His eyes meet yours across a crowded room - is that the look of love? Only, say scientists, if it lasts longer than 8.2 seconds.

If a man’s gaze is more like four seconds, research suggests he is less than impressed. Women, however, treat both hunks and geeks alike, with their eyes lingering on both for similar amounts of time.

Hidden cameras secretly tracked the eye movements of 115 students as they chatted with actors and actresses. They were then asked to rate their conversation partner’s attractiveness.

 The men looked into the eyes of actresses they considered beautiful for an average of 8.2 seconds, but that dropped to 4.5 seconds when gazing at those they rated less attractive.

The female students, however, did not differ in the amount of time they spent looking at the actors, the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior reported.

The researchers believe that men use eye contact to seek out fit and fertile mates. But women are more wary of attracting unwanted attention because of the risks of unwanted pregnancy and single parenthood.

I have been at a loss for words since the new year started. I hope we haven’t lost all of our readers.

Over the past few weeks we have been hearing and reading rumors that Jay-Z and Aaliyah were dating before her early death in 2001. This is odd to hear as before she died, rumors were swirling that she and Damon Dash were an exclusive item.

Which brings me to today’s topic…should you date your friends ex? I have always heard “bro’s before hoe’s” or that “my girl friends over a guy any day”. So what is your take?

In my own personal experience, I have never dated a girl friends ex. How about you?

When it comes to assessing the romantic playing field — who might be interested in whom — men and women were shown to be equally good at gauging men’s interest during an Indiana University study involving speed dating — and equally bad at judging women’s interest.

Researchers expected women to have a leg up in judging romantic interest, because theoretically they have more to lose from a bad relationship, but no such edge was found.

“The hardest-to-read women were being misperceived at a much higher rate than the hardest-to-read men. Those women were being flirtatious, but it turned out they weren’t interested at all,” said lead author Skyler Place, a doctoral student in IU’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences working with cognitive science Professor Peter Todd. “Nobody could really read what these deceptive females were doing, including other women.”

Place’s study, published in the January issue of the journal Psychological Science, focused on the ability of observers to judge romantic interest between others because this ability has evolutionary benefits when it comes to finding a mate. Decisions that other people around us make, said Place, can influence or inform our own choices.

“So, if you walk into a room and there’s 20 people you’ve never met before, being able to know which individuals might be available and which are clearly smitten by others can make you more efficient in finding your own romantic interest to pursue,” he said.

For the study, 28 women and 26 men of college age watched video clips of couples interacting on speed dates. Speed dating is a popular commercial method for singles to meet a large number of individuals in one evening of successive brief one-on-one conversations. Each participant observed 24 videos, all with different men and women, and after each rated whether the man seemed interested in the woman and the woman in the man.

The speed dating sessions were all conducted in Germany while the observer ratings were all made by students in Indiana. Despite the language difference, observers were still able to judge men’s romantic interest accurately using body language, tone of voice, eye contact, how often each dater spoke and other non-verbal cues.

“How people talk might convey more than what they say,” Place said.

Observers did not have to see much of this non-verbal behavior. They were just as good at predicting the speed-dating couple’s interest if they saw only 10 seconds of the date as they were if they saw 30 seconds. The researchers say this showed that observers, even with limited information, could make quick, accurate inferences using “thin slices” of behavior.

There was, however, great variability in how well observers could predict the interest of any particular speed-dater, ranging from 90 percent accuracy down to 10 percent. In five of the videos, 80 percent of the observers thought the women shown were interested when in fact they were not — they were acting friendly even though they had no interest in the men.

Evolutionary theory, said Place, predicts a certain level of coyness or even deceptiveness in women because if a relationship is abandoned they may face greater costs, including pregnancy and child rearing. When choosing a mate, it is in a woman’s best interest to get men to open up and talk honestly to give her a better idea of whether they would be good long-term partners.

“In a speed dating environment, you would expect to see these effects dramatically, with the women trying to get the men to be more straightforward, while they themselves remain more coy,” Place said. “Though the pace is faster than a typical first date, the strategy remains the same.”

