Valentine’s Day: a kiss is still a kiss (and a mate-assessment technique)
In 2007, researchers announced the not-so-very-astonishing news that kissing does not mean the same thing to men and to women.
Individuals may differ (and indeed they do). But, as a general rule, kissing is more often a means to an end for men. I’ll leave you to guess what that end might be. For women, kissing is more intrinsically important and even necessary, a sort of measure of the pulse of a romance.
Or, as the researchers rather unromantically put it, women use kissing to “establish and monitor the status of their relationship, and to assess and periodically update the level of commitment on the part of a partner.”
But that’s not all. A psychology professor at Lafayette College reports that kissing has a measurable effect on certain hormones:
[The team] found that kissing reduced the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in both sexes. But levels of oxytocin, a hormone linked to social bonding that they expected to be boosted by kissing, only rose among the men.
For women, a romantic atmosphere (dimmed lights, mood music) helped raised their oxytocin to the level of the men’s.
Ah, women. So very demanding! Especially on Valentines Day—which happens to be today.
And then there’s chocolate:
In 2007 British scientists measured the brain and heart activity sparked by passionate kissing, but found it was less intense that the stimulation produced by eating chocolate.
Speaking of mood music, and kissing:
Hispanics, then, found the perfect solution by adding chocolate to meat.
Perhaps men should use chocolate concentrated lip gloss or something. Breath mints too?
“” Women use kissing to “establish and monitor the status of their relationship, and to assess and periodically update the level of commitment on the part of a partner.”
Men use sex to “establish and monitor the status of their relationship, and to assess and periodically update the level of commitment on the part of a partner.”
I use kissing to settle political arguments.
just kidding…
I use political arguments as a means to and end 🙂
“it’s in his kiss”…
Artfldgr: great choice.
I found the attributed motivation for men to be shallow, stereo-typical, and unsupported by my anecdotal experience. So I went to the link and found this “In a sample of 1,041 college students” now there is a valid sample to conduct a study on human relations.
The titles could as easily have been “researchers find that horny college aged males have a different response to the initial demonstrations of intimacy than horny college aged females”. Wow thats news.
I doubt that many of us think that generalizing the social interactions of collegians to the rest of the population, has any meaning or value. Although it may remind us how foolish we were at that time.
uncleFred: good point. The sample is always very important.
My guess is that, in a sample of college-aged men, almost any activity might be regarded as a means to that particular end.
I recall an article about sampling in psychology from many years ago. It asked the question are college sophomores human beings.
And now you know why I give women chocolate.
Hersey’s Kisses, in fact…
Neo,
Thanks for the Casablanca clip — one of the greatest movies ever. Ingrid Bergman had a depth, beauty, and sexiness unseen on the screen today. Black and white film and creative lighting make it timeless.
Read this article a few hours too late!
I’ve heard that most of the so called scientific surveys and experiments are done with college aged individuals as the sample and control.
This goes anywhere from sexuality, to career, to psychology, to sociological studies.
So you could say that if you want to know what makes the adolescent teen or young fools of humanity tick, scientific tests has reams of data on that.
College people are cheap to buy, you see. And they’re isolated in a sort of kinder garden where you can divide them up into control and non control groups while maintaining diversity and avoiding convenience bias in sampling.
But first and foremost, they are cheap.
Trying to go house to house to find “people” to do tests is… very inconvenient vs the eternally money starved college co eds.
Having your female friend play pinball is a good indicator of the end, if you know what I mean.
Hold on, I just gave my age away: there aren’t many pinball machines today that require body “English.”
In college (1960’s), the definition of a kiss was “A kiss is an upper persuasion, for a lower invasion”
and no one brougth up kiss me kate?
with where a wasp keeps it sting…
one of the naughtiest scenes along with juliets balcony scene that shakespeare wrote…