Category: Relationships

The 'smug marrieds' may have good reason to feel pleased with themselves as experts now confirm that long-term committed relationships are good for mental and physical health and this benefit increases over time.

In an editorial published by student BMJ, David and John Gallacher from Cardiff University say that on average married people live longer. They say that women in committed relationships have better mental health, while men in committed relationships have better physical health, and they conclude that "on balance it probably is worth making the effort."

Men's physical health probably improves because of their partner's positive influence on their lifestyle and "the mental bonus for women may be due to a greater emphasis on the importance of the relationship," they write.

But the journey of true love does not always run smoothly, maintain the authors, pointing to evidence that relationships in adolescence are associated with increased adolescent depressive symptoms.

And not all relationships are good for you, they add, referring to evidence that single people have better mental health than those in strained relationships.

They also confirm that breaking up is hard to do, saying "exiting a relationship is distressing" and divorce can have a devastating impact on individuals. Having numerous partners is also linked with a risk of earlier death.

They conclude that while relationship failures can harm health this is not a reason to avoid them. A good relationship will improve both physical and mental health and perhaps the thing to do is to try to avoid a bad relationship rather than not getting into a relationship at all.

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Journal Reference:

1. David Gallacher and John Gallacher. Are relationships good for you?BMJ, January 27, 2011

Men are more than twice as likely to continue dating a girlfriend who has cheated on them with another woman than one who has cheated with another man, according to new research from a University of Texas at Austin psychologist.

Women show the opposite pattern. They are more likely to continue dating a man who has had a heterosexual affair than one who has had a homosexual affair.

The study, published last month in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, provides new insight into the psychological adaptations behind men's desire for a variety of partners and women's desire for a committed partner. These drives have played a key role in the evolution of human mating psychology.

"A robust jealousy mechanism is activated in men and women by different types of cues — those that threaten paternity in men and those that threaten abandonment in women," says Jaime C. Confer, the study's lead author and a doctoral candidate in evolutionary psychology.

Confer conducted the study with her father, Mark D. Cloud, a psychology professor at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania.

The researchers asked 700 college students to imagine they were in a committed romantic and sexual relationship with someone they've been dating for three months. They were then asked how they would respond to infidelity committed by the imagined partner.

Some participants were told their partners had been unfaithful with a man, others with a woman. Some were told their partners had an affair with one person, others with multiple partners. Some were told the infidelity happened once, others twice.

Regardless of the number of episodes or partners, the study found that:

• Overall, men demonstrated a 50 percent likelihood of continuing to date a partner who has had a homosexual affair and a 22 percent likelihood of staying with a woman after a heterosexual affair.
• Women demonstrated a 28 percent likelihood of continuing to date a boyfriend who has had a heterosexual affair and a 21 percent likelihood of staying with someone who has had a homosexual affair.

The findings suggest men are more distressed by the type of infidelity that could threaten their paternity of offspring. Men may also view a partner's homosexual affair as an opportunity to mate with more than one woman simultaneously, satisfying men's greater desire for more partners, the authors say.

"These findings are even more remarkable given that homosexuality attitude surveys show men have more negative attitudes toward homosexuality and to be less supportive of civil rights for same-sex couples than women. However, this general trend of men showing lower tolerance for homosexuality than women is reversed in the one fitness-enhancing situation — female homosexuality," say the authors.

Conversely, women objected to continuing a relationship following both types of affairs, but especially so for a boyfriend's homosexual affair. Such an affair may be seen as a sign of dissatisfaction with the current relationship and a prelude to possible abandonment, according to the authors.

Participants were also asked the outcomes of real-life infidelity experiences. Results mirrored those of the imagined infidelity scenarios: Men were significantly more likely than women to have ended their actual relationships following a partner's (presumably heterosexual) affair.

We know that people tend to be attracted to, date, and marry other people who resemble themselves in terms of personality, values, and physical appearance. However, these features only skim the surface of what makes a relationship work. The ways that people talk are also important. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people who speak in similar styles are more compatible. 

