Effects of a 7-Day Pornography Abstinence Period on Withdrawal-Related Symptoms in Regular Pornography Users

Effects of a 7-Day Pornography Abstinence Period on Withdrawal-Related Symptoms in Regular Pornography Users: A Randomized Controlled Study. David P. Fernandez, Daria J. Kuss, Lucy V. Justice, Elaine F. Fernandez & Mark D. Griffiths. Archives of Sexual Behavior, Jan 18 2023. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02519-w

Abstract: Little is known about whether withdrawal-like symptoms manifest when regular pornography users attempt to abstain from pornography. The present study used a randomized controlled design to examine whether (1) negative abstinence effects that may be potentially reflective of withdrawal-related symptoms manifest when a non-clinical sample of regular pornography users attempt to abstain from pornography for a 7-day period and (2) these negative abstinence effects would only manifest (or manifest more strongly) for those with higher levels of problematic pornography use (PPU). A total of 176 undergraduate students (64.2% female) who were regular pornography users (defined as having used pornography ≥ three times a week in the past 4 weeks) were randomly assigned to an abstinence group (instructed to attempt abstinence from pornography for 7 days, n = 86) or a control group (free to watch pornography as usual, n = 90). Participants completed measures of craving, positive and negative affect, and withdrawal symptoms at baseline and each night of the 7-day period. Contrary to the confirmatory hypotheses, there were no significant main effects of group (abstinence vs. control) or group × PPU interaction effects on any of the outcome measures, controlling for baseline scores. These findings indicate that no evidence of withdrawal-related symptoms was found for abstaining participants, and this was not dependent on level of PPU. However, exploratory analyses showed a significant three-way interaction (group × PPU × past 4-week frequency of pornography use [FPU]) on craving, where an abstinence effect on craving was found at high levels of PPU only once past 4-week FPU reached the threshold of daily use. While these exploratory findings should be interpreted with caution, they suggest that abstinence effects could potentially manifest when there is a combination of high PPU and high FPU—a hypothesis that warrants investigation in future prospective abstinence studies.

Discussion

The present study used a randomized controlled design to examine whether (1) negative abstinence effects potentially reflective of withdrawal-related symptoms manifest when regular pornography users (defined in the present study as having used pornography ≥ three times a week in the past four weeks) try to abstain from pornography for a 7-day period and (2) these negative abstinence effects only manifest (or manifest more strongly) for those with higher levels of PPU.

Confirmatory Analyses

The results showed that both confirmatory hypotheses (H₁ and H₂) were not supported. Contrary to the first hypothesis, there were no significant main effects of group (abstinence vs. control) on craving, negative affect, positive affect or withdrawal symptoms during the experimental period, controlling for baseline scores. This indicates that when assessed prospectively in comparison with a non-abstaining control group, no evidence of withdrawal-related symptoms was found for the abstaining participants in this sample. This finding is in contrast to previous cross-sectional research relying on retrospective self-report that found 72.2% of pornography users who had at least one past pornography abstinence attempt recalled experiencing at least one withdrawal-like symptom upon cessation (Dwulit & Rzymski, 2019).

The second hypothesis that negative abstinence effects during the experimental period would only manifest (or manifest more strongly) for those with higher levels of PPU was also not supported, as there were no significant group × PPU interaction effects on all outcome measures. Nonetheless, it is important to interpret this finding in light of the fact that because this was a non-clinical sample of regular pornography users, the range of scores on the PPCS was relatively low [M = 54.72, SD = 18.60, with only 15.3% of the sample having PPCS scores that met or exceeded the suggested clinical cutoff of ≥ 76 in Bőthe et al. (2018)]. This finding does not rule out the possibility that in a sample with higher levels of PPU, moderating effects of PPU might be observed.

