Whether it’s a company like BP apologising for causing environmental catastrophe or a political leader expressing regret for her country’s prior misdemeanours, it seems there’s barely a day goes by without the media watching hawkishly to find out just how the contrite words will be delivered and what effect they’ll have on the aggrieved.

Surprisingly, psychology has, until now, paid little attention to what makes for an effective apology. (…)

The three apology types or components are: compensation (e.g. I’m sorry I broke your window, I’ll pay to have it repaired); empathy (e.g. I’m sorry I slept with your best friend, you must feel like you can’t trust either of us ever again); and acknowledgement of violated rules/norms (e.g. I’m sorry I advised the CIA how to torture people, I’ve broken our profession’s pledge to do no harm).

Fehr and Gelfand’s hypothesis was that the effectiveness of these different styles of apology depends on how the aggrieved person sees themselves (known as ’self-construal’ in the psychological jargon). To test this, the researchers measured the way that 175 undergrad students see themselves and then had them rate different forms of apology. (…)

The researchers found that a focus on compensation was most appreciated by people who are more individualistic (e.g. those who agree with statements like ‘I have a strong need to know how I stand in comparison to my classmates or coworkers’); that empathy-based apologies are judged more effective by people who see themselves in terms of their relations with others (e.g. they agree with statements like ‘Caring deeply about another person such as a close friend is very important to me’); and finally, that the rule violation kind of apology was deemed most effective by people who see themselves as part of a larger group or collective (e.g. they agree with ‘I feel great pride when my team or work group does well’ and similar statements). These patterns held regardless of the severity of the misdemeanour.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Borisovini }

The quality and quantity of individuals’ social relationships has been linked not only to mental health but also to both morbidity and mortality. (…)

Humans are naturally social. Yet, the modern way of life in industrialized countries is greatly reducing the quantity and quality of social relationships. Many people in these countries no longer live in extended families or even near each other. Instead, they often live on the other side of the country or even across the world from their relatives. Many also delay getting married and having children. Likewise, more and more people of all ages in developed countries are living alone, and loneliness is becoming increasingly common.

In the UK, according to a recent survey by the Mental Health Foundation, 10% of people often feel lonely, a third have a close friend or relative who they think is very lonely, and half think that people are getting lonelier in general. Similarly, across the Atlantic, over the past two decades there has been a three-fold increase in the number of Americans who say they have no close confidants. There is reason to believe that people are becoming more socially isolated.

Some experts think that social isolation is bad for human health. They point to a 1988 review of five prospective studies that showed that people with fewer social relationships die earlier on average than those with more social relationships. (…)

The researchers identified 148 prospective studies that provided data on individuals’ mortality as a function of social relationships and extracted an “effect size” from each study. (…)

The findings indicate that the influence of social relationships on the risk of death are comparable with well-established risk factors for mortality such as smoking and alcohol consumption and exceed the influence of other risk factors such as physical inactivity and obesity.

{ Plos Medecine | Continue reading }

photo { Paige de Ponte }

Desmond Morris, a curator of mammals at the London Zoo, suggested that permanently enlarged breasts in human females resulted from hominid bipedalism. (…)

The link between bipedalism and permanent breast enlargement, according to Morris, has to do with the erotic nature of breasts. He argues that as early humans (hominids) began walking upright, face-to-face encounters between the sexes became the norm, affecting the position used in sexual intercourse: males would no longer mount females from behind as they do among non-human primates. In the non-human primate position, presentation of the female buttocks to the male is an erotic display that stimulates male interest and excitement. with the advent of bipedalism, Morris argues, if females were to be successful in shifting male interest around to the front, evolution would have to do something to make the female frontal region more stimulating to males. This was accomplished, Morris says, through self-mimicry in which female breasts came to look like rounded buttocks: female breasts became mimics of “the ancient genital display of the hemispherical buttocks.”

