THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYswathe of brain regions, perhaps reflecting an abrupt loss of inhibition.
Other research on the female orgasm has found that it blocks pain whilst
simultaneously increasing sensitivity to touch.
Other psychologists have investigated what turns people on in the first
place. A widely-reported study by Meredith Chivers, now at Queens Univer-
sity in Canada, found that straight women are more aroused by what they
see people (or animals) doing, whereas men, gay and straight, are more
concerned by gender. Participants watched videos featuring gay male sex,
gay female sex, straight sex, solitary masturbation, people performing exer-
cises in the nude and sex between bonobos. Subjective and physiological
measures of arousal showed that, overall, all the participants were most
turned on by sex and least turned on by watching nude people exercise.
However, clear gender-differences also emerged, such as that the
straight women didn’t care much about the gender of who they were
watching: it was what they were doing that mattered (although gay
women were more selective and were unaroused by men). The female
participants even showed some arousal in response to the mating
bonobos. In contrast, men were particularly excited when the video
matched their sexual orientation – gay men being most titillated by the
sight of other men, straight men by the sight of straight women.
Another study by Chivers looked at the results from dozens of previous
experiments to see how much correspondence there was between
people’s subjective reports of their sexual arousal and physiological
measures of their genitals. This showed that men have a consistently
greater correspondence than do women between how they feel and what
their body is doing. The research was inconclusive, but one reason could
simply be that getting an erection makes it easy for men to know when
they are sexually aroused.
Ways to stay together
If all these facts about kissing and orgasms aren’t enough to motivate
you to stay with your husband or wife (perhaps they’ve tempted you
to find a new lover), you would do well to heed the findings of a 2006
epidemiological study which showed that having a spouse can prolong
your life. A follow-up survey of nearly 67,000 people interviewed in 1989
revealed that 5,876 (8.8 percent) had died before 1997. Analysing the data,
and controlling for age, health and socioeconomic factors, Robert Kaplan
and Richard Kronick of the University of California discovered that the
death rate among those people who had never married was 58 percent