Studies

Research published earlier this year in Communication Quarterly has identified five flirting personalities, reports USA Today.

More than 5,020 heterosexual adults participated in the study, by filling out questionnaires about their flirting technique and their romantic partners. "The flirting styles inventory is for the very first stage of romantic development," explains Jeffrey Hall, co-author and assistant professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He also notes that, in most cases, an individual uses a combination of the 5 flirting styles, though one type is typically dominant.

The flirting styles identified are: physical, traditional, polite, sincere, and playful.

1. Physical: People with a physical flirting style have a tendency to develop relationships quickly. Both sexual chemistry and emotional connection is strong with their partners, though sexual interest may be the greater focus in the relationship.
2. Traditional: Traditional flirts adhere to conventional ideas of dating and relationships. Men and women who favor this style believe that men should pursue women, and women should not pursue men. They often tend to be introverted.
3. Polite: Daters who fall into these categories place emphasis on proper etiquette and nonsexual communication. They are less likely than daters with other styles to approach someone they're interested in, and they are often not flattered by flirting, but their relationships are meaningful.
4. Sincere: Deep relationships are the name of the game for sincere flirts. Their relationships feature both strong emotional connections and sexual chemistry, but are based primarily on the emotional bond. This is the flirting style that was cited most in the study.
5. Playful: Flirting is all about fun and building self-esteem for playful daters. They tend to be interested in flirting as a recreational activity, rather than as a tool to find a long-term relationship. This is the most uncommon flirting style.

The researchers make it clear that one style is not objectively better than the others in all situations, though one can be more effective than another, depending on the outcome you want to achieve. "For example," Hall says, "a playful flirt is more likely to have short-term relationships. People with a playful style of flirting are effective in having that type of relationship but may find it difficult to let people they're interested in know they want something more."

Daters who leaned towards the physical, sincere, and playful styles were likely to experience the most success for dating and long-term relationships. Individuals with a combination of the physical and sincere styles showed "rapid relational escalation of important relationships with more emotional connection and greater physical chemistry."

Take the flirting styles survey at http://connect.ku.edu/tests/flirt/

What do romantic comedies, Sudoku puzzles, and Twitter have in common?

They were all tools used in experiments in TruTv's countdown of "10 Dumb Sex & Relationship Studies." We've already covered some of the most ridiculous research collected by Nick Nadel in Part I, so let's jump straight into more highlights from the list:

Dubious Study #4: Researchers at the University of Valencia in Spain studied 84 male students, who were asked to solve a Sudoku puzzle while an attractive woman was in the room. They found that the cortisol levels of some men were so high they had reached the level of a person jumping out of a plane. Contact with an attractive woman, the researchers then reasoned, can cause stress hormones to reach dangerously high levels.

Nadel's Take: This study is just plain ridiculous. "Who did the researchers bring in for this study," he wonders, "Sofia Vergara? Just how hard up are these guys that they can't solve a simple Sudoku while in the presence of a pretty face?"

My Thoughts: Maybe it was a really hard Sudoku puzzle?

Dubious Study #5: Women love men with mystery, according to a team from Virginity University and Harvard, who found that women were more drawn to the Facebook profiles of men who showed little interest in them.

Nadel's Take: Isn't this basic dating wisdom that everyone learns in elementary school? Was a scientific study really required?

My Thoughts: Once again, I find myself taking Nadel's side, with one important addition - yes, it's a well-known fact that women are drawn to men they think are unattainable, but men are also consistently drawn to women they think they can't have. Playing hard to get works both ways.

Dubious Study #6: "Children of divorce tend to lag behind in math test scores and interpersonal skills," says a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin.

Nadel's Take: Divorce isn't easy on anyone, but does it deserve to be blamed for everything?

My Thoughts: Divorce is rough on all involved, there's no doubt about it. It should come as no surprise that the end of a marriage - or any other traumatic experience - may have negative effects on other areas of a person's - child or not - life.

Dubious Study #7: Women who marry men who are less attractive than they are have happier marriages, according to a study published in the Journal of Family Psychology.

Nadel's Take: These findings represent nothing more than the stereotype that men place more value on physical appearance than women, while women seek out support and stability.

My Thoughts: There is also plenty of research, as Nadel points out, that suggests that people seek out partners with matching levels of attractiveness. So perhaps what all these studies are really telling us is that love and attraction cannot be quantified and explained - merely enjoyed.

Read the original post here.

A quick glance at my history on this site will attest to the fact that I'm a huge fan of relationship studies. I'm mesmerized by the ways we try to apply science to sex and love, in hopes of one day being able to explain the mysterious ways of the heart.

Some studies provide fascinating insight into modern mating rituals, but many (if not most) are, as TruTv.com writer Nick Nadel puts it, "forehead-slappingly obvious." Nadel collected a list of 10 studies that most definitely fall into the latter category. Here are a few of the highlights:

Dubious Study #1: Researchers at Radboud University of Nijmegen in The Netherlands found that men tend to have difficulty performing cognitive tasks after socializing with members of the opposite sex. In other words, Nadel says, "interacting with women makes men dumb."