Szalay and Costello (1991) have continued this line of thinking, but argue that permanently enlarged breasts sexually arouse males not because they look like buttocks, but because they mimic the appearance of female genitalia.

{ Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Sarah Lawrence College, Why Women Have Breasts, 2002 | Continue reading }

photo { Reka Ebergenyi photographed by Eric Fischer }

“The problem is all inside your head”, she said to me. The answer is easy if you take it logically. (…) She said it grieves me so to see you in such pain, I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again. I said I appreciate that. (…) She said why don’t we both just sleep on it tonight, and I believe in the morning you’ll begin to see the light. And then she kissed me and I realized she probably was right.

{ Paul Simon, Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, 1975 | Lyrics }

50 Ways to Leave Your Lover is a 1975 hit song by Paul Simon, from his album Still Crazy After All These Years. It became number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 on February 7, 1976, and remained there for three weeks.

Written after Simon’s divorce from first wife Peggy Harper, the song is a mistress’s humorous advice to a husband on ways to end a relationship. Studio drummer Steve Gadd created the unique drum beat that became the hook and color for the song consisting of an almost military beat. The song was recorded in a small New York City studio on Broadway.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

{ Paul Simon, live on BBC TV, December 27, 1975 }

Body odors are important cues used for social and sexual discrimination. As was shown many times, animals can easily smell age-, health- and genetics-related  differences.  Recent study of our large-eyed relatives, ring-tailed lemurs, demonstrate that drugs can alter body scents and change behavior.

Researchers examined changes in endocrine and  semiochemical profiles of sexually mature female lemurs treated with hormonal contraceptives during their breeding season. (…) The conclusion? Contraceptives change chemical ‘signature’, minimizing distinctiveness and genetic fitness cues. No more can the males determine which females are genetically and physically beautiful. All contracepted females lost their individuality and started to smell funny.

{ Olfactics and Olfactory Diagnostics | Continue reading }

I forget where I read this tip, but I have used it many times with great success. It starts with the notion that most women change their hair all the time. You might not notice, but a woman is very aware of these small deviations in everything from highlights to length to fluffiness. I’m probably not using the official hairdresser terms, but you get the idea. It’s different every day, at least according to the woman who owns the hair. To me, hair is either brown or it isn’t, and you either have some or you don’t. The rest is beneath my radar.

So here’s the tip. When you see a woman who you haven’t seen for a few weeks, you can pay her this compliment, and it works every time. Say, “You’ve done something with your hair. I like it.”

The woman will feel flattered that you noticed anything beyond her hair’s very existence and its degree of brownness. She might even wonder if you can be her new gay friend. But she will confirm that something is indeed different and offer many details about how it got there. You can use that time to think about your hobbies.

So far, this idea isn’t mine. I just forget where I stole it from. But I did add a twist to it that I will claim credit for. You know how embarrassing it is when you introduce yourself to someone you think is a stranger at a gathering and the person says, “We met a few weeks ago.” This is a sure tipoff that you consider the person non-memorable. If the person is a woman, you can use the hair trick to save yourself. Simply look surprised that you have met before then pretend you are having a flash of recognition, and add “Of course! But your hair is different today. It threw me.”

Now you have flipped it from being the idiot who can’t remember a new person for a few weeks into a person who has such intense memory for detail that any deviation is the same as a mask.

Yes, I’ve used that method often. I can’t say it works every time, but it sure beats my old method of arguing that I must look like some other person and I just arrived in town an hour ago.

{ Scott Adams }

photo { Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }

Remember Me is a beautifully streamlined ceramic dildo designed by Coco de Mer & Adele Brydges. The vintage style logo and exquisite silver locket is engraved with the words, Lovers, Adventurers and Dreamers. (…) Open up the silver locket to reveal a little mirror, which is perfect for looking, exploring and loving yourself, and on the other side insert a picture of a long-distance lover to remember them and re-create memories.

