Month: August 2018

By Emma Young

Scent plays an often under-appreciated role in sexual attraction, helping to account for why visual attractiveness alone can’t explain just how physically attractive a person is perceived to be. But what role does our ability to smell our partners – or potential partners – play in actual experience? 

We know from past research that men born without the ability to smell tend to have fewer sexual partners. And about half of people who lose their sense of smell, through infection or injury, report negative impacts on their sexual behaviour. However, this could be an indirect effect – an inability to smell is often also associated with depression or social insecurity, which can affect aspects of sexuality – and such studies do not tell us whether sense of smell is related to sexual experience among healthy people. Now, in a new paper in Archives of Sexual Behavior, Johanna Bendas at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, and her fellow researchers report evidence from healthy, young adults showing precisely that.

The researchers studied 42 women and 28 men aged between 18 and 36. They found that there was no relationship between their odour sensitivity (measured using a test that establishes how much of a smelly chemical must be present for the individual to be able to detect it) and either sexual desire or sexual performance (defined as how many times they’d engaged in sexual activity during the previous month and how long, on average, a sexual encounter had lasted).

However, people with a keener sense of smell reported finding their sexual activities more “pleasant”, and women with a greater sensitivity to odours had more orgasms during sex. 

“Our data suggest a positive influence of olfactory sensitivity on the sex life of young and healthy participants,” the researchers write. “The perception of body odors such as vaginal fluids, sperm and sweat seems to enrich the sexual experience” by increasing sexual arousal, they add.

There are some limitations to the study, including the correlational design which means other unknown factors might be playing a causal role. Also, while the researchers did control for the use of hormonal contraception in the women, they didn’t consider the stage of menstrual cycle of the female volunteers at the time of the study – something that is known to influence olfaction. Future research in this area should take this into account, and could further explore the influence of specific odours. “The direct measurement of sexual arousal or experience will give further insight into the assumption that olfactory sensitivity improves sexual experience,” the researchers write.

—Olfactory Function Relates to Sexual Experience in Adults 

Emma Young (@EmmaELYoung) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest

 

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By Christian Jarrett

The idea that some of us experience “imposter syndrome” was first mooted in the 1970s by two US clinical psychologists who noticed the preponderance of high-achieving women who felt they had somehow cheated or fluked their way to success and feared being found out. Research on the syndrome has since exploded and it’s become clear that many men also experience similar fraudulent feelings. In fact, in their new exploratory paper in Personality and Individual Differences, a team of US and German researchers claim that, under pressure, imposter syndrome may hit men harder than women, triggering more anxiety and worse performance – a difference they speculate may be due to traditional gender norms that place a greater expectation on men to be competent.

Rebecca Badawy and her colleagues recruited hundreds of female and male undergrads studying communication or business in northeastern USA. They measured their levels of imposter syndrome with an established scale that includes items like “Sometimes I’m afraid others will discover how much knowledge or ability I really lack”.

In one study, the researchers gave the students two sets of five verbal and numerical Graduate Record Exam questions (the GRE is used in the US to select students for graduate programmes). After the first set of questions, the researchers ramped up the pressure for half the students, giving them fake feedback that stated they had answered all of the first five questions incorrectly.

Although imposter feelings were overall higher among women, this harsh feedback seemed to especially affect male students with high imposter feelings – they reported higher anxiety, made less effort (as measured by time taken on the task), and showed a trend towards poorer performance, as compared to others given positive feedback. In contrast, female students with high imposter feelings responded to harsh feedback by increasing their effort and showing superior performance.

It was similar in a second study in which heightened pressure was placed on half the students by telling them that their results on five Graduate Record Exam questions would be shown to a professor on their course (the researchers called this a “high accountability” situation). In this context, men with higher imposter syndrome scores again showed increased anxiety, reduced effort and a tendency toward worse performance, as compared with others who were told their scores would be shown anonymously to a stranger. In contrast, women with imposter feelings were largely unaffected (in terms of anxiety, effort or performance) by the increased accountability situation.

The increase in anxiety, and reduction in effort, shown by men with imposter feelings could be interpreted as reflecting their fear of being found out, combined with a “self-handicapping” strategy – reducing their effort so that they can use this as an excuse to explain the poor performance that they are anticipating.

“Assuming that traditional gender norms hold, males [with imposter syndrome] may have exhibited  stronger negative reactions because they believe that society at large values males who demonstrate high competence and at the same time, do not believe that they can fulfil this standard,” the researchers said.

