RNDP 25: More Dating Developments from those Hardworking Scientists

"Intranasal Oxytocin Increases Positive Communication and Reduces Cortisol Levels During Couple Conflict"

Swiss researchers Beate Ditzen, Marcel Schaer, Barbara Gabriel, Guy Bodenmann, Ulrike Ehlert, and Markus Heinrichs report that a nasal spray of oxytocin helped couples discussing stressful topics have more positive communication. "Oxytocin increased positive communication behavior in relation to negative behavior and reduced salivary cortisol, i.e., their stress levels, compared to placebo." [EurekAlert]

The researchers say they're a long way from using oxytocin spray in a treatment context, so I doubt they've turned their mind to its use in the dating context. Still, if you've been dating a while and you hear the words "we need to talk" a quick sniff on an oxytoxin nozzle might be a great idea.

Can Evolutionary Theory bring us a new Paradigm?

A survey of more than 10,000 individuals in 18 "human populations" has concluded that the stereotype of men being more promiscuous than women may be wrong. Dr Gillian Brown, of the University of St Andrews, said: "The study shows that women are just as likely to seek out just as many partners as men." [EurekAlert; Telegraph; PhysOrg]

This is interesting news for anyone involved in the dating game, but Dr Brown and her team are ready to take their research much further than these initial findings and apply evolutionary theory to understanding human mating strategies.

Recent advances in evolutionary theory suggest that factors such as sex-biased mortality, sex-ratio, population density and variation in mate quality, are likely to impact mating behaviour in humans...

Taking a new perspective on what evolutionary theory predicts about mating strategies will have important implications for how we think about male and female sex roles. We're entering an exciting new era in which evolutionary theory can help us to understand the diversity of human mating strategies.

It could be that further analysis of this data will let us build a data model where we plug in Ottawa's figures for sex-biased mortality, sex-ratio, population density and variation in mate quality and as output we'll get an optimal mating strategy - a critical component of a Revolutionary New Dating Paradigm!