{ Coco de Mer }

Whether we like it or not, today’s couples feel far less encumbered by the legal, social, and moral strictures of traditional marriage and its obligations. Increasing numbers are negotiating what they mean by “fidelity” and how they wish to define monogamy in their relationship.

If there’s anything fundamental to the meaning of marriage in Western society, it’s monogamy. In fact, monogamy may be the only thing that remains essential to most people’s idea of marriage. People no longer marry for economic, dynastic, or procreative reasons, as they did for millennia; they can’t be compelled to marry by law, religion, or custom; they don’t need to marry to have sex or cohabit or even produce and raise children. But throughout all of this staggering change, the requirement and expectation of monogamy as the emotional glue that keeps the whole structure of marriage from collapsing under its own weight has remained constant.

Given the almost universal public denunciation and disapproval of infidelity (which doesn’t exclude the barely hidden schadenfreude at the deliciously scandalous goings-on of celebrities, famous preachers, major political figures, sports heroes, or even your office coworker caught in flagrante), you’d think that infidelity must be quite rare. At least nice people don’t do it—we wouldn’t do it.

Except that we would and we do—much more than most people seem to realize. As a culture committed, in theory, to monogamy, our actions tell a different story. It isn’t just that, as therapists, we need to understand that infidelity happens—we all know that already. What some of us may not realize is how often it happens. Research varies, but according to some surveys, such as those reported by Joan Atwood and Limor Schwartz in the 2002 Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 55 percent of married women and 65 percent of married men report being unfaithful at some point in their marriage. Up to one-half of married women have at least one lover after they’re married and before the age of 40.

{ Psychotherapy Networker | Continue reading }

Discoveries by scientists over the past 10 years have elucidated biological sex differences in brain structure, chemistry and function. “These variations occur throughout the brain, in regions involved in language, memory, emotion, vision, hearing and navigation,” explains Larry Cahill, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

While women and men struggle to communicate with each other and ponder why they don’t think and react to things in similar ways, science is proving that the differences in our brains may have more serious implications beyond our everyday social interactions. (…)

To better understand the implications of sex differences in the brain, it is important to examine disease entities in depth. Take Alzheimer’s disease, for example. Significant differences exist between men and women who suffer from the disease. (…)

Schizophrenia is another disease that affects men and women differently. Differences include age of onset, symptoms and the time course of the disease. In addition, structural brain differences are apparent. According to Cahill, “men with schizophrenia show significantly larger ventricles than do healthy men, whereas no such enlargement is seen in women with schizophrenia.”

Researchers do not understand the implications of these differences yet, but the study of sex differences in the brain is advancing quickly.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

There are fundamental sex differences between males and females that go well beyond reproduction. The more people look, the more differ ences are found in both the structure and function of cells throughout the brain. It’s just mind-boggling when you see the complexities. There is recent data suggesting that glial cells from male and female neonates respond differently to estrogen, as if there’s already been some programming that keeps the male glial cells from responding to estrogen the same way as the female cells. We have evidence, as do others, that the hippocampus, a memory-related organ unrelated to reproduction, responds differently to estrogens. The female responds to estrogen by forming new synaptic connections in the hippocampus, while the male does not. But if you block the actions of testosterone in the male at birth, then the male will respond to estrogens to induce these synapses. There are many other examples. The differences include cerebellum, the autonomic nervous system, cerebral cortex, and hypothalamus. The more we look, the more sex differences we discover. (…)

It’s very clear, for example, that psychotropic medications and many other drugs work differently in males and females. Some of it is related to sex differ ences in how the liver clears drugs from the body, but almost any drug that affects the brain is going to work somewhat differently in the male and female, depending on the gender first and secondly on the hormonal status. (…)

When the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) tested Prempro, a combination of Premarin [estrogen made from horse urine] and Provera [a synthetic progestin], all it really did was to show that that’s not a very good combination.

{ Bruce McEwen interview/The Dana Foundation | Continue reading }

Female Viagra is ineffective at improving sexual desire in women, so FDA doesn’t approve the medicine.