The study focused on words called “function words.” These aren’t nouns and verbs; they’re the words that show how those words relate. They’re hard to explicitly define, but we use them all the time—words like the, a, be, anything, that, will, him, and and. How we use these words constitutes our writing and speaking style, says study coauthor James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin. 

“Function words are highly social and they require social skills to use,” he says. “For example, if I’m talking about the article that’s coming out, and in a few minutes I make some reference to ‘the article,’ you and I both know what the article means.” But someone who wasn’t part of that conversation wouldn’t understand. 

Pennebaker, Molly Ireland, and their colleagues examined whether the speaking and writing styles couples adopt during conversation with each other predict future dating behavior and the long-term strength of relationships. They conducted two experiments in which a computer program compared partners’ language styles. 

In the first study, pairs of college students had four-minute speed dates while their conversations were recorded. Almost every pair covered the same topics: What’s your major? Where are you from? How do you like college? Every conversation sounded more or less the same to the naked ear, but text analysis revealed stark differences in language synchrony. The pairs whose language style matching scores were above average were almost four times as likely to want future contact as pairs whose speaking styles were out of sync.

A second study revealed the same pattern in everyday online chats between dating couples over the course of 10 days. Almost 80 percent of the couples whose writing style matched were still dating three months later, compared with approximately 54 percent of the couples who didn’t match as well. 

What people are saying to each other is important, but how they are saying it may be even more telling. People aren’t consciously synchronizing their speech, Pennebaker says. “What’s wonderful about this is we don’t really make that decision; it just comes out of our mouths.”

Are you wondering whether you and your partner have matching language styles? Visit James Pennebaker’s “In Synch: Language Style Matching” application online to find out! http://www.utpsyc.org/synch/

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Journal Reference:

1. M. E. Ireland, R. B. Slatcher, P. W. Eastwick, L. E. Scissors, E. J. Finkel, J. W. Pennebaker. Language Style Matching Predicts Relationship Initiation and Stability. Psychological Science, 2010; 22 (1): 39 DOI: 10.1177/0956797610392928

 In a recent survey of pharmacy professors, 100 percent of the respondents who had Facebook profiles said they would not send friend requests to their current students.

Just fewer than half of the responding faculty members had a Facebook profile, and of those, most said they also ignored friend requests from students — especially current students.

It was a small study, with 95 faculty members from colleges of pharmacy at four Ohio institutions participating. But it is among the first studies to examine college professors' use of the social network, especially with respect to how they interact with students online.

Though the study was limited to pharmacy schools, senior author James McAuley, associate professor of pharmacy practice and neurology at Ohio State University, said the findings have potential to be applicable to other disciplines.

"I would imagine that if faculty members in other colleges got requests from students, the same questions might go through their minds," he said.

The study was designed primarily to document whether and how faculty use Facebook. But because respondents are divided on the subject, the researchers suggest that faculty might benefit from attempts to reach consensus among their department and college colleagues about the appropriate use of social networking.

"A clearly defined stance or consensus may decrease faculty members' concern or discomfort about how to handle a friend request from a student," the researchers wrote.

The study is published in a recent issue of the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education.

The survey was launched after a former resident sought McAuley's advice about Facebook etiquette. Lead study author Anne Metzger, who teaches at the University of Cincinnati, received a Facebook friend request from a student. She called McAuley to ask for guidance on how to react to the request.

"At the time she was a relatively new faculty member, and she wanted to learn from her more senior peers," McAuley said. "That was the premise of doing a broader survey."

McAuley and Metzger joined with two other Ohio State pharmacy resident graduates, Kristen Finley at Ohio Northern University and Timothy Ulbrich at the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy, to survey the pharmacy faculty at all four institutions.

The researchers distributed surveys to 183 full-time pharmacy faculty, and received 95 responses — a 52 percent response rate. Among those who responded, 44 professors (46 percent) had Facebook profiles, and 51 (54 percent) did not. The longer the respondents had been on the faculty, the less likely they were to have Facebook pages: Those with Facebook profiles had been faculty members for an average of 8.6 years, vs. 11.4 years of faculty status among those without Facebook profiles.