Nadel's Take: "As obvious studies go, this one is up there with 'people sometimes bend the truth online.'" It shouldn't take a research team to figure out that men's brains get distracted around women.

My Thoughts: I have to side with Nadel on this one. It shouldn't come as a surprise that men's brains get a little addled around attractive women, and I bet that a study on women's brains would find that they are equally as addled around attractive men.

Dubious Study #2: According to the findings of one of OkCupid's many studies on the OkTrends blog, people who use Twitter every day have shorter relationships than those who do not.

Nadel's Take: OkCupid doesn't even believe their findings. A spokesperson for the site said "Unfortunately, we have no way to tell who's dumping who here; whether the Twitterati are more annoying or just more flighty than everyone else." In other words, there's no actual proof that Twitter has anything to do with the length of a relationship.

My Thoughts: If the people responsible for the study aren't even sure what their findings are, they're probably not worth paying much attention to. The OkTrends studies are a lot of fun, but are by no means the definitive word on all things dating.

Dubious Study #3: The length of a man's ring finger is related to his attractiveness, according to a team at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The ratio that compares the length of a man's index finger to his ring finger is known as "2D:4D."

Nadel's Take: The study claims that men with longer ring fingers have "rugged, caveman-like" faces. "Right," Nadel says, "because women always go for the caveman look. It's not like some of our most popular male celebrities are non-threatening, baby-faced types or anything."

My Thoughts: Many studies examining female perception of male attractiveness have found that women are attracted to different types of men during different phases of their menstrual cycles. A woman could, therefore, be interested in both the "baby-faced types" and the "rugged cavemen" over the course of a month. And as far as the fingers go, "correlation is not causation" - though there may be a link between finger length and attractiveness, one does not necessarily cause the other.

Stay tuned for more frivolous findings and silly studies from Nick Nadel and TruTV...

A British wedding website conducted a survey of 4,000 couples. On the survey the couples had to indicate the levels of happiness during the different stages of their marriage. From the results researchers pinpointed the happiest day at 2 years, 11 months and 8 days after the marriage. During this time, British couples had the most sex, best social life, vacations and romantic meals. This is also the time when the couples have the longest heart to heart conversations and when wives receive the most compliments.

Here are a few things that the researchers found which led to those happy marriages:

• Spend 24 minutes having a heart to heart a day.
• Allow for 75 minutes of alone time a day.
• Never go to bed with an argument unresolved.
• 5 cuddles a day and say "I Love You." at least once.
• Spend 3 nights a week curled up on the sofa together.
• 4 phone calls / emails / text messages a day.

I heard on the radio today that loneliness is contagious, and like a bad cold you can spread it around.

I wasn't sure if I believed this or not and after a quick search on Google, I found this recent article at The Globe and Mail.

After studying 12,000 people, researches from 3 Universities (Harvard, Chicago and California) concluded:

that lonely respondents “infected” remaining friends with their loneliness before the relationships crumbled, perpetuating a cycle of isolation.

Believe it or not if you are lonely you can affect people (spread your loneliness) up to 3 degrees of separation. At one degree of separation, 52 percent of people have a greater chance of being lonely if they are directly connected to someone who is. At two degrees of separation the chances of you being lonely drops to 25 percent and at three degrees, it is 15 percent. At 4 degrees of separation the effect disappears.

I heard about a Australian study and paper called "What’s love got to do with it?" today on our local talk radio station. I also see that Markus over at the Paradigm Shift makes reference to it as well.

The data used in the study is from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (HILDA) and the paper will be presented at the 2009 HILDA Survey Research Conference on July 16 and 17 at University of Melbourne.

The study analyses a range of factors including the relationship between personality, gender and occupation. The researchers investigated individual and couple characteristics associated with marital instability and found that characteristics of men and women can have quite different impacts on marital stability.

This Australian paper takes a look at 2,482 married couples for 6 years (from 2001 to 2007) and attempts to identify the factors associated with marital problems.

Here are some of the higher risk factors associated with marital instability:

• One partner smokes, and the other one doesn't (the same rule can be applied to drinking).
• Almost twice as many marriages which had a low household income separated (16%) when compared to families who are financially stable (9%).
• A woman who wants children more than her husband.
• If the age difference is greater than 9 years (the man being older), it doubles your risk of separation.
• Men who married under 25 years of age are twice as likely to divorce.
• 20% of couples who had children (either together or from other relationships) before the marriage, divorced. It is only a 9% separation rate for couples who did not have children before the marriage.

This research paper is an excellent resource for dating site owners in helping to create a more accurate matchmaking system. While the data is out of Australia, their culture is not that much different from ours here in North America. For the most part, all of the popular dating sites have released very little information on how their matchmaking systems work. In part, it is because they want to keep trade secrets but they also worry about negative reviews from peers. I also have a feeling, a fair number of dating sites do not have any independent scientific research to back up their matchmaking algorithms.

Here is a local copy of the full paper.