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Friday, August 14, 2015

Not Everybody Likes Kissing

The music swells. On-screen, the two main characters' eyes meet. They lean in, and — slowly! — their lips gently press in a romantic kiss. All the teenage girls in the audience exhale audibly.

Such on-screen behavior seems romantic if you were raised in a culture that practices romantic kissing. But that type of culture may not be the majority. In a studypublished this month in American Anthropologist, researchers propose that romantic kissing isn't something everybody does; in fact, not even half the cultures surveyed lock lips in romance.

Scientists have at least a couple of ideas about why we kiss people we are attracted to. We might be doing it to evaluate a potential mate, evolutionary biologists say, or to maintain a bond, or to arouse the other person. Kissing behaviors have been observed in chimpanzees and bonobos, though how romantic the animals were feeling at the time is unknown.

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Obama kisses A$$ because he loves to disrespect the office of the President to foreign diplomats and leaders. He also likes the taste of it better than kissing the ugly fat pig he is married to.

Anonymous said...

Boy, that comment took a left turn.

Anonymous said...

4:17 so true! Obama will kiss @ss to any leader to get a nuclear treaty, a trade deal, a Nobel Prize, a Muslim released.