The most common reasons cited among faculty who did not use Facebook were lack of time or lack of interest in maintaining a profile.

Nearly four out of five faculty who did use Facebook were not friends with their students. Among those who were friends with students, 12 percent gave student friends access to their entire profile, while 9 percent gave student friends only limited access to their profile.

All respondents said they would not ask current students to be friends on Facebook, but a small minority said they would send a request to students who had graduated.

"My stance, along with everybody else, is that faculty should not reach out to current students on Facebook," McAuley noted. "But if I get a request from a student, I will accept their friendship."

Professors who did use Facebook were evenly divided about whether their faculty status presented a conflict with social networking sites. Those who thought being faculty members did pose a conflict typically reported that they try to maintain a line between personal and professional relationships with students.

Very few faculty had used Facebook for teaching purposes — one respondent had used it to initiate online discussions, and another used the network to provide information to students in experiential education courses. Four faculty members had used Facebook in connection with their roles as advisers to student organizations.

McAuley co-advises a large student organization at Ohio State's College of Pharmacy, and in that role, spends a lot of time with students. In addition, he participates in social activities designed to bring students and faculty together — for example, gathering for pizza and soft drinks or attending a sporting event.

"There is generally this desire for students and faculty to get to know each other outside the classroom, but some people might feel that even that blurs the line," said McAuley, who added that his Facebook use is personal rather than professional. "I don't see a big difference between participating in these social events and allowing a student to be a Facebook friend and see my post about my dog graduating from puppy training."

In general, previous research concerning social network use among college students suggests that because of the power differential between students and the professors judging their performance, students are the ones taking risks in the online relationship. McAuley said that in his experience, being Facebook friends with current and former students has not led to any surprise revelations that might influence his opinion of students.

"I would think most students are aware of the potential problems with putting something on their page that is inappropriate or unprofessional," he said. "If you're friends with a faculty member, then it's not a good idea to post pictures about getting drunk Friday night when on Monday morning, you have to go to a job interview or to a site as a student in a professional practice."

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Journal Reference:

1. Anne H. Metzger, Kristen N. Finley, Timothy R. Ulbrich, and James W. McAuley. Pharmacy Faculty Members' Perspectives on the Student/Faculty Relationship in Online Social Networks. AJPE, Vol. 74 No. 10

 Breast cancer patients who have a strong social support system in the first year after diagnosis are less likely to die or have a recurrence of cancer, according to new research from Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) and the Shanghai Institute of Preventive Medicine. The study, led by first author Meira Epplein, Ph.D., assistant professor of Medicine at VICC, was published in a recent edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Patients in the study were enrolled in the Shanghai Breast Cancer Survivor Study, a large, population-based review of female breast cancer survivors in China, which Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Shanghai Institute of Preventive Medicine have carried out since 2002 under the leadership of principal investigator Xiao Ou Shu, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Medicine at VICC, and senior author of the study.

From 2002 to 2004, a total of 2,230 breast cancer survivors completed a quality of life survey six months after diagnosis and a majority responded to a follow-up survey 36 months after diagnosis. The women were asked about physical issues like sleep, eating and pain, psychological well-being, social support and material well-being. The answers were converted to an overall quality of life score.

During a median follow-up of 4.8 years after the initial quality of life assessment, the investigators documented participants who had died or been diagnosed with a cancer recurrence.

Six months after diagnosis, only greater social well-being was significantly associated with a decreased risk of dying or having a cancer recurrence. Compared to women with the lowest scores, women who scored highest on the social well-being quality of life scale had a 48 percent reduction in their risk of a cancer recurrence and a 38 percent reduction in the risk of death.

Emotional support was the strongest predictor of cancer recurrence. Specifically, women reporting the highest satisfaction with marriage and family had a 43 percent risk reduction, while those with strong social support had a 40 percent risk reduction and those with favorable interpersonal relationships had a 35 percent risk reduction.

