This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Cannabis for construction workers — A Nigerian study from 2015 hints at a cannabis boost to efficiency. Manasseh Iroegbu at the University of Uyo, Nigeria, is lead author of “Exploring the performance of mason workers in the […]
Comes a further investigation into the ways of love: “Characteristics and Personality Styles of Women Who Seek Incarcerated Men as Romantic Partners: Survey Results and Directions for Future Research, ” Marcela Slavikova and Nancy Ryba Panza [pictured below], Deviant Research, Volume 35, Issue 11, 2014, pages 885-90. The authors, at CUNY, New York, and California […]
The group of self-chosen elite, somewhat secretive mathematicians called Bourbaki have become the subject, or perhaps the object, of a study in a journal about romance. The study is: “Bourbaki and the Oulipo,” Jacques Roubaud [pictured here], Journal of Romance Studies, Volume 7, Number 3, Winter 2007 , pp. 123-132. The author, himself a profesor […]
You suspect you’re in for a jolly read —a jolly ride, really, through the realm of romantic evil! — when a scholarly report begins with the words: When are women drawn to shady, self-centered, sly, cunning, and manipulative men? … In this work, we postulate in our novel Veil of Darkness hypothesis that men with “dark” personality […]
Miss Conduct outlines her psychology-based theory of romance, illustrated with examples from Star Trek: So here’s my Theory of Romance, based on work by David McClelland, a great man with whom I had the tremendous privilege to work early in my grad-school career, and Dan McAdams, author of one of the best non-academic books on psychology I have […]
Nicholas Guéguen, of whom we have written again and again, is back, now bearing on flowers: “‘Say it … Near the Flower Shop’: Further Evidence of the Effect of Flowers on Mating,” Nicolas Guéguen, Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 152, no. 5, 2012, pp. 529-532. “For millennia, flowers have been used to convey romance. In […]
Savor the romance, if you will (or don’t, if you won’t) in the wording of this press release from Patricia Donovan of the University of Buffalo (UB): Lead author Lora E. Park [pictured here], PhD, UB associate professor of psychology and her co-authors, found converging support for the idea that when romantic goals are activated, […]
“For millennia flowers have been used to convey romance, yet their effect on human romantic behavior has not been explicitly tested.” This lacuna in the literature has recently been filled, or, at the very least substantially occluded, by Professor Nicolas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud, France (see: Improbable Research, passim [1] [2] [3] &etc) […]
Nicholas Guéguen has published a new romantic study. Professor Guéguen, whose imaginative and persistent attempts to explore the mysteries of l’amour we have sometimes chronicled is perhaps best known for his monograph “Women’s Bust Size and Men’s Courtship Solicitation“, which is considered to be one of the classics of its genre. The new paper is: […]
Valentine’s Day always brings the question “Can you catch a cold by kissing?” A 1984 experiment gave this answer: “Casual social encounters or kisses between infected and susceptible individuals are probably unlikely to result in the transmission of rhinoviruses.” Here’s kissing data from the experiment. The citation and further quotations appear below it.