CAMDEN, NJ — People who feel “chemistry” in another’s embrace or kiss may be literally correct, scientists at Rutgers University say. Even a caress can release endorphins — feel-good hormones — but sloppy kisses are particularly powerful sexual triggers, especially for men.“Men like sloppier kisses with more open mouth, and that suggests to me that they are unconsciously trying to transfer testosterone to trigger the sex drive in women,” Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the biology of attraction, told a gaggle of reporters gathered for a press conference during a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fisher added that overly sloppy kisses just as easily can close the door on relationships before they get started.
“Should you drool more? You don’t want to turn off your partner,” she warned.
According to Fisher, physiology underlies the mechanics of kissing. Men’s and women’s styles are driven by biological imperatives and gender shortcomings. Men have poorer senses of taste and smell than women, hence their preference for sloppier kisses may be an attempt to overcome an evolutionary deficit, Fisher said.
“What [men] might be doing is trying to pick up the estrogen cycle in a woman to figure out the degree of her fertility,” she postulated.
Though MRIs indicate kissing stimulates an enormous part of the brain, adding love into the equation compounds the effect, Fisher noted.
MRIs revealed “people who had recently fallen in love had high levels of activity in the reward system in the brain that produces dopamine and is linked to craving, motivation, focused attention and goal-oriented behavior,” she said. “Rejected people showed a great deal of activity in several areas directly associated with addiction.”
MRIs also indicated extra stimulation in a region of the brain susceptible to serotonin — a calming chemical — and oxytocin, which is known to produce pair-bonding and lower stress hormones in humans and animals.
In another study, Lafayette College neuroscience professor Wendy Hill discovered women’s levels of oxytocin actually dropped after test subjects spent 15 minutes either kissing or holding hands and talking with a male partner.
She said the surprising result may have been due to a lack of romantic atmosphere in the college health center where the study was performed.
“We’re running the tests again in a more romantic setting,” Hill said. “It’s a secluded room in an academic building. It has a couch, it has flowers, it has candles — electric because of fire-hazard issues — and we have light jazz playing.”