After much review and public controversy, the FDA met this week and determined that flibanserin, a new medication that was hoped to be an effective treatment for female sexual arousal disorder, did not significantly improve symptoms of the disorder, and ruled against approving the medication.

Female sexual arousal disorder, also known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder, (HSDD) is a relatively new diagnosis. It was historically known as frigidity, and more attention was given to the concept of the lack of sexual desire or arousal as a biological disorder potentially treatable with pharmaceuticals. When Sildenifil (Viagra) appeared on the market with enormous publicity and profit for the pharmaceutical industry, a lack of desire in women came under consideration as a potentially treatable disease.

HSDD is often defined by a persistent lack of desire or a lack of sexual fantasies. Women with HSDD rarely initiate sex or seek sexual satisfaction. It is thought that as many as 10 percent of American women may suffer from HSDD.

Possible causes may include stress, relationship problems, anger, or a lack of intimacy with sex partners.  There are also known medical causes including side effects of certain medications including some antidepressants, blood pressure medications, and birth control pills. Menopause may also decrease sexual arousal and stimulation, as well as depression.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

The female-libido-boosting drug flibanserin proved marginally effective in two trials reported by the FDA on Wednesday. Still, its side effects may outweigh whatever benefits it offers: 15 percent of participants stopped taking the drug due to dizziness, nausea, anxiety, or insomnia. Why does it seem like every drug causes the same side effects?

{ Slate | Continue reading }

Q: You’ve devoted your career to studying hormonal effects on the brain, including sex differences. What surprises you most about how male and female brains differ?

McEwen: There are fundamental sex differences between males and females that go well beyond reproduction. The more people look, the more differ­ences are found in both the structure and function of cells throughout the brain. It’s just mind-boggling when you see the complexities. There is recent data suggesting that glial cells from male and female neonates respond differently to estrogen, as if there’s already been some programming that keeps the male glial cells from responding to estrogen the same way as the female cells. We have evidence, as do others, that the hippocampus, a memory-related organ unrelated to reproduction, responds differently to estrogens. The female responds to estrogen by forming new synaptic connections in the hippocampus, while the male does not. But if you block the actions of testosterone in the male at birth, then the male will respond to estrogens to induce these synapses. There are many other examples. The differences include cerebellum, the autonomic nervous system, cerebral cortex, and hypothalamus. The more we look, the more sex differences we discover.

Q: Has science done enough to take into account sex differences in basic and clinical research?

McEwen: Science has not done enough to take into account sex differences in either basic or clinical research. It’s very clear, for example, that psychotropic medications and many other drugs work differently in males and females. Some of it is related to sex differ­ences in how the liver clears drugs from the body, but almost any drug that affects the brain is going to work somewhat differently in the male and female, depending on the gender first and secondly on the hormonal status. The NIH now has an office of Women’s Health Research and there are a number of private and university-sponsored programs in women’s health research. This has revitalized the study of sex differences, meaning, in large part, the study of whole animals and how they differ behaviorally and physiologically. You can’t just assume that what works in the male is going to work the same way in the female.

{ Sex Differences in the Brain, Inetrview with Bruce McEwen | The DANA Foundation | Continue reading }

unrelated bonus:

Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years

Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

{ Social Science Research Network | via The Situationist }

photo { Bill Owens }

If you’re having trouble getting a date, French researchers suggest that picking the right soundtrack could improve the odds. Women were more prepared to give their number to an ‘average’ young man after listening to romantic background music, according to research that appears today in the journal Psychology of Music, published by SAGE.

There’s plenty of research indicating that the media affects our behaviour. Violent video games or music with aggressive lyrics increase the likelihood of aggressive behaviour, thoughts and feelings – but do romantic songs have any effect? This question prompted researchers Nicolas Guéguen and Céline Jacob from the Université de Bretagne-Sud along with Lubomir Lamy from Université de Paris-Sud to test the power of romantic lyrics on 18-20 year old single females. And it turns out that at least one romantic love song did make a difference.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Studying the interactions between people in ever increasing detail reveals entirely new patterns of human behaviour–and poses challenges for network science.

