Hot MedFax

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 ...

This is a little spooky.  A new study has found that love can sometimes make us mean . Say what? The study found that, under certain circumstances, feelings of warmth, tenderness and sympathy can in fact predict aggressive behaviors, according to a recent study by two University at Buffalo researchers.  Love and compassion go hand-in-hand, or do they?  The study attempted to find out. It turns out it’s not about anger or feeling personally threatened, says study author Michael J. Poulin.  Apparently, it's all about hormones that lead to increased "approach behaviors," says Poulin, a professor of psychology, according to newswise.com.  “People are motivated by social approach or getting closer to others.” But Poulin adds that people approach one another for many reasons, including aggression, so it stands to reason that if compassion is linked to the action of these hormones and these hormones are linked to social approach behaviors, they might ...

Want to now if a person is interested in you romantically -- or sexually? His eyes will first focus on your face if he thinks he might fall in love, but if he's more attracted than searching for a relationship, it will be your body.  Duh. But think about it.  A new study has found that it all happens in the blink of an eye, when you first meet someone, according to newswise.com.  The new study found that eye patterns concentrate on a stranger’s face if the viewer sees that person as a potential partner in romantic love, but the viewer gazes more at the other person’s body if he or she is feeling sexual desire. That automatic judgment can occur in as little as half a second, producing different gaze patterns.  “Although little is currently known about the science of love at first sight or how people fall in love, these patterns of response provide the first clues regarding how automatic attentional processes, such as eye gaze, may differentiate feelin...

You've heard the expression, every cloud has a silver lining?  Well, how about every silver lining has a cloud? A new study has found that the very same hormone that helps us love also helps us lie. Say what?   Oxytocin - the "love" hormone produced by the body to encourage bonding - may also help us to lie -- but here's the silver lining.  To the benefit of our group. Oxytocin -- which has sometimes been confused (at least by me) for oxycodone, a way to curb pain (and get high) --   has been demonstrated in research as "promoting bonding in couples and between mothers and babies, and is also thought to drive people's impulse to be sociable," according to medicalnewtoday.com. The more oxytocin a person has, the more empathy and trust they will have, as well as lower social  anxiety  and fear response. Oxytocin can also stimulate aggression, if it is required for reasons of defense, medicalnewstoday reports. Oxytocin can also keep men monoga...

Who thinks about their brains when falling in love?  But a new study has found the actual part of the brain that makes decisions about whether we want to spend the rest of our lives with someone. According to newswise.com, t he finding, made in an examination of a 48-year-old man who suffered a stroke, provides the first causal clinical evidence that an area of the brain called the anterior insula “plays an instrumental role in love,” said UChicago neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo, lead author of the study. " In this study, the patient made decisions normally about lust but showed slower reaction times when making decisions about love, in contrast to neurologically typical participants matched on age, gender and ethnicity," the Web site reports. “This distinction has been interpreted to mean that desire is a relatively concrete representation of sensory experiences, while love is a more abstract representation of those experiences,” said Cacioppo, a research associate...

OK, so it's Valentine's Day soon.  So let's talk about falling in love, and what it does to you physically. "Falling in love causes our body to release a flood of feel-good chemicals that trigger specific physical reactions," said Pat Mumby, PhD, co-director of the Loyola Sexual Wellness Clinic and professor, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Neurosciences, Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine (SSOM) at newswise.com. "This internal elixir of love is responsible for making our cheeks flush, our palms sweat and our hearts race." Levels of these substances, which include dopamine, adrenaline and norepinephrine, increase when two people fall in love. Dopamine creates feelings of euphoria while adrenaline and norepinephrine are responsible for the pitter-patter of the heart, and Otherrestlessness and overall preoccupation that go along with experiencing love.  MRI scans indicate that love lights up the pleasure center of the brain...

Wouldn't it be nice if we all could not only "just get along," but love everyone? Stephen Asma, professor of philosophy at Columbia College, says universal love is a myth, according to a story by Christie Nicholson at smartplanet.com. She notes that he affirmed this in a   recent New York Times article , “All people are not equally entitled to my time, affection, resources or moral duties," he said in the article. Ansa told Nicholson tha the idea of universal love has been used for ill, not good, using as examples the Soviet Union and Mao's China, where " even family bias was bad and should be broken and subjugated to this universal love." Nicholson reported on Ansa's belief that love and expressions of it are finite. In fact, Ansa postulates that care is more a biological affect than an emotional one, according to Nicholson. All mammals experience it. "Caring for somebody is a lot like sprint racing," Ansa told Nicholson. You h...