In contrast, the women with imposter feelings appeared less sensitive to the negative feedback and expectation of review by a professor – if anything, they arguably responded to negative feedback in an adaptive way by increasing their effort. The researchers linked this with the traditional cultural expectation that women should be warm rather than competent.  “Being less constrained by gender norm violations and backlash (i.e. they were already expected to perform poorly on competence-based tasks like exam questions), females [with imposter feelings] may have felt freer to attempt to improve their performance (and risk failure) rather than excusing it with lack of time or effort invested,” they said.

It’s hard to know if and how these findings might relate to real-world situations in an  academic setting or workplace. Badawy and her team admit their findings are exploratory and may not generalise. In particular, if their explanation based around gender norms is accurate, one can imagine these norms might vary not just across international cultures, but even between different sub-cultures in the same country – depending, for instance, on the specific gender-based attitudes, beliefs and pressures in different occupations.

These issues aside, Badawy and her colleagues suggest their key finding – of particular male vulnerability to imposter syndrome under pressure – may have practical implications for managers. “If managers of organisational specialists observe evidence of imposter syndrome in male workers currently performing at high levels, they may benefit from making attempts to restore those workers’ sense of agency if they are placed under high accountability situations,” they said. They added that mentoring by professors or managers, skills training and stretch assignments could be potential beneficial strategies (find more ways to combat imposter syndrome in this 99U article). However, they warned these will only work “if mentors are trained to down regulate their own gender role expectations”.

—Are all impostors created equal? Exploring gender differences in the impostor phenomenon-performance link

Christian Jarrett (@Psych_Writer) is Editor of BPS Research Digest

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By Alex Fradera

The average young adult sends more than 100 texts per day, mainly to offer social support to friends and family. But until now, there has been little evidence whether it helps the recipient or not. New research in Computers in Human Behavior confirms that sending a comforting text to a partner confronted with a difficult task really can make them feel supported. But more surprisingly, the study suggests that to actually reduce their stress, it’s better to send a message that isn’t explicitly supportive.

Emily Hooker and colleagues from the University of California asked 75 women to attempt a stressful set of tasks involving mental mathematics and public speaking. At the start of the experiment they were fitted with a blood pressure cuff to capture information about blood flow and heart rate. While waiting to perform, some participants received texts from their romantic partner who was waiting in the other room. Crucially, some of the partners sent texts (scripted by the researchers) that were comforting (e.g. “Don’t worry. It’s just a psych study. You’ll be fine.”) whereas others sent more mundane texts that were not explicitly supportive (e.g. “It’s cold in here.”). Participants also received a second reinforcing text with the same tone as the first (i.e. either supportive or mundane) while they prepared for their challenge (other participants acted as a baseline control group and received no texts at any point). 

After delivering the task, participants who’d earlier received a comforting text reported feeling more supported by their partner (compared with the controls). However, it was only those participants who’d earlier received mundane texts who showed a physical reduction in their stress response, as shown by lower systolic blood pressure during preparation and the task itself. 

There is evidence that attempts to support other people that give the impression of social evaluation – “I can see that you’re struggling” – are ineffective at reducing stress, and Hooker’s team conjecture that the supportive texts, by making direct references to the stressful tasks, may have inadvertently triggered this effect, although this was not explicitly tested for in the study. If so, it adds to research suggesting that “invisible” support – like offering unrelated humour – can be one of the more effective forms of reducing stress through social support. In this case, simply the reminder that the boyfriend was next door, grumbling about the cold, affirmed that the person was not alone, and could receive comfort or validation should that be needed (e.g. if the stressful event went badly).

This finding certainly needs follow-up research to figure out what are the ingredients in different forms of text-based social contact to affect how we feel. It’s worth noting that the effect of the mundane messages also involved a slower recovery to blood pressure baseline than the supportive text or the control condition. So it may be that different kinds of messages can have selective effects on different phases of the stress response. Studies have begun to show downsides of heavy texting use, such as school performance and sleep, although in many cases these may be confounded by use of mobile phones in general. It’s useful, then, to see evidence of something many of us assume and hope for – that contact with loved ones via text can provide them with a sense of being supported during stressful events.

—It just takes a text: Partner text messages can reduce cardiovascular responses to stress in females

Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is Staff Writer at BPS Research Digest

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