Hormonal women are more responsive to manly men, and Kinsey Institute researchers have the brain scans to prove it.

Women participating in the Kinsey study were shown 224 photos of men’s faces, some of which had been “masculinized” or “feminized” using photo-morphing software. MRI scans revealed higher levels of brain response to the masculinized photos, particularly in women who were in the phase of their menstrual cycle immediately preceding ovulation and higher fertility.

The study, published this month in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, is the first to show differences in neural activation to masculinized and feminized faces. One of the areas of the brain most activated by the images, the anterior cingulated cortex, is involved in decision-making and assessment, which indicates that women are calculating the risks and rewards related to a man with high levels of testosterone.

“Because male traits generally thought to predict good condition and even genetic quality often coincide with less desirable characteristics, women must balance potentially disparate mating priorities,” writes Heather Rupp, who headed up the study. “For example, although men characterized by more masculine testosterone-linked traits may be socially dominant and physically healthy, they are also less likely to invest in offspring and to enter into a partnered relationship.”

In the battle of nurture vs. nature, however, ovulating women ultimately will choose in favor of genetically strong children. At other points in the menstrual cycle, the feminized faces are preferred, indicating a dip in certain hormones and a preference for men who are willing to stick around and play catch with Junior.

“As is true for most social behaviors, both biology and social influences impact the output of behavior, and likely interact,” Rupp told LiveScience.

In addition, Rupp and her colleagues asked the women — none of whom were on hormonal contraceptives — to subjectively rate the images, and discovered that scan results didn’t always match up with stated preference.

The finding is a nod to the complexity of sex, and the phenomenon of making up your mind without using your brain.

Men who are more sexually active in their 20s and 30s may run a higher risk of prostate cancer, research suggests.

The Nottingham University study quizzed 800 men on how often they had sex or masturbated.

Those who were most active while younger had more chance of developing cancer later in life.

The researchers said higher levels of sex hormones could lead to a bigger sex drive and the cancer, the journal BJU International reported.

How far into a pregnancy is it okay to have sex? Hilda Hutcherson, M.D., gynecologist and author of What Your Mother Never Told You About Sex, offers the following facts:

Fact #1: You can have sex until the baby’s ready to come out. (It’s probably best not to try for a quickie in the delivery room, though–you might poke the kid’s eye out. Har har.)

Fact #2: Unless your man has an STD, it’s fine for him to ejaculate inside you. (The baby will be none the wiser, trust us.)

Fact #3: Sex can send you into labor. (Beats drinking castor oil, we say.)

Fact #4: Men sometimes fear that their penis will bang against the baby’s head and give the baby brain damage. (Aren’t men the cutest?) “I always tell them, ‘You’re not that big. Nobody’s that big or that hard,’” says Hutcherson.

Fact #5: You should opt for positions wherein your man’s body weight isn’t on your belly. “Once a patient gets into her second trimester and her uterus extends up above her pubic bone, I tell her that, for comfort reasons, it’s best not to have full pressure on her abdomen during sex,” notes Hutcherson.

 1        Because people learn from their bad experiences, second marriages tend to be more successful than first marriages.

 Although many people who divorce have successful subsequent marriages, the divorce rate of remarriages is in fact higher than that of first marriages.¹

 2        Living together before marriage is a good way to reduce the chances of eventually divorcing.

 Many studies have found that those who live together before marriage have a considerably higher chance of eventually divorcing.  The reasons for this are not well understood.  In part, the type of people who are willing to cohabit may also be those who are more willing to divorce.  There is some evidence that the act of cohabitation itself generates attitudes in people that are more conducive to divorce, for example the attitude that relationships are temporary and easily can be ended.² 

 3        Divorce may cause problems for many of the children who are affected by it, but by and large these problems are not long lasting and the children recover relatively quickly.