An unexpected finding was that both negative affect and withdrawal symptoms decreased over the experimental period for both abstinence and control groups. This decrease appeared to be indicative of the “downward drift” phenomenon (see Gilbert et al., 2019, p. 538), which is the tendency for participants to report progressively fewer negative affect-related symptoms when tested repeatedly, regardless of assignment to treatment or control. This phenomenon has been observed in studies of abstinence from cigarette smoking (Gilbert et al., 2002) and gaming (Evans et al., 2018) and also non-abstinence-related studies (e.g., Sharpe & Gilbert, 1998). While multiple explanations have been proposed for the phenomenon (Arrindell, 2001; Sharpe & Gilbert, 1998), one plausible explanation is that repeated testing (in the present study, the daily surveys) acts as an intervention that facilitates self-monitoring of negative affect and possibly coping mechanisms to deal with the negative affect. This finding further underscores the importance of including a non-abstaining control group in future prospective abstinence studies, as decreases in negative affective symptoms over time by abstaining participants could easily be misattributed to abstinence.

Exploratory Analyses

Importantly, exploratory analyses provided partial support for the possibility that the null findings observed in the confirmatory analyses could have been the result of not accounting for the moderating effects of a third variable (i.e., past 4-week FPU). The majority of the sample (61.4%) reported past 4-week FPU on the lower end of the spectrum (i.e., three or four times a week), in large part contributed to by the large proportion of female participants in the sample (64.2%) most of whom also reported past 4-week FPU of three or four times a week (77.0%). Consistent with past research (Chen et al., 2018; Grubbs et al., 2019c; Weinstein et al., 2015), female participants in this sample had lower baseline rates of FPU, PPU and craving than male participants. Therefore, the possibility that abstinence effects might only manifest at higher levels of FPU was examined in exploratory models with past 4-week FPU added as a moderator and gender controlled for as a covariate.

A significant three-way group × PPU × past 4-week FPU interaction on craving was found, but past 4-week FPU did not play a significant moderating role in the negative affect, positive affect and withdrawal symptoms models. At high levels of PPU (+ 1 SD), the control group had higher craving scores than the abstinence group over the experimental period when past 4-week FPU was “three times a week,” but inversely the abstinence group had higher craving scores than the control group over the experimental period when past 4-week FPU was “once a day” or “more than once a day.” Notably, this indicates that there was an abstinence effect on craving when PPU was high, but only once past 4-week FPU reached the threshold of daily use. It is noteworthy that this effect was found even though high PPU at + 1 SD (i.e., M = 72.82) in this sample did not reach the clinical cutoff of ≥ 76 specified in Bőthe et al. (2018). This finding is similar to a previous cross-sectional survey of undergraduates in Canada that found an increase in addiction-related symptomatology once FPU reached the threshold of daily use (Harper & Hodgins, 2016). It is uncertain as to why the abstinence group reported significantly lower craving than the control group at high levels of PPU and past 4-week FPU of ‘three times a week,’ but one speculative explanation could be that abstaining participants below a specific threshold of FPU (i.e., three times a week) due to lower habit strength (Sirriani & Vishwanath, 2016) had enough self-regulation such that they were able to successfully implement strategies to regulate their experience of craving (e.g., prevent its occurrence or reduce its intensity whenever it did emerge) to help them achieve the abstinence goal.

There are two possible interpretations of the abstinence effect on craving under high PPU and high FPU conditions that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. First, if negative abstinence effects are interpreted within an addiction framework as withdrawal-related symptoms, then craving could potentially be a withdrawal symptom in PPU. High FPU on its own (without high PPU) may be indicative of preoccupation with pornography that may not be associated with negative life consequences (Bőthe et al., 2020a, 2020b), but the fact that craving manifested for those with daily or more FPU only when PPU was high reinforces the idea that abstinence-induced craving could be reflective of a dependency on pornography and potentially a withdrawal symptom (if a pornography withdrawal syndrome exists). This interpretation would be consistent with a finding from a recent systematic review that craving was the most common abstinence effect across multiple potential behavioral addictions (Fernandez et al., 2020). Second, craving could also have been a manifestation of sexual desire and/or arousal during the experimental period. Because higher baseline rates of FPU could have to some extent been reflective of higher sexual drive (Leonhardt et al., 2021), the fact that craving only manifested for those with high PPU when FPU was daily or more supports the sexual desire explanation. If participants’ primary sexual outlet was masturbating to pornography, then urges to use pornography could be a natural manifestation of sexual desire and/or arousal throughout the deprivation period (Castro-Calvo et al., 2022). The fact that an abstinence effect was found for craving and not the other outcome variables (i.e., positive affect, negative affect and withdrawal symptoms) further lends support to this non-pathological interpretation, because affect-related disturbances would arguably be expected to also be present if an actual withdrawal syndrome exists. At the same time, the lack of abstinence effects on these other outcome variables needs to be interpreted with caution because given the limited statistical power in the sample to detect three-way interaction effects, similar but smaller effects may not have been detected for these variables. Overall, all findings in these exploratory analyses should be interpreted with caution because of their post hoc exploratory nature and limited statistical power to detect effects of interest. While these exploratory findings are noteworthy, they should be regarded as hypothesis-generating for future studies.

Implications

In sum, the findings of the present study have two main implications for understanding the potential manifestation of withdrawal-related symptoms during pornography abstinence. First, confirmatory analyses showed that there was no evidence of negative abstinence effects (i.e., withdrawal-related symptoms) among a sample of pornography users who were using pornography at least three times a week, and this was not dependent on level of PPU (but with the caveat that the sample had relatively low levels of PPU). These null findings are important to emphasize as they provide preliminary evidence that the average regular pornography user who uses pornography somewhat regularly (i.e., a few times a week) generally does not experience withdrawal-like symptoms while trying to abstain from pornography for a 7-day period.

Second, exploratory findings raise the possibility that negative abstinence effects might manifest only when both baseline FPU and PPU are high—a hypothesis that needs to be tested in future prospective studies. Exploratory analyses found that craving was an abstinence effect when PPU was high, but only once past 4-week FPU was at least daily or more. This tentatively suggests that craving could potentially be a PPU withdrawal symptom if a pornography withdrawal syndrome exists, but future adequately powered studies need to verify this finding a priori and rule out alternative theoretical explanations (e.g., craving being solely a manifestation of sexual arousal). While craving was the only significant abstinence effect under these conditions, it cannot be ruled out that adequately powered studies might find other abstinence effects.

Overall, it is crucial that the findings of the present study be considered in terms of its specific sample characteristics (i.e., non-clinical, majority female sample of undergraduates from a sexually conservative country, most of whom were using pornography 3–4 times a week [61.4%], had PPCS scores below the clinical cutoff of 76 [84.7%] and had no intrinsic desire to quit their pornography use [89.8%]). These findings may not generalize to clinical samples, non-clinical samples with higher FPU or PPU, predominantly male samples, samples from more sexually liberal countries or samples composed solely of pornography users intrinsically motivated to quit their pornography use. Future studies using similar prospective designs and diverse samples with varying gender ratios and levels of FPU, PPU and intrinsic motivation to abstain from pornography use are needed to replicate and extend these findings.

It is also important to consider when interpreting the present study’s findings that the study period (February–March 2021) was during the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Malaysia, when movement control and social distancing measures were enforced throughout the country (Rampal & Liew, 2021; Zamri et al., 2021). This could have potentially influenced the present study’s findings in two ways. First, participants’ self-reported affective states during the study period could potentially have been impacted by elevated psychological distress levels brought about by the pandemic (Marzo et al., 2021; Necho et al., 2021). Second, participants’ sexual lives could have also been affected by the pandemic. Frequency of partnered sex among participants may have decreased due to reduced access to potential sexual partners (Herbenick et al., 2022). While some longitudinal data have shown that as a general trend, FPU and PPU did not increase over time during the pandemic, this might not necessarily have been the case for all pornography users (Grubbs et al., 2022; Koós et al., 2022). For example, there has been evidence of retrospective self-reports, particularly among male participants, of increased FPU and frequency of masturbation during the pandemic when compared to pre-pandemic frequencies (Gleason et al., 2021; Sallie et al., 2021). It is plausible that some participants in the present study may have developed an increased reliance on masturbating to pornography as a sexual outlet in the absence of opportunities for partnered sex during stay-at-home orders, which could have made abstaining from pornography more challenging than usual. In sum, it is important to take into account that the present study’s findings may not necessarily generalize to a post-pandemic setting.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

The present study has several limitations that need to be highlighted. First, because the study’s aim was to investigate abstinence effects irrespective of gender, there were no gender restrictions in the inclusion criteria, resulting in a sample that was close to two-thirds (64.2%) female. Compared to females, males tend to use pornography more for sexual pleasure (Bőthe et al., 2021a; Grubbs et al., 2019c) and have a stronger sex drive in general (Baumeister et al., 2001). As such, males may be more reliant on pornography as a sexual outlet than females. Therefore, it may be reasonable to speculate that males could have greater difficulty in abstaining from pornography than females even if they have similar rates of baseline FPU. However, because females had lower past 4-week FPU than males in the present sample, exploratory analyses with gender as moderator were not run because they would have been difficult to disentangle from exploratory analyses with past 4-week FPU as moderator. Future studies could consider restricting inclusion criteria to just male participants to examine whether abstinence effects manifest in a male-only sample or run adequately powered studies with both genders included (but with narrower inclusion criteria for baseline FPU [e.g., ≥ six times a week]) to investigate potential varying abstinence effects by gender, if any. Differing contexts of pornography use across genders (e.g., women in relationships are more likely than men to use pornography primarily or only with their partner; Carroll et al., 2017) could also be accounted for as a potential moderator of effects in future studies.

Second, nearly half (45.4%) of participants in the abstinence group reported using pornography at least once during the experimental period, which could have led to a mitigation in the frequency and/or intensity of any withdrawal-related symptoms experienced for these participants. While excluding participants who lapse from analyses may introduce bias because these participants are likely to experience the greatest amount of withdrawal in the first place (Hughes, 2007b; Piasecki et al., 2003a, 2003b; Shiffman et al., 2004), it is important to keep in mind that withdrawal-related symptom scores of the abstinence group as a whole may have been influenced by the considerable proportion of participants who did lapse in the present study.

Third, because the focus of the present study was to examine effects of abstinence from pornography specifically, participants in the abstinence group were allowed to masturbate without pornography or engage in non-pornography-related sexual activity. An advantage of allowing non-pornography-related sexual outlets is that potential manifestations of withdrawal-like symptoms can be more clearly attributed to a dependency on pornography use instead of dependency on masturbation or sexual activity (e.g., if withdrawal-like symptoms persist even after masturbating without pornography). However, a drawback of this is that it may not resemble many real-world abstinence attempts, given that many individuals with PPU may decide to abstain from pornography and masturbation or abstain from sexual activity altogether as a short-term recovery strategy (Fernandez et al., 2021). Future studies could consider modifying abstinence instructions so that they also include masturbation or sexual activity altogether.

Fourth, while the experimental design used in the present study contributed to rigorous internal validity due to randomization and use of a control group, experimental designs are inherently limited in the extent to which the studies’ results are generalizable to the wider population (because of the use of a relatively small, homogenous sample) and applicable to real-world situations (because of the emphasis on controlled conditions that prioritize internal validity over ecological validity). Importantly, abstinence in the present study may not be representative of real-world abstinence attempts because participants knew that abstinence would only last for a temporary 7-day period, they could lapse without consequence, and they could terminate their participation at any moment. Non-experimental longitudinal studies of intrinsic abstinence attempts are needed to supplement data provided by studies that experimentally manipulate abstinence.

Fifth, because it is plausible that a pornography withdrawal syndrome, akin to the withdrawal syndromes of some substances (cf. Hughes et al., 1994), might only begin or worsen after a significant period of abstinence (e.g., one or two weeks), the fairly brief duration of the present study (i.e., 7 days) meant that any potential withdrawal symptoms that might have emerged beyond an initial 7-day period could not be captured. Future studies could consider increasing the duration of the abstinence period to investigate this possibility.

Sixth, the outcome measures used to assess potential pornography withdrawal-related symptoms in the present study were a limitation because they were modified from existing scales constructed to assess alcohol craving (Flannery et al., 1999), smoking withdrawal symptoms (Welsch et al., 1999) and general affect (Thompson, 2007). Measures of pornography-specific withdrawal-related symptoms need to be developed and validated for use in future abstinence studies.

Seventh, despite having a significantly shorter recall period compared to a single end-of-week assessment, end-of-day surveys still rely on retrospection and as such remain susceptible to some recall bias (Newman & Stone, 2019). Research comparing aggregated momentary affect ratings throughout the day to retrospective end-of-day affect ratings demonstrates that end-of-day ratings of negative affect tend to be slightly biased toward peak and recent affect (Neubauer et al., 2020). Future studies can use ecological momentary assessment (EMA) instead of daily surveys for greater sensitivity to fluctuations of affect throughout the day.

Eighth, because the baseline measures for all outcome variables had a bigger recall period (past 7 days) compared to the daily measures (past day), changes in daily scores relative to baseline could not be examined. Incorporating a pre-intervention period where baseline data are also collected using the same daily surveys would allow for standardization of measures and examination of changes from baseline.

Finally, the present study did not account for the type or genre of pornography that participants typically used. It is possible that specific types of pornography (e.g., non-mainstream content; Hald et al., 2018) or greater variability of pornography content consumed (Lewczuk et al., 2021) may be associated with increased difficulty in abstaining from pornography use and can be accounted for in future abstinence studies.

The influence of sexual activity on sleep

The influence of sexual activity on sleep: A diary study. Carlotta Florentine Oesterling, Charmaine Borg, Elina Juhola, Marike Lancel. Journal of Sleep Research, January 16 2023. https://doi.org/10.1111/jsr.13814

Summary: Aiming to promote overall health and well-being through sleep, the present studies examine to what extent sexual activity serves as a behavioural mechanism to improve sleep. The relation between sexual activity, i.e., partnered sex and masturbation with or without orgasm, and subjective sleep latency and sleep quality is examined by means of a cross-sectional and a longitudinal (diary) study. Two hundred fifty-six male and female participants, mainly students, completed a pre-test set of questionnaires and, thereafter, a diary during 14 consecutive days. The cross-sectional study was analysed using analysis of covariance and demonstrated that both men and women perceive partnered sex and masturbation with orgasm to improve sleep latency and sleep quality, while sexual activity without orgasm is perceived to exert negative effects on these sleep parameters, most strongly by men. Accounting for the repeated measurements being nested within participants, the diary data were analysed using multilevel linear modelling (MLM). Separate models for subjective sleep latency and sleep quality were constructed, which included 2076 cases at level 1, nested within 159 participants at level 2. The analyses revealed that only partnered sex with orgasm was associated with a significantly reduced sleep latency (b = −0.08, p < 0.002) and increased sleep quality (b = 0.19, p < 0.046). Sexual activity without orgasm and masturbation with and without orgasm were not associated with changes in sleep. Further, no gender differences emerged. The present studies confirm and significantly substantiate findings indicating that sexual activity and intimacy may improve sleep and overall well-being in both men and women and serve as a directive for future research.

4 DISCUSSION

The present cross-sectional and longitudinal (diary) studies aimed to investigate whether specific sexual activities (i.e., partnered sex and masturbation with or without orgasm) affect subjective sleep latency and sleep quