nswd

relationships

‘No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.’ –Albert Einstein

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In a study published in May, Fisher and her colleagues asked 15 people who had recently been dumped but were still in love to consider two pictures—one of the former partner and one of a neutral acquaintance—while an MRI scanner measured their brain activity. When looking at their exes, the spurned lovers showed activity in parts of the brain’s reward system, just as happy lovers do. But the neural pathways associated with cravings and addictions were activated too, as was a brain region associated with the distress that accompanies physical pain.

Rejected lovers also showed increased neural response in regions involved in assessing behavior and controlling emotions. “These people were working on the problem, thinking, what did I do, what should I do next, what did I learn from this,” Fisher says. And the longer ago the breakup was, the weaker the activity in the attachment-linked region. In other words: Love hurts, but time heals.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

photo { Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster, From Here to Eternity, 1953 }

‘Envy is nothing but hate.’ –Spinoza

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New research in Psychological Science found that the fear of being the target of malicious envy makes people act nicer to people they think might be jealous of them.

There are two types of envy says Niels van de Ven of Tilburg University and his coauthors: benign envy and malicious envy. People with benign envy are motivated to improve themselves, so they could be more like the person they envied. People with malicious envy want to bring the people above them down.

{ APS | Continue reading }

photo { David Stewart }

O dee, O dee, that’s very lovely!


Is being polite honest? Young adults aren’t quite sure. (…)

Should you honestly tell your roommate she looks fat in her summer white pants, or that he should dump his clingy girlfriend? When you put on a big smile for your sixth interview of the day in a seemingly hopeless job search, are you being honest?

These are questions our great-grandparents would have dismissed out of hand. In their world, there was virtue in being polite, and if you didn’t have something nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. During the inner-directed 1960s, however — the era of the Human Potential Movement and self-actualization — sincerity and expressions of visceral emotions became our new definition of honesty. And these ideas stuck.

{ Big Questions Online | Continue reading }

Wonder One’s my cipher and Seven Sisters is my nighbrood

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Evolutionary biologists suggest there is a correlation between the size of the cerebral neocortex and the number of social relationships a primate species can have. Humans have the largest neocortex and the widest social circle — about 150, according to the scientist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar’s number — 150 — also happens to mirror the average number of friends people have on Facebook. Because of airplanes and telephones and now social media, human beings touch the lives of vastly more people than did our ancestors, who might have encountered only 150 people in their lifetime. Now the possibility of connection is accelerating at an extraordinary pace. As the great biologist E.O. Wilson says, “We’re in uncharted territory.”

{ TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg | Continue reading | A map of the world, as drawn by Facebook }

Love and romance poetry

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{ When you think of the words “prudent” and “marriage,” the last person you should think of is Elizabeth Taylor, who was married eight times, and shocked and astounded each and every time it didn’t work out. The most bizarre choice of husband was probably Larry Fortensky, a construction worker she met in rehab. | Craked | Continue reading }

G-55 fly ma let’s go

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The researchers in question looked at over 5,000 people, and were able to discern five different styles of flirting. (…)

Traditional.— This is based very much in traditional gender roles. You know, where the men make the first move, and women don’t pursue men. This means that women (who’re more passive) are less flattered by flirting, and also find it more difficult to get men’s attention. Men, on the other hand, tend to know women longer before approaching them. So, basically, all quite introverted.

Physical.— This is based very much on sexual attraction, and communicating that interest. Relationships formed as a result tend to be formed more quickly, and have greater emotional and sexual chemistry than some others.

Sincere.— This is all about, well, sincerity. So it focuses on the creation of emotional connections, and on demonstrating sincere interest in the other person. Women tend to score higher here, but both men and women think it’s a good way to go about things, and relationships tend to be meaningful, and have good chemistry.

Playful.— This is mostly flirting for the sake of flirting. People using this style tend not to have any interest in long-term/important relationships (and so tend not to), but do it because they find it fun and it enhances their self-esteem.

Polite.— This is very much about being proper and polite.  While sexual flirting is, obviously, not high on the agenda, and people who use this style tend to approach those they like less often, they also tend to form meaningful relationships with people.

{ Miscience | Continue reading }

photo { Garry Winogrand, New York, 1969 }

In other words, we should not be fooled by etymology and think that theory is about Vorhandenheit and praxis about Zuhandenheit

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Sex costs amazing amounts of time and energy. Just take birds of paradise touting their tails, stags jousting with their antlers or singles spending their weekends in loud and sweaty bars. Is sex really worth all the effort that we, sexual species, collectively put into it?

Most biologists think that sex is totally worth it. With sex, every new generation receives a fresh combination of genes from its parents. This makes it easier to adapt to changing environments, as genes can spread quickly through a population.

In asexual species every child will be genetically identical to its parents, making it hard to compensate for disadvantageous mutations. Biologists expect that deleterious mutations will pile up in asexual species in a process known as Muller’s ratchet. With every mutation in an asexual lineage, Muller’s ratchet clicks one step closer to extinction.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Glenn Glasser }

Fifth Ave shit baby, Fendi furs

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Well, you see, Whitaker introduces us to the notion of change. This is a very important concept in family therapy, and it grew out of work with people in relationships. I’m talking about the idea that therapy is not about insights. It’s about change. This makes sense. After all, when people come together to form a relationship, whether they realise it or not, they’re trying to change each other. All too often, though, they fall into a situation called homeostasis in which change is impossible. They are stuck in seemingly unchangeable patterns. So what you do? (…)

Who I am and who you are is pretty much a plaything of context and assumptions. Change the context, change the assumptions, and you change the self. Do that with people in a relationship, and you change the relationship.

{ Mira Kirshenbaum | Continue reading }

photo { Ralph Gibson, The Somnambulist, 1970 }

Diremood is the name is on the writing chap of the psalter

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Other muscles can simulate a smile, but only the peculiar tango of the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi produces a genuine expression of positive emotion. Psychologists call this the “Duchenne smile,” and most consider it the sole indica­tor of true enjoyment. The name is a nod to French anatomist Guillaume Duchenne, who studied emotional expression by stimulating various facial muscles with electrical currents. (The technique hurt so much, it’s been said, that Duchenne performed some of his tests on the severed heads of executed criminals.)

In his 1862 book Mecanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, Duchenne wrote that the zygomatic major can be willed into action, but that only the “sweet emotions of the soul” force the orbicularis oculi to contract. “Its inertia, in smiling,” Duchenne wrote, “unmasks a false friend.”

Psychological scientists no longer study beheaded rogues — just graduate students, mainly — but they have advanced our understanding of smiles since Duchenne’s discoveries. We now know that genuine smiles may indeed reflect a “sweet soul.” The intensity of a true grin can predict marital happiness, personal well-being, and even longevity. We know that some smiles — Duchenne’s false friends — do not reflect enjoyment at all, but rather a wide range of emotions, including embarrassment, deceit, and grief. We know that variables (age, gender, culture, and social setting, among them) influence the frequency and character of a grin, and what purpose smiles play in the broader scheme of existence. In short, scientists have learned that one of humanity’s simplest expressions is beautifully complex.

{ APS | Continue reading }

‘Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art.’ –Proust

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For many people, the holiday season is the most wonderful time of the year. For University of Minnesota economist Joel Waldfogel, it’s the most wasteful. The problem is in the gift-giving, says Waldfogel, who highlights the fact that gifts frequently “leave recipients less than satisfied, creating what economists call a ‘deadweight loss,’” (defined as: a loss to one party that is not offset by a benefit to another). In other words, from the standpoint of economic theory, gifts are often poorly matched with the recipient’s preferences, so holiday gift-giving results in what Waldfogel calls “an orgy of value destruction.”

{ Failure | Continue reading }

Mac-10, thirty two shot clip in my snorkel

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“Overeducation” is something Woody Allen seems to discern more often than the rest of us might. “I know so many people who are well-educated and super-educated,” he told an interviewer for Time recently. “Their common problem is that they have no understanding and no wisdom; without that, their education can only take them so far.” In other words they have problems with their “relationships,” they have failed to “work through” the material of their lives with a trained evaluator, they have yet to perfect the quality of their emotional consumption. Wisdom is hard to find. Happiness takes research. (…)

You could call that “overeducation,” or you could call it one more instance of “people constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe,” or you could call it something else. Woody Allen often tells interviewers that his original title for Annie Hall was “Anhedonia,” which is a psychoanalytic term meaning the inability to experience pleasure.

{ The NY Review of Books | Continue reading }

photo { Sylvain-Emmanuel Prieur }

‘Anything can, accidentally, be the cause of pleasure, pain, or desire.’ –Spinoza

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Seek serenity to accept what you cannot change, courage to change what you can, and wisdom to know the difference. (…)

We usually have far less control over and understanding of our relations than we think. Sure we can list features we like and dislike, all else equal. And we might be mostly correct about which way those features influence our attraction. Even so, we mostly just don’t know why we like some and dislike others. Sometimes we don’t even realize who it is we like and dislike.

If we calculate that it would be in our interest to like or dislike someone more, we have only a very limited ability to actually make ourselves do this. Even when we decide we’d be better off breaking it off a relation, we can find that quite hard to actually do so. More likely we’ll break something off and then make up reasons about why that was a good idea.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

images { 1. unsourced | 2. Toshio Saeki | More: Toshio Saeki, Japan’s master of erotic illustration }

Knock-knock at your front door. It’s the suede/denim secret police. They have come for your uncool niece.

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Assuming you’re in a heterosexual relationship, which is worse: for your partner to be unfaithful with a person of the opposite or the same sex?