Divorce increases the risk of interpersonal problems in children. There is evidence, both from small qualitative studies and from large-scale, long-term empirical studies, that many of these problems are long lasting.  In fact, they may even become worse in adulthood.³ 

 4        Having a child together will help a couple to improve their marital satisfaction and prevent a divorce.

 Many studies have shown that the most stressful time in a marriage is after the first child is born.  Couples who have a child together have a slightly decreased risk of divorce compared to couples without children, but the decreased risk is far less than it used to be when parents with marital problems were more likely to stay together “for the sake of the children.”⁴

Divorce

 5        Following divorce, the woman’s standard of living plummets by seventy three percent while that of the man’s improves by forty two percent.

 This dramatic inequity, one of the most widely publicized statistics from the social sciences, was later found to be based on a faulty calculation.  A reanalysis of the data determined that the woman’s loss was twenty seven percent while the man’s gain was ten percent. Irrespective of the magnitude of the differences, the gender gap is real and seems not to have narrowed much in recent decades.⁵  

 6        When parents don’t get along, children are better off if their parents divorce than if they stay together.

   A recent large-scale, long-term study suggests otherwise.  While it found that parents’ marital unhappiness and discord have a broad negative impact on virtually every dimension of their children’s well-being, so does the fact of going through a divorce. In examining the negative impacts on children more closely, the study discovered that it was only the children in very high conflict homes who benefited from the conflict removal that divorce may bring.  In lower-conflict marriages that end in divorce—and the study found that perhaps as many as two thirds of the divorces were of this type—the situation of the children was made much worse following a divorce. Based on the findings of this study, therefore, except in the minority of high-conflict marriages it is better for the children if their parents stay together and work out their problems than if they divorce.⁶  

 7        Because they are more cautious in entering marital relationships and also have a strong determination to avoid the possibility of divorce, children who grow up in a home broken by divorce tend to have as much success in their own marriages as those from intact homes.

 Marriages of the children of divorce actually have a much higher rate of divorce than the marriages of children from intact families.  A major reason for this, according to a recent study, is that children learn about marital commitment or permanence by observing their parents. In the children of divorce, the sense of commitment to a lifelong marriage has been undermined.⁷  

 8        Following divorce, the children involved are better off in stepfamilies than in single-parent families.

 The evidence suggests that stepfamilies are no improvement over single-parent families, even though typically income levels are higher and there is a father figure in the home.  Stepfamilies tend to have their own set of problems, including interpersonal conflicts with new parent figures and a very high risk of family breakup.⁸ 

 9    Being very unhappy at certain points in a marriage is a good sign that the marriage will eventually end in divorce.

 All marriages have their ups and downs.  Recent research using a large national sample found that eighty six percent of people who were unhappily married in the late 1980s, and stayed with the marriage, indicated when interviewed five years later that they were happier. Indeed, three fifths of the formerly unhappily married couples rated their marriages as either “very happy” or “quite happy.”⁹  

  10 It is usually men who initiate divorce proceedings

 Two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women.  One recent study found that many of the reasons for this have to do with the nature of our divorce laws.  For example, in most states women have a good chance of receiving custody of their children. Because women more strongly want to keep their children with them, in states where there is a presumption of shared custody with the husband the percentage of women who initiate divorces is much lower.¹⁰  

Also, the higher rate of women initiators is probably due to the fact that men are more likely to be “badly behaved.” Husbands, for example, are more likely than wives to have problems with drinking, drug abuse, and infidelity.

 Sources

¹ Joshua R. Goldstein, “The Leveling of Divorce in the United States” Demography36 (1999): 409-414;  Andrew Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)

² Alfred DeMaris and K. Vaninadha Rao, “Premartial Cohabitation and Marital Instability in the United States: A Reassessment” Journal of Marriage and the Family54 (1992): 178-190; Pamela J. Smock, “Cohabitation in the United States” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000)

³ Judith Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (New York: Hyperion, 2000); Andrew J. Cherlin, P. Lindsay Chase-Landsdale, and Christine McRae, “Effects of Parental Divorce on Mental Health Throughout the Life Course” American Sociological Review 63 (1998): 239-249; Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) 

⁴ Tim B. Heaton, “Marital Stability Throughout the Child-rearing Years” Demography27 (1990): 55-63; Linda Waite and Lee A. Lillard, “Children and Marital Disruption”American Journal of Sociology 96 (1991): 930-953; Carolyn Pape Cowan and Philip A. Cowan, When Partners Become Parents: The Big Life Change for Couples (New York: Basic Books, 1992) 