"We found that social well-being in the first year after cancer diagnosis is an important prognostic factor for breast cancer recurrence or death," said Epplein. "This suggests that the opportunity exists for the design of treatment interventions to maintain or enhance social support soon after diagnosis to improve disease outcomes."

While a strong social support network influenced cancer recurrence and mortality during the first year, the association tapered off and was no longer statistically significant by the third year after diagnosis. This may be related to a smaller sample size of patients who answered the questionnaire, or other factors beyond quality of life that take precedence in later years.

"Our research supports previous studies that found a benefit for breast cancer patients who have a meaningful emotional support network," said Epplein. "These results suggest that therapeutic interventions may be useful because social well-being is potentially modifiable."

The study was supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Defense Breast Cancer Research Program and the National Cancer Institute.

Married people may think they communicate well with their partners, but psychologists have found that they don't always convey messages to their loved ones as well as they think — and in some cases, the spouses communicate no better than strangers.

The same communication problem also is true with close friends, a recent study has found.

"People commonly believe that they communicate better with close friends than with strangers. That closeness can lead people to overestimate how well they communicate, a phenomenon we term the 'closeness-communication bias,'" said Boaz Keysar, a professor in psychology at the University of Chicago and a leading expert on communications.

Keysar's colleague Kenneth Savitsky, professor of psychology at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., devised an experiment resembling a parlor game to study the issue. In it, two sets of couples sat in chairs with their backs to each other and tried to discern the meaning of each other's ambiguous phrases. In all, 24 married couples participated.

The researchers used phrases common in everyday conversations to see if the spouses were better at understanding phrases from their partners than from people they did not know. The spouses consistently overestimated their ability to communicate, and did so more with their partners than with strangers.

"A wife who says to her husband, 'it's getting hot in here,' as a hint for her husband to turn up the air conditioning a notch, may be surprised when he interprets her statement as a coy, amorous advance instead," said Savitsky, who is lead author of the paper, published in the January issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

"Although speakers expected their spouse to understand them better than strangers, accuracy rates for spouses and strangers were statistically identical. This result is striking because speakers were more confident that they were understood by their spouse," Savitsky said.

"Some couples may indeed be on the same wavelength, but maybe not as much as they think. You get rushed and preoccupied, and you stop taking the perspective of the other person, precisely because the two of you are so close," he said.

Savitsky conducted a similar experiment with 60 Williams College students. In the study, the students overestimated their effectiveness in communicating with friends, replicating the pattern found with married couples.

Closeness can create 'illusion of insight'

Communication problems arise when a speaker assumes that a well-known acquaintance has all the information the speaker has, removing the need for a long explanation, Keysar said. When people meet a stranger, they automatically provide more information because they don't have a "closeness bias" in that encounter. In the same way, listeners may wrongly assume that a comment or request from a close acquaintance is based on knowledge that the two have in common — a mistake the listener would not make with a stranger.

In order to test that idea, a team at Keysar's lab set up an experiment in which two students would sit across from each other, separated by a box with square compartments that contained objects. Some of the objects were not visible to one of the students. That student, the speaker, would ask the partner to move one of the objects — but the speaker did not know that the request could be interpreted in two different ways. For example, if the speaker asked the partner to move a mouse, the partner would have two options: a computer mouse that the speaker could see, or a stuffed mouse that the speaker could not see.

The study found that when partners were asked to move an object with an ambiguous name, they would hesitate longer when the speaker was a friend. But when the speaker was a stranger, the partner would be faster to focus on the object that the speaker could see, and ignore the object that the speaker did not know about. This showed that the participants were more likely to take an egocentric position when working with a friend, neglecting to consider the possibility that the friend didn't share the same information they had.

"Our problem in communicating with friends and spouses is that we have an illusion of insight. Getting close to someone appears to create the illusion of understanding more than actual understanding," said co-author Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

"The understanding, 'What I know is different from what you know' is essential for effective communication to occur," Savitsky said. "It is necessary for giving directions, for teaching a class or just for having an ordinary conversation. But that insight can be elusive when the 'you' in question is a close friend or spouse."

