In , Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron wanted to test the connection between sexual attraction and anxiety. They put men into two conditions. They either walked across a high, shaky bridge or a low, sturdy bridge. Afterward, they met a female experimenter who asked a series of questions and gave the men her phone number "just in case.
The men who met the woman after walking on the high bridge were more likely to call her than the men who met her on the low bridge. Psychologists call this phenomenon the "misattribution of arousal. That's why doing exciting things — like going for bike rides, riding a roller coaster — makes for many first dates.
Yale psychologist John Bargh performed an experiment in which participants held warm or cold beverages and had to rate whether someone's personality was warm or cold.
Participants who held warm beverages judged the person to have a warm personality, because their minds were already primed to think that way.
If you take someone on a coffee date instead of an ice cream date , they may feel more warmly toward you. It's not only important to be close to someone emotionally — you should also strive to be close physically. According to an experiment at MIT, the proximity of students' dorm rooms increased how close they felt to one another.
This is because they had more passive interactions, like brief meetings as they passed one another in the hallway, which made them feel more intimate. It's known as the mere exposure effect , which states that familiarity plays a huge role in attraction.
We've all heard that women are attracted to men with nice cars. But men also appear more attractive if they are photographed in a luxury apartment. In a Cardiff Metropolitan University study , a man was photographed with a casual posture in a "high status" luxury apartment and a "neutral status" standard apartment context.
The men with the luxury apartments were rated significantly higher for attractiveness when presented to the female subjects. Researchers determined that the illusion of status-linked property ownership had a high impact on attraction, and that context can make all the difference. In a University of Michigan experiment , women read vignettes about men. Whenever the story featured a person who owned a dog, women rated them with higher long-term attractiveness.
This is because pet ownership signals nurturance and a tendency toward relationship commitment. It also makes you appear more relaxed, approachable, and happy. People are more likely to be attracted to someone who didn't find them appealing at first but eventually warmed up to them than someone who always liked them. This was revealed in a study by Jerome Tognoli and Robert Keisner about the gain-loss theory of attraction.
Participants "accidentally" heard the experimenter describe them in either a positive or negative way. It turned out that p articipants liked the experimenter far more when they gave them an initially negative rating that later became positive.
This shows that people find it more rewarding when they need to win someone over. In a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study on walking speeds of people on a track, researchers found that males walk at a significantly slower pace to match females' pace when the woman is their romantic interest. Meanwhile, friends who were not attracted to one another did not adjust their walking speeds. In a study , each participant was rated on physical attractiveness and then randomly assigned to date another participant.
Then, participants were asked to rate their satisfaction with their dates. The participants who were more attractive were harsher in their judgments — even if they were both equally attractive. The better looking someone was, the less satisfied they were likely to be. Not into pet ownership? The good news is that simply being seen with a dog can make you seem more dateable. In one study , a year-old man approached hundreds of women and asked for their phone numbers.
When he had a dog with him, he was much more likely to score their digits. In a study , each participant was given random photographs of strangers mixed with composite images of themselves morphed with those strangers.
They were then asked which ones they were more attracted to, and the participants chose the composites. According to the study, "Three experiments demonstrate that people find others more sexually attractive For you.
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A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Shana Lebowitz and Ivan De Luce. If you're looking for love this Valentine's Day, there are certain factors that can increase your chances of finding it.
According to various psychological studies, some of those factors include playing hard to get, owning a dog, and even caring about the environment. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. If you make eco-friendly purchases. If you play hard to get. If you display the right facial expression. Women prefer familiarity, but men prefer novelty.
If you use a lot of hand gestures. Palmer explained that attachment theory plays a big part in the development of love for our parents, because when children are protected and nurtured by available, responsive parents, they have their need for emotional nurturing satisfied. Therefore, they learn to love the parents in return. What children learn about love from their parents determines how they will love others as adults, she said.
But if your emotional needs were not nurtured, you did not fully develop and instead became a demanding and anxious adult still seeking the love you missed as a child. That's not to say that people from neglectful or non-loving homes aren't capable of love themselves, but they might need to do some extra work to resolve their issues and get there. Remember the pair bonding Nance mentioned? Well, it happens for a reason.
When people fall in love, they go into a state of limerence," she said, which is a fancy way of saying infatuation or obsession. This happens because our brains and hormones go wild when faced with a sincere love interest. The good feeling is a reward that makes us want more," Nance explained.
Although serotonin levels vary per person, they can also go down during the head-over-heels process. As a result, decreased serotonin may produce OCD-like symptoms that cause some people to think of the person they are in love with constantly, said Dr.
The hormonal reactions aren't limited to romantic love, however. Occasionally, eyes meet across the room and the rest is history. For most of us, however, falling in love is more complicated. Sometimes, the person who wants to be loved is unconsciously getting in their own way. When you feel lovable you project that out and other people notice," Palmer said.
The needier they appear, the less chance there is for someone to enter their life to fulfill those needs," she added, noting that it's critical to "love yourself without being dependent on other people's opinions. Once you're ready to love yourself and are open to outside love, the rest is timing, chemistry and common ground. Although the old saying " opposites attract " remains prevalent, it's actually false in most cases.
At the end of the day, love is relative, so don't expect your relationship to look, feel or act the same as past experiences or like those of your friends. Ever looked back on a teenage romance and wondered what you were thinking?
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