NYT: The New Dating Tools: A Card and a Wink
Move over, Match.com. This is the next generation of online dating. Unlike traditional dating sites where members spend hours on computers writing autobiographies and scrutinizing photographs, a raft of newfangled dating tools are striving to better bridge the gap between online and real-world romance.
Three from the morning feed…
Brooding Russians: Less distressed than Americans (ScienceDaily)
Bad Breath Troubles? (WebMD)
A study finds a new way t o predict whether or not a couple is going to stay together–word matching.
The researchers found that volunteers who found it easy to associate their partner with bad things and difficult to associate the partner with good things were more likely to separate over the next year.
A pair of studies looks at the look of love:
First: Attitudes Towards Sexual Relationships Can Be Judged From Photos Of Your Face
And in another:
Volunteers looked at faces with exaggerated or reduced male or female features; the faces had been morphed to look either more or less masculine or feminine. As the faces flashed on a computer screen, the volunteer was supposed to hit a key as quickly as possible to indicate whether the face was looking at them or away from them. Both women and men could do that more quickly when the face had exaggerated sexual characteristics.
New feature at OKCupid helps ID your most alluring profile picture with the help of other users. Comes alongside this iffy move: OKCupid Hides Good-Looking People From Less Attractive Users. Unsavory–though a Consumerist commenter may be onto something re the attractive users thing:
I think it’s just a ploy, I received the same email too and my matches don’t seem to have changed. Probably just a way to draw people back in that haven’t been signing in as often.
Dating, Sex, and Herpes, a Q&A at the NYT with Dr. Peter Leone. Starts this way:
Can you have herpes but never even know it? Can the herpes simplex virus spread even if you don’t have symptoms? And how do you navigate the maze of sex and dating when you know you are infected with herpes?
A lively takedown of pay dating sites on the OkCupid Blog–simultaneously demystifying the online dating process.
There is a negative correlation between the number of messages a man sends per day to the reply rate he gets.The more messages you send, the worse response rate you get. It’s not hard to see why this would be so. A rushed, unfocused message is bound to get a worse response than something you spend time on.
Too many choices, at the grocery store or in dating, can lead to hasty decision-making–or so says a study reported at PsychCentral:
In this environment, researchers found that people respond by paying attention to different types of characteristics – discarding attributes such as education, smoking status, and occupation in favor of physical characteristics such as height and weight….[I]f the brain is faced with abundant choice, even about who to go out with, it may make decisions based on what it can evaluate most quickly.
It may not have taken a psych study to figure out that there’s a gender split regarding feelings about hooking up among college students. But of interest: all still prefer dating to hooking up–or at least say they do to a psych researcher.
PsyBlog digs into psych study history and answers the question, Does Playing Hard To Get Work?:
[E]very time psychologists used an experiment to test the idea that playing hard to get is a good dating strategy, their results didn’t make any sense. At least not until 1973 when Elaine Walster and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin finally hit upon a method that teased out the subtleties (Walster et al., 1973).