Joining the three in authoring the article were Travis Carter, a College graduate of the University of Chicago and a post-doctoral student at Chicago Booth, and Ashley Swanson, a graduate student at MIT.

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Journal Reference:

1. Kenneth Savitsky, Boaz Keysar, Nicholas Epley, Travis Carter, Ashley Swanson. The closeness-communication bias: Increased egocentrism among friends versus strangers. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011; 47 (1): 269 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.09.005

The risks encountered by young people on the Internet are less significant than is often believed. This has been demonstrated by the EU Kids Online survey, conducted in 25 European countries (1) by a research network led by the London School of Economics, including a French team headed by Dominique Pasquier of the Laboratoire traitement et communication de l'information (LTCI) (CNRS/Télécom Paris Tech).

The survey, funded by the European Commission (2), shows that only a small minority of youngsters is confronted with problems on the Internet, and that very few of these children say they have been upset as a result.

The relations between parents and children with respect to the Internet seem to be more harmonious than they are with regard to television.

However, about half of those parents whose children have encountered problems online were not aware of them. The results of this survey, carried out in 2010 among 25,140 European Internet users aged 9-16, along with their parents, were disclosed on January 13, 2011.

The survey was carried out in the participants' homes between May and August 2010, using a sample of 25,140 Internet users aged 9-16 (in France, this represents 87% of 9-16 year olds), and one of their parents. Its main findings are as follows.

Internet usage and behavior of 9-16 year olds

The Internet is part of children's daily lives: 93% of 9-16 year olds surf the web at least once a week, and 60% connect to the Internet daily or almost daily. They spend on average an hour and a half online every day; 50% say they " find it easier to be themselves" online than in face-to-face relationships (this is true of slightly more boys than girls, and slightly more children from low than high socioeconomic status (SES), with 13-14 year olds making up the highest percentage).

Children go online at an increasingly young age: the average age at which a child first uses the Internet is 7 in Denmark and Sweden, compared to 8 in several other Northern European countries. In France, 9 is the average age of first web use.

87% of European children use the Internet at home, 63% at school, 53% with friends, and 42% with other family members. At home, 49% connect in their bedroom, compared to 39% in a shared space. In France, use in the bedroom (41%) is below the European average, while a large majority of young Danes (74%) log in from their room.

A majority of children take part in social networks and participation increases with age: while 59% of 9-16 year olds have a profile on a social network; this percentage rises from 26% of 9-10 year olds to 81% of 15-16 year olds. Their profiles are public in 26% of cases. Girls are more likely to have a private profile. Youngsters communicate overwhelmingly with people they already know or who have connections with people they know. Only 25% of children are involved in online communications with strangers, especially through chats, games, or virtual worlds.

Internet dangers: clarifications

The two problems most frequently encountered by children are access to unhealthy content and excessive use of the Internet. The survey reveals that 21% of 11-16 year olds have been confronted with unhealthy content

online: hate messages directed against certain groups (12%), pro-anorexia content (10% on average, but 19% of girls aged 14-16), encouragement to self-mutilation (7%), drug-taking (7%), or suicide (5%). However, France is the EU country least affected by this problem, reported by 14% of young French people compared to 21% of all Europeans and 43% of Czechs and Norwegians. The survey found 23% of 11-16 year olds reporting negative experiences related to excessive use of the Internet, such as neglecting their friends, lack of sleep, or problems at school.

The study also shows that what adults identify as a problem is not necessarily seen as such by their children. For example, 14% of young people had seen sexual images on the Internet, but only one third considered this experience uncomfortable. 15% had received sexual messages, but only a quarter said they found these upsetting. 9% of children had a face-to-face encounter with someone they met on the Internet, and only one in eight found this a disturbing experience. In 53% of these encounters with strangers, the child took a friend along.

The children who reported being made uncomfortable by a problem on the Internet are a small minority: only 8% of 9-16 year olds in France and 12% in Europe as a whole.