⁵ Leonore J. Weitzman, “The Economics of Divorce: Social and Economic Consequences of Property, Alimony, and Child Support Awards” UCLA Law Review28 (August, 1981): 1251; Richard R. Peterson, “A Re-Evaluation of the Economic Consequences of Divorce” American Sociological Review 61 (June, 1996): 528-536; Pamela J. Smock, “The Economic Costs of Marital Disruption for Young Women over the Past Two Decades” Demography 30 (August, 1993): 353-371

⁶ Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)

⁷ Paul R. Amato, “What Children Learn From Divorce” Population Today, (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, January 2001); Nicholas H. Wolfinger, “Beyond the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce” Journal of Family Issues 21-8 (2000): 1061-1086

⁸ Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Alan Booth and Judy Dunn (eds.),Stepfamilies: Who Benefits? Who Does Not? (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994)

⁹ Unpublished research by Linda J. Waite, cited in Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage (New York: Doubleday, 2000): 148 

¹⁰ Margaret F. Brinig and Douglas A. Allen, “’These Boots Are Made For Walking”: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women” American Law and Economics Review 2-1 (2000): 126-169 

Women are better at spotting a cute baby than men, according to a study.

Psychologists at St Andrews University discovered that women could determine a pretty baby instinctively by its chubby cheeks, big round eyes and button nose.

They used computer image manipulation to discover how subtle variations in attractiveness were picked up differently by the sexes.

The team suggests that cuteness sensitivity is affected by female reproductive hormones.

Babies on the Left are Deemed Cuter by Women...

The white marble bar of the Meatpacking District hot spot Bistro Bagatelle is littered with $500 Louis Vuitton knockoff clutches—fakes, but nice fakes. Hovering over them are the anxious blonde women (fakes, but nice fakes too) to whom the bags belong. These are Manhattan’s gold diggers—ladies of little means and big ambitions, who hope to use their looks to nab a rich man, better highlights and perhaps even a real Vuitton clutch. This bar is their mine. But in the middle of the worst financial crisis the city has faced since the Great Depression, there’s little gold in “them thar hills.”

The only thing missing on this Tuesday night in October is bankers. There are no scotches or whiskeys or hairy wrists wearing expensive watches resting on the bar. The few gents there are at Bagatelle are seated together, speaking in low, somber tones over plates of coquilles St. Jacques and bottles of Médoc. Three young Bulgarian women at the bar are getting restless. Sophie—23, blonde and a real estate broker—wears a cream cashmere sweater with a neckline that plunges like the Dow. Her friend Emilaya, 23, is a student at CUNY who resembles Scarlett Johansson. Their third friend, another beautiful Bulgarian, doesn’t speak English. It doesn’t matter. Three single Slavs, and still no one has approached them. Sophie sighs and sips her Pinot gris. “It’s getting harder and harder to find a good man,” she says. “Everyone is looking for handsome, rich and charming men but there are less and less of them to go around.” Since the financial markets started collapsing back in March, wealthy Prince Charmings, already an endangered species on the nightlife scene, have become almost completely extinct. The handsome ones aren’t charming, the charming ones aren’t handsome and many of the rich ones are now poor.

With a supply of supple honeys outstripping demand, men are now choosier and even more fickle than usual. Ted Morgan, co-author of How to Marry a Multi-Millionaire: The Ultimate Guide to High Net Worth Dating, says, “There is an increased sense of desperation among women about dating, and men can sense this.” Beggars, they figure, can’t be choosers. Stacey, a raven-haired IT engineer, is single but shouldn’t be. At any other time, in fact, she wouldn’t be. The 31-year-old, who boasts of dating a well-known reality star and a slew of high-net-worth individuals, is accustomed to dinners at Ono and Markt, Nicolas Feuillatte champagne by the jeroboam and—if indeed she did end the night in her own home—being chauffeured there in a hired Town Car. But, she says, those Sex and the City salad days are over. She complains, “It sucks to be a single girl right now”—in large part because strapped Wall Street guys are spending less on dates. A typical night out during these troubled times may still be at Buddakan, but it will just as likely be for wine at the bar rather than a table laden with $44 Peking duck. According to one 29-year-old trader who lives in Murray Hill, “We don’t have time or money to spend hundreds of dollars on a girl. If it’s a drink and it doesn’t go anywhere, well, at least I’m cutting back.”

