once again the onna is posting for the rat...

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http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1007888.htm
Men can't help acting on impulse

Psychologists have for the first time measured what advertisers long ago realised. Men are more likely to act impulsively when they see pictures of attractive women, according to a new study.

The result suggested that short-lived social cues are more likely to lead to impulsive and short-sighted behaviour than previously thought, said Dr Margo Wilson and Dr Martin Daly, psychologists at Canada's McMaster University.

But they were not sure why: "We hypothesise that viewing pictures of pretty women was mildly arousing, activating neural mechanisms associated with cues of sexual opportunity," they wrote today in the Royal Society of London journal Biology Letters.

Researchers already knew that men, more than women, generally tend to "discount the future", or value immediate rewards over future ones.

Evolutionary psychologists have argued that Darwinian selection has encouraged this gender difference because men have more to gain in an evolutionary sense by taking immediate sexual opportunities. Women's longer view reflects their much greater personal investment as parents.

Wilson and Daly recreated a "mating opportunity" mindset in men, by exposing them to images of desirable women. They then tested whether that influenced the rate at which they discounted the future.

They recruited about 200 psychology students, roughly equal numbers of young men and women. They then divided them into groups, asked them to make various monetary choices and view either pictures of people of the opposite sex or of cars.

The pictures were selected from a website where users post photographs of people and rate them for their attractiveness, "hot" or "not".

The researchers showed different test groups photographs rated from both categories and asked the study participants to rate them for attractiveness. The subjects' ratings broadly tallied with those from the website.

The people in the study also made monetary choices before and after they looked at the pictures.

The results showed a clear difference. Men who were shown "hot" women were then much more likely to choose an option that offered the chance to win a cheque for US$15 to $35 dated the day after the test, rather than a larger cheque for US$50 to $75 dated seven to 236 days into the future.

This elevated discounting rate wasn't apparent in the other test groups, suggesting that it was specific to men and to sexually arousing images.

Daly and Wilson have a long-standing interest in future discounting, noting that criminal offenders have "relatively short time horizons", as do poor people and young people.

Such behaviour may not deserve pejorative labelling with terms such as "myopia" and "impulsivity", they argued. It more likely reflected an understandable degree of future discounting related to their life circumstances.

Birds and bees do it

They also pointed out instances in the natural world where cues that predict future events, such as a closing window of seasonal opportunity in feeding or mating, can influence animal behaviour.

Worker bees, for example, tend to take more high-risk foraging opportunities as their wings become worn or when they have infectious diseases that reduce their life expectancy. And male scorpionflies become less choosy about the females they court as their mating season progresses.

"For similar reasons, cues promising relatively good returns on present efforts should inspire allocations of effort that effectively discount the future relatively steeply," the report said.

"If availability of courtship-worthy targets inspires an escalation of present mating effort, for example, this must typically be achieved at the expense of future efforts."

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http://channels.netscape.com/ns/men/package.jsp?name=fte/prettywomen/prettywomen
Pretty Women Make Men Stupid!

Women have known this since the beginning of time. Now psychologists at McMaster University in Canada have figured it out, too. A beautiful woman can make a guy stupid.

According to New Scientist, pretty women scramble men's ability to assess the future. Scientifically, it's known as "discounting the future." Seen frequently in animals, it means preferring an immediate, lesser reward to a greater reward in the future.

Here's an example: If someone offered to give you $10,000 now or the same amount five years from now, you would choose to take the money today because there is no value in waiting. But if someone were to offer you $10,000 today or $50,000 in five years, you would probably opt to wait for the higher amount. This is called "rational discounting." If you were to take the $10,000 today, it's called "irrational discounting."

The study: McMaster University researchers Margo Wilson and Martin Daly wanted to find out if sexual mood influenced discounting behavior. They showed 209 male and female students pictures of attractive and not-so-attractive people of the opposite sex. Each was then offered a chance to win a prize. They could accept a check for between $15 and $35 tomorrow or one for $50 to $75 at some point in the future.

The results for the men: After a man viewed pictures of women who were of average attractiveness, they made a rational decision about the prize money and accepted the larger amount to be received in the future. But when they had just seen pictures of beautiful women, they discounted the future value of the reward in an irrational way and opted instead for the immediate and smaller cash outlay. In other words, after seeing a very attractive woman, the men were more likely to make dumb choices.

The results for the women: Viewing the photographs of men--whether they were sexy hunks or just run-of-the-mill guys--had no effect on women's ability to make rational decisions.

Why the difference? Wilson and Daly don't know, but they suspect that viewing pictures of pretty women is mildly arousing for men. If that's the case, it would activate neural mechanisms associated with cues of sexual opportunity. Tommaso Pizzari, an evolutionary biologist at Leeds University, offered another possible explanation to New Scientist: "If there's the prospect of getting a very attractive partner it may pay a man to take more risks than if an average partner was available."

The research findings were published in the journal Biology Letters.