In contrast, being harassed by hurtful or nasty messages on the Internet, while rare, causes more pain. 6% of 9-16 year olds have received nasty or hurtful messages (and 3% say they have sent such messages themselves). Two thirds of recipients said they felt "somewhat" or "very" bothered. The percentage of those who say they were upset by online harassment is significantly higher among girls and lower SES children. But the upset does not last very long: 62% of children forget about it straight away, and only 2% still think about it several months later. Furthermore, face-to-face harassment is more common (13% of

children) than it is on the Internet (6% of children) or through mobile phones (3%). Online bullying takes place primarily in social networks and instant messaging. Boys, especially adolescents, are more exposed to sexual images online (3), while girls tend to receive more nasty or hurtful messages. However, girls are generally more likely to be upset by the problems they encounter. Adolescents take more risks than younger children, but claim to be less upset by them.

Parents and children

There is little conflict between parents and children regarding the Internet, and what they say is much more in agreement than in surveys on television use, where children's accounts can differ greatly from their parents'. The use of technical mediation for parental control is relatively low: only a quarter of parents block or filter out certain sites (28%) or monitor the history of sites visited by their children (24%). Parents especially restrict personal data disclosure (85%) and downloading (57%). Most parents (70%) say they talk with their children about what they do online. More than half (56%) give their children advice on how to interact with others online, or discuss things that might worry them (52%). A third of parents have helped their children when something went wrong (36%). Two thirds of children (68%) think their parents know "a lot" or "quite a lot" about their Internet use.

Less than half (44%) believe that mediation by their parents restricts their online activities, and only 13% would want their parents to be less involved. But while three quarters of parents think it is "not very likely" or "not at all likely" that something bad will happen to their children on the Internet over the next six months, many were actually not aware of problems that had in fact arisen: 40% of parents of children who had seen sexual images were convinced that this had not happened. 52% of parents whose children had received sexual messages and 56% of those whose children had been sent bullying messages did not find out about it. The same was true for 61% of parents whose children had face-to-face encounters with someone they met on the Internet. Parental underestimation of problems is therefore substantial.

Other sources of advice

Teachers play an important advisory role, especially in the case of older teenagers and lower SES children. But there are significant differences between countries, the two extremes being 97% of teachers involved in Norway and 65% in Italy (in France, this percentage is 76%).

Three quarters of children (73%) say that their peers help them with the Internet, most of the time by providing practical assistance, and that they are the ones they first turn to if they have problems. Information from the mass media (television, radio, newspapers, cinema, advertising) is little used (20% of children) and online safety advice even less so.

Notes

(1) The survey was carried out in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, The Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

(2) The EU Kids Online survey was funded by the European Commission Safer Internet Programme.

(3) The Internet is now the place where children most risk seeing pornographic images: 14% of children have seen such images online, compared to only 12% on television, through films or videos.

Pornographic images online are seen by boys aged 13-16 more than other groups (24% compared to 14% on average).

— While monogamy is often touted as a way to protect against disease, young couples who say they have discussed monogamy can't seem to agree on what they decided. And a significant percentage of those couples who at least agreed that they would be monogamous weren't.

A new study of 434 young heterosexual couples ages 18-25 found that, in 40 percent of couples, only one partner says the couple agreed to be sexually exclusive. The other partner said there was no agreement.

Public health researchers Jocelyn Warren and Marie Harvey of Oregon State University looked at data from the PARTNERS Project, a Center for Disease Control-funded study conducted by Harvey. The researchers said this study showed that many couples are misjudging their partners' risk behaviors.

The results are in a forthcoming article published online in the Journal of Sex Research.

"Other studies have looked at perceptions related to monogamy, but this is really the first one that explores the discussions that heterosexual couples are — or aren't — having about monogamy," Warren said. "Miscommunication and misunderstandings about sexual exclusivity appear to be common."

Previous research has shown that condom use tends to decline as relationships become more intimate and steady over time. Yet Warren and Harvey's study shows that some couples may not be communicating effectively on the terms of their relationship. Even among those who agreed they had an explicit agreement to be monogamous, almost 30 percent had broken the agreement, with at least one partner having had sex outside the relationship.

