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How weird is this?  Depending on whether someone wants to have a romantic relationship with you, or just a friendship, it all has to do with one part of the body rather than another. No, I'm not talking about those parts. According to a new study,  heterosexual men and women look at the head or chest of an opposite-sex person longer and more often when evaluating dating potential, compared with possible friendship.  But both men and women look at legs or feet with greater frequency when they made platonic rather than sexual judgments, newswise.com reports. While -- here comes the boring part -- we've always thought that attraction hinges on a fixed set of characteristics that makes a person desirable, this new study shows that what people look for in a prospective relationship partner depends on their "relational" goals . And here it comes, the big finale.  "The same person who makes a highly desirable friend may not make a good mate,” says  Angela Bah...

Uh oh.  Didn't see this coming. Did you know opposites attract -- except in a relationship? According to a new study, turns out, when you're in a relationship, you're more likely to find someone who looks like you more attractive. My husband and I are certainly opposites.  He stands 6'1" to my less than 5'2".  (I used to have to stand on a chair arm to kiss him when we first started dating.  Now we're old married parents.  Need I say more?) If we are in a relationship we are more likely to be attracted to faces resembling our own, but for single people, opposites attract, newswise.com reports.  Relationship status affects who and what we find attractive, found a study published in Frontiers in Psychology . Dr Jitka Lindová of Charles University in the Czech Republic and her team showed a series of photographs of faces to university students and asked them to rate their attractiveness. The photographs were digitally manipulated so that t...

How depressing. A new study shows that the closer people who had been separated by distance get to each other, the more likely they will not be attracted to the other person. Apparently, distance equals attraction. Now my husband and I were GU (geographically undesirable) for about 10 years, with him living and working in Queens and me here in Connecticut.  He came up every weekend and on Thursday nights but it wasn't until we started living together that, I won't say he got less attractive.  But some of the mystery was gone, especially when I was picking up his dirty socks off the floor. According to newswise.com, what people believe they want and what they might actually prefer are not always the same thing. And the difference between genuine affinity and apparent desirability becomes clearer as the distance between two people gets smaller. Qualities admired in another person from far away may appear threatening as they get closer, the web site reports. For e...

Uh oh.  A new study has found people are hard-wired to fall out of love and move into new romantic relationships. “Our review of the literature suggests we have a mechanism in our brains designed by natural selection to pull us through a very tumultuous time in our lives,” says Brian Boutwell, Ph.D., associate professor of criminology and criminal justice and associate professor of epidemiology at Saint Louis University. “It suggests people will recover; the pain will go away with time. There will be a light at the end of the tunnel.” As anyone who has endured a break-up knows, some break-ups take more time than others.  I didn't have a lot of serious relationships in my life (I met my husband in my late 20's), but they didn't all end the way I wanted and some of them certainly required much more time to recover (I remember, after one break-up, going running and as I circled the gym, realizing, well, I got through one minute.) Drawing largely upon the field of ...

Admit it. That low sexy voice gets you every time. And it's just been proved by a new study that's found that "men with low-pitched voices have an advantage in attracting women, even though women know they’re not likely to stick around for long," according to newswise.com. But for the men, maybe not so much, really. While researchers at McMaster University discovered that women were more attracted to men with masculine voices, at least for short-term relationships, "those men were also seen as more likely to cheat and unsuitable for a longer relationship, such as marriage." "The sound of someone’s voice can affect how we think of them,” newswise.com quotes Jillian O’Connor, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and lead author of the study. Isn't it always a shock when a woman with a tight, whiny voice turns out to be a lookalike for Sofia Vergara? Or, a man with a deep, booming voice is really ...

Did you know that men who sweat together play well together, too?  A new study has confirmed that something in a man's perspiration can entice other men to be more cooperative and generous, according to a story by David Worthington. "Men with higher testosterone levels are more susceptible to suggestion from their clammy compatriots," he writes at smartplanet.com. It's hormones, a Finnish study has found, according to Worthington, and it's one I've never heard of: androstadienone.  Apparently this pheromone influences male decision-making behavior, Worthington reports. Studies are underway to see if this hormone can also determine whether “an attractive and dominant male can be a valuable potential mating partner for a female,” or a “competitor for another male." Worthington relates. We know pheromones as the "sex" hormone but it looks like it has other uses, too. At one time, it was thought that women were attracted to men's sweat ...