Today, women drinking paid-for saketinis are among the lucky few. Staceys and Sophies all over the city—women who six months ago subsisted on a steady diet of underwritten dinners followed by a night of bottle service at Marquee or Rose Bar—are waiting for their Sidekicks to vibrate. Sophie is broken up about a recently pink-slipped relationship with a Lehman brother. “I was dating this guy for a couple of weeks,” she says, “and all of a sudden he just stopped calling me. For weeks, I waited. Finally he called. He had lost his job and was too ashamed to tell me.”

But all downturns have their upsides. Just as the Wall Street apocalypse has been a boon to short sellers—those who bet against the stock market—so too has the scarcity of marketable men been a boon to, well, men. In some ways, the slowdown has created space for true love to flourish. Win Hornig, 25, a former analyst for the now defunct Bear Stearns who pens the blog Banker Gone Broke, isn’t on the dating scene anymore. He met his girlfriend, a former Lehman Brothers analyst, through a mutual friend over a dinner at Country last month, when he still had a job but the market was cooling off. “If the market was busy, we would have never met. We both would have been at the office instead.” Win’s a winner, but today even losers can score. According to Ted, “You used to hear women say, ‘I’d never date anyone who makes less than $1 million.’ You don’t hear that anymore. The number is getting lower and lower and lower.” Stacey says now when she goes out on dates she asks herself, “Does this person have EP—earning potential? Even if he’s a janitor, I’d give him a chance.” But Stacey would do well to learn from the market. Trading in futures is risky business.

Scientists have found that the pleasure women get from making love is directly linked to the size of their partner’s bank balance.

They found that the wealthier a man is, the more frequently his partner has orgasms.

“Women’s orgasm frequency increases with the income of their partner,” said Dr Thomas Pollet, the Newcastle University psychologist behind the research.

He believes the phenomenon is an “evolutionary adaptation” that is hard-wired into women, driving them to select men on the basis of their perceived quality.

The study is certain to prove controversial, suggesting that women are inherently programmed to be gold-diggers.

However, it fits into a wider body of research known as evolutionary psychology which suggests that both men and women are genetically predisposed to ruthlessly exploit each other to achieve the best chances of survival for their genes.

The female orgasm is the focus of much research because it appears to have no reproductive purpose. Women can become pregnant whatever their pleasure levels.

Pollet, and Professor Daniel Nettle, his co-author, believed, however, that the female orgasm is an evolutionary adaptation that drives women to choose and retain high-quality partners.

He and Nettle tested that idea using data gathered in one of the world’s biggest lifestyle studies. The Chinese Health and Family Life Survey targeted 5,000 people across China for in-depth interviews about their personal lives, including questions about their sex lives, income and other factors. Among these were 1,534 women with male partners whose data was the basis for the study.

They found that 121 of these women always had orgasms during sex, while 408 more had them “often”. Another 762 “sometimes” orgasmed while 243 had them rarely or never. Such figures are similar to those for western countries.

There were of course, several factors involved in such differences but, said Pollet, money was one of the main ones.

He said: “Increasing partner income had a highly positive effect on women’s self-reported frequency of orgasm. More desirable mates cause women to experience more orgasms.”

This is not an effect limited to Chinese women. Previous research in Germany and America has looked at attributes such as body symmetry and attractiveness, finding that these are also linked with orgasm frequency. Money, however, seems even more important.

David Buss, professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, who raised this question in his book The Evolution of Desire believes female orgasms have several possible purposes.

“They could promote emotional bonding with a high-quality male or they could serve as a signal that women are highly sexually satisfied, and hence unlikely to seek sex with other men,” he said. “What those orgasms are saying is ‘I’m extremely loyal, so you should invest in me and my children’.”