Harvey, a leading researcher in the field of sexual and reproductive health, said this study adds to a growing body of research on safer sex communication.

"Couples have a hard time talking about these sorts of issues, and I would imagine for young people it's even more difficult," she said. "Monogamy comes up quite a bit as a way to protect against sexually transmitted diseases. But you can see that agreement on whether one is monogamous or not is fraught with issues."

The couples surveyed included both married and non-married couples. Interestingly, couples with children were less likely to have a monogamy agreement in place. Married couples were no more likely to have an explicit monogamy agreement in place than other couples.

Only commitment was related to sustained monogamy. Relationship commitment was assessed using an accepted measurement scale where participants rated themselves from one to five (five being highest) on questions such as "You view your relationship as permanent." With every unit increase in the commitment scale, the odds that the couple had a sustained monogamy agreement increased almost three-fold.

"Relationship variables appear to be related to monogamy," Harvey said. "But factors such as marriage and children did not increase the likelihood that the couple had agreed to monogamy."

Warren said couples become monogamous generally for emotional reasons, to show love and trust in a relationship. Yet the concern is that a lack of communication between heterosexual couples is leading to unintended risks.

Harvey said the sexual behavior and protection of young couples is ripe for intervention. She recommends that those who work with young people in clinical and community settings ask what kind of protection they are using. "And if they answer that their partner is monogamous, they may want to think about advising that young person to use protection," Harvey said.

Warren is a research associate at OSU and Harvey is a professor of public health at OSU. Christopher Agnew from Purdue University contributed to this study.

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Journal Reference:

1. Jocelyn Warren, S. Marie Harvey, Christopher Agnew. One Love: Explicit Monogamy Agreements among Heterosexual Young Adult Couples at Increased Risk of Sexually Transmitted Infections. Journal of Sex Research, 2010; : 1 DOI: 10.1080/00224499.2010.541952

As adolescents move from elementary school into their middle or junior-high years, changes in friendships may signal potential academic success or troubles down the road, say University of Oregon researchers.

A new study, appearing in the February issue of the Journal of Early Adolescence, found that boys and girls whose friends are socially active in ways where rules are respected do better in their classroom work. Having friends who engage in problem behavior, in contrast, is related to a decrease in their grades. Having pro-social friends and staying away from deviant peers proved more effective for academic payoffs than simply being friends with high-achieving peers.

The middle school/junior high years are a major transition for children, as students move away from grade-school classrooms led by one teacher every day into an environment of multiple classes with different teachers and opportunities to make new friends. This new study — conducted by Marie-Helene Veronneau and Thomas J. Dishion of the UO Child and Family Center — focused solely on the role played by friendship on academic achievement.

Their findings emerged from data collected in a longitudinal study of 1,278 students — 55 percent of them girls — done previously by center researchers. In that study, students named their three best friends. Instead of relying on student reports of their peers' behaviors and grades, researchers in the new study looked specifically at behavioral and academic records of the friends.

A surprise discovery was that girls who already were struggling academically in sixth grade actually suffered later when their chosen friends were already those making the highest grades, Veronneau said. "We don't know the mechanisms on why it is this way for girls, but we can speculate that girls compare themselves to their friends and then decide they are not doing very well. Perhaps this affects their self-efficacy and belief in their own abilities."

For girls already doing well in sixth grade, however, there was an opposite influence. "It could be for these girls, having friends who also are getting good grades, school is challenging and stimulating, and they end up doing better than expected," she said.

The study's findings clearly show that in the middle school years "a great deal of learning is taking place that is not being attended to," said Dishion, director of the Child and Family Center and professor of school psychology. "Puberty is taking place. The brain is changing rapidly. Kids' brains are almost wired to be reading the social world to see how they fit in, and the school is the arena for it."

These transitional years may be pivotal, Dishion said. In a previous longitudinal study, he said, he and colleagues looked at the impacts of peer relationships of young people at ages 13, 15 and 17 to look for predictive indicators of life adjustments at age 24. Those influences at age 13 — going back to middle school — were the most influential, he noted. While instruction is school is vitally important, he said, it may be that more eyes should be looking at shifting peer relationships.