The study of networks has changed the way we think about our world and the way that societies organise themselves within it. In particular, the discovery that many real world networks can be thought as small worlds, in which most nodes are not neighbours but can be reached by a small number of jumps, has had a profound impact.

But until now, most studies have focused on networks as static affairs in which the links between nodes do not change in any significant way.

That is beginning to change as data becomes available from mobile phones and RFID tags that tease apart the nature of human behaviour and interaction in detail that has never before been possible.

Today, Lorenzo Isella at the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Turin and friends reveal an interesting example in which the interactions between humans in similar but not identical circumstances leads to subtle but important differences in the network of connections between them. (…)

Isella and co have examined data taken from RFID cards that recorded the interactions between people at two different events: an exhibition at the Science Gallery, a museum in Dublin, and a conference at the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Italy.

These data sets are quite different. At the Science Gallery, researchers recorded 230,000 interactions between 14,000 people over a period of three months. At the conference, they recorded 10,000 interactions between 100 people over three days.

People’s behaviour at these events were obviously different. At the museum, people arrived at different times and streamed through the gallery in just a few hours. At the conference, the attendees tended to stay on site and make repeated contacts over several days.

So it’s hardly surprising then that the average number of contacts made at the conference was more than double those made at the museum (roughly 20 v 8).

The networks were also different. It turns out that the pattern of interactions between attendees at the conference formed a small world network while the pattern at the museum often did not. So it is much harder to link visitors to the museum to each other using a small number of steps through the network.

These differences have an important implication which Isella and co were able to draw out by studying the way that infectious agents such as memes or viruses might spread through the respective networks.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

Brain study shows that the opinions of others matters

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) in collaboration with Aarhus University in Denmark have found that the ‘reward’ area of the brain is activated when people agree with our opinions.

The study, published today in the journal Current Biology, suggests that scientists may be able to predict how much people can be influenced by the opinions of others on the basis of the level of activity in the reward area.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Marco Ovando }

A French drug company is seeking to offer American women something their European counterparts already have: a pill that works long after “the morning after.”

The drug, dubbed ella, would be sold as a contraceptive — one that could prevent pregnancy for as many as five days after unprotected sex. But the new drug is a close chemical relative of the abortion pill RU-486, raising the possibility that it could also induce abortion by making the womb inhospitable for an embryo. (…)

The last time the Food and Drug Administration vetted an emergency contraceptive — Plan B, the so-called morning-after pill — the decision was mired in debate over such fundamental questions as when life begins and the distinction between preventing and terminating a pregnancy. (…)

Plan B, which works for up to 72 hours after sex, was eventually approved for sale without a prescription, although a doctor’s order is required for girls younger than 17. The new drug promises to extend that period to at least 120 hours. Approved in Europe last year, ella is available as an emergency contraceptive in at least 22 countries.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

Last week, while many of us were distracted by the oil belching forth from the gulf floor and the president’s ham-handed attempts to demonstrate that he was sufficiently engaged and enraged, Gallup released a stunning, and little noticed, report on Americans’ evolving views of homosexuality. Allow me to enlighten:

1. For the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as morally acceptable has crossed the 50 percent mark. (You have to love the fact that they still use the word “relations.” So quaint.)

2. Also for the first time, the percentage of men who hold that view is greater than the percentage of women who do.

3. This new alignment is being led by a dramatic change in attitudes among younger men, but older men’s perceptions also have eclipsed older women’s. While women’s views have stayed about the same over the past four years, the percentage of men ages 18 to 49 who perceived these “relations” as morally acceptable rose by 48 percent, and among men over 50, it rose by 26 percent.