According to a pair of US psychologists, the answer depends on whether you’re a man or woman. Men, they’ve found, are less likely to continue a relationship with an unfaithful partner who’s had a heterosexual affair, as opposed to a homosexual affair. For women, it’s the other way around - they’re more troubled by their male partner going off with another man.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

‘All I can do is be me, whoever that is.’ –Bob Dylan

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Men and women have been pairing off since the dawn of humanity. For most of its history, marriage was an economic institution that created advantageous alliances between clans and was arranged, often, without much input from the bride or groom. But by the 19th century, many in the Western world had begun to marry for love, making the relationship infinitely more complicated and divorce a lot more common.

Romantic love assumed a position of high value but even higher vulnerability.

Still, until the second half of the 20th century, these ubiquitous couplings went largely unstudied. What happened behind closed doors generally remained private, unless one had a particularly nosy set of in-laws or a manner of fighting that necessitated police intervention.

Marriages, with the power to affect everything from personal income levels to mental and physical health, remained a hazy mystery. But with the advent of the affordable video camera in the late 1960s, psychologists began recording couples’ interactions. The scientists hooked up their subjects to monitors that detected changes in blood pressure or stress hormones, and then coded even their slightest movements — an eye roll or a knuckle crack. The couples were interviewed about their marital satisfaction and were, in some cases, tracked for years.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Unhappy couples in New York have long gone to extremes to throw off the shackles of matrimony—in the worst cases, framing their spouses, producing graphic testimony about affairs, or even confessing to crimes they did not commit. All this will fade into the past if, as expected, Gov. David Paterson signs a bill making New York the last state in the country to adopt unilateral no-fault divorce.

Their counterparts in other states have had it much easier. California adopted the first no-fault divorce bill in 1970; by 1985, every other state in the nation—but one—had passed similar laws. In New York, the miserably married must still charge each other with cruel and inhuman treatment, adultery or abandonment—or wait one year after a mutually agreed legal separation—in order to divorce.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

Weak grey goo, sudden extreme climate change

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My last post said teen males want more sex than teen females. Older men also often complain of women withholding sex, while women complain of men demanding too much sex. From a typical top ten complaints list:

[Women About Men:] 3. They are not affectionate enough. 4. They tend to bypass sexual foreplay.

[Men About Women:] 1. Women complain, criticize and nag too much. …  4. They tend to withhold sex as a punishment or blackmail.

This is often explained in part via women just caring less about sex than men.

{ Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

By all love ever rejected! By hell-fire hot and unsparing!

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According to Slashdot and some awesome guy named Big Alan (AKA Alan Hirsch):

… the key to a man’s heart, and other parts, is pumpkin pie. Out of the 40 odors tested in Hirsch’s study, a mixture of lavender and pumpkin pie got the biggest rise out of men ages 18 to 64. That particular fragrance was found to increase penile blood flow by an average of 40%. “Maybe the odors acted to reduce anxiety. By reducing anxiety, it acted to remove inhibitions,” said Hirsch.

{ OmniBrain/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Young Kyu Yoo }

The purest bliss was surely then thy dower

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In 1978, the divorce rate was much higher than it is today. (…)

Americans still venerate marriage enough to want to try it. About 70% of us have been married at least once, according to the 2010 Census. (…)

41% of babies were born to unmarried moms in 2008, an eightfold increase from 50 years ago, and 25% of kids lived in a single-parent home, almost triple the number from 1960. Contrary to the stereotype, it turns out that most of the infants born to unmarried mothers are not the product of casual sexual encounters. (…)

Most of those unwed mothers said their chances of marrying the baby’s father were 50% or greater, but after five years, only 16% of them had done so and only about 20% of the couples were still cohabiting. This didn’t mean that the children didn’t live with a man, however, since about a quarter of their moms were now living with or married to a new partner.

{ Time | Continue reading }

screenshot { Michelangelo Antonioni, The Eclipse, 1962 }

As she walked home with silent companions, a thick fog seemed to compass her mind

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Research conducted by a UCLA behavior lab found that women tend to avoid their fathers during periods of peak fertility, suggesting an evolutionary adaptation against inbreeding in humans. An examination of cell phone records found that ovulating women were half as likely to engage in conversation with their fathers and spoke to them for half as long than during low fertility periods. (…)

The reluctance to engage in conversations with fathers could not be attributed to an impulse to avoid all parental control during ovulation. In fact, the researchers found that women actually increased their phone calls to their mothers during this period of their cycle.

{ University of California Newsroom | Continue reading }

photo { Logan White }

But instead I just pour myself a drink. It’s got to be love, I’ve never felt this way.

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{ Did you know that the most likely day of the year to be broken up with is the first Monday in December? | Lee Byron | more | Thanks Glenn }

And Yes, I know our differences pulled us apart

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{ xkcd }



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