In their conclusions, Dishion and Veronneau suggested that responsible adults — at school and at home — "should pay special attention" to changes in friendships and encourage students to pursue and participate in adult-supervised activities to promote pro-social relationships.

"Parents should pay attention to what their kids are doing and with whom they hang out," Veronneau said. "If parents notice that there is a shift in a child's friendship network, they should try to get to know those kids, talk with teachers and communicate naturally with their own child about where they are going and when they will be coming home."

The research was supported through grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Veronneau and from the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health to Dishion.

When their romantic partners are not quintessentially masculine, women in their fertile phase are more likely to fantasize about masculine-looking men than are women paired with George Clooney types.

But women with masculine-looking partners do not necessarily become more attracted to their partners, a recent study co-authored by a University of Colorado at Boulder researcher concludes.

Meanwhile, a man's intelligence has no effect on the extent to which fertile, female partners fantasize about others, the researchers found. They say the lack of an observed "fertility effect" related to intelligence is puzzling.

The findings augment the emerging understanding of how human sexual selection evolved over time, and how the vestiges of that evolution are evident today.

The findings come from a study published recently in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. The study was conducted by Steven Gangestad and Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico and Christine Garver-Apgar, a postdoctoral fellow at CU's Institute for Behavioral Genetics.

A "masculine face" has a relatively pronounced chin, strong jaw, narrow eyes and well-defined brow. George Clooney fits this bill, Gangestad suggests. A less-masculine face, on the other hand, would include a less-pronounced jaw and wider eyes, a la Pee-wee Herman.

But this does not mean that pretty boys are less attractive as life partners.

"When they rate men's sexiness, in a sense, that's when (women) show the shift," Gangestad  said. "If they rate men's attractiveness as a long-term partner, then they don't show it."

The team interviewed 66 heterosexual couples in which women's ages ranged from 18 to 44. Their relationships ranged from one month to 20 years in length. Nine couples were married.

A host of studies has shown that women's interest in men with masculine features peaks during ovulation. But this study is the first to confirm that the effect occurs in real couples.

"The effects of facial masculinity and attractiveness fit in a larger picture that has emerged," says Garver-Apgar.

The prevailing wisdom during much of the last half-century was that women did not experience estrus, the period in which other primates signal their fertility with swollen genitals. But newer research suggests that women may not have lost all remnants of estrus.

Evolutionary biologists have documented that women are choosy when fertile, and their freedom to choose mates is increased because their fertile phase is not advertised as it is in other primates. A growing body of evidence suggests that, when most fertile, women gravitate toward males who show signs of good genetic quality.

Masculine facial features suggest that a man is of good genetic quality, because he had the resources during development not only to survive but also to expend energy on a macho visage. Rugged-looking jaws and eyebrows are signals of testosterone.

Instead of using his energy on other features or to maintain his immune system, the masculine-looking male may have had a "surplus energy budget," Garver-Apgar says.

During development, individuals make trade-offs. They can build big brains, large muscles or stronger immune systems. Brains, brawn and immunity may all compete for the same resources.

While it is not surprising that women's gazes would fall on masculine-looking men when they are most fertile, Garver-Apgar says the lack of a similar effect with intelligence is perplexing.

"That we didn't find any effect of men's intelligence on their partners' sexual interests across the cycle is important because some evidence suggests that intelligence associates with genetic quality."

But the data on the intelligence-attraction equation are mixed. If intelligence correlates with good genetic quality, Garver-Apgar wonders, why is it that intelligence is not among those traits that women prefer mid-cycle? "Why don't you see a fertility effect?"

Further research should help answer those questions, she and her co-authors suggest.

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Journal Reference:

1. Steven W. Gangestad, Randy Thornhill, Christine E. Garver-Apgar. Men's facial masculinity predicts changes in their female partners' sexual interests across the ovulatory cycle, whereas men's intelligence does not. Evolution and Human Behavior, 2010; 31 (6): 412 DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2010.06.001