I warned you: stunning. (…)

(I now return you to Day 46 of the oil spill where they finally may be making some progress.)

{ Charles M. Blow/NY Times | Continue reading }

“While I remained at Paris, near you, my father,” said Fleur-de-Marie, “I was so happy, oh! so completely happy, that those delicious days would not be too well paid for by years of suffering. You see I have at least known what happiness is.”

“During some days, perhaps?”

“Yes, but what pure and unmingled felicity! Love surrounded me then, as ever, with the tenderest care. I gave myself up without fear to the emotions of gratitude and affection which every moment raised my heart to you. The future dazzled me: a father to adore, a second mother to love doubly.

{ Eugene Sue, Mysteries of Paris, 1842-1843 | Continue reading }

White men with brown eyes are perceived to be more dominant than their blue-eyed counterparts. However, a blue-eyed man looking to make himself appear more dominant would be wasting his time investing in brown-coloured contact lenses. A new study by Karel Kleisner and colleagues at Charles University in the Czech Republic has found that brown iris colour seems to co-occur with some other aspect of facial appearance that triggers in others the perception of dominance.

Sixty-two student participants, half of them female, rated the dominance and/or attractiveness of the photographed faces of forty men and forty women. All models were Caucasian, and all of them were holding a neutral expression. Men with brown eyes were rated consistently as more dominant than blue-eyed men. No such effect of eye-colour was found for the photos of women. Eye colour also bore no association to the attractiveness ratings.

Next the researchers used Photoshop to give the brown-eyed men blue eyes and the blue-eyed men brown eyes. The photos were then rated by a new batch of participants. The intriguing finding here was that the dominance ratings were left largely unaffected by the eye colour manipulation. The men who really had brown eyes, but thanks to Photoshop appeared with blue eyes, still tended to be rated as more dominant.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Avedon, Billy Mudd, Trucker, Alto, Texas, May 7, 1981 }

My favorite ad ever, I think it was in Frontiers or one of the gay magazines in L.A., and it ran for weeks and weeks, it was a classified ad. It said, “Every night at 10 p.m., here’s my address, my door’s unlocked. Fuck me.” (…)

Well phone sex is something I’d never do for fear that someone was recording it. I have done it before in my life. But it’s the kind of thing that today I’d be very hesitant about. Because you can never have healthy phone sex. Who has phone sex and then says, “One day we are going to fall in love and grow old together”? It’s usually some kind of verbal abuse or something. (…)

Well I’d advise that if you’re a bear, don’t tell your parents. Parents shouldn’t have to accept that. “Mom, Dad, sit down. I have something to tell you.” Imagine their nervous look. “I’m a bear,” you know; and they do that. (…)

Let me tell you, I’m at an age where I’m starting to attract people who want daddies, but I’d be mortified to be thought of as someone’s daddy. What I’ve learned is that with anybody who wants a daddy, it isn’t because they’ve had a good relationship with their daddy. It’s to punish their daddy, and you are the vessel. (…) Otherwise they would date people age-appropriate, something I’m not very good at. (…)

I have a very, very nice life as a single man. I’ve had long-term boyfriends and we’ve lived together in the summer, but I’m really bad at living with someone. You’ve never seen my house. Who could live in it but me? I could see someone saying, “I think I’ll hang this up.” No you won’t. And I can’t stand television. One relationship almost ended because of it. I can’t stand having a television on in my house. I don’t care if I’m wildly in love. If they watch television, it’s a deal breaker. I’ll make them wear earphones. (…)

What is sex to Michael Jackson? All it is is taking out that limp polka-dot penis and dribbling a weak load somewhere. He’s not a top. To me, I don’t know if he’s guilty, but I taught in prison and had a lot of pedophiles in my class, and he certainly fits the profile of a child molester. 


{ Interview with John Waters | Butt magazine | Continue reading }

photo { via Bon Jane | Facebook }

{ Agency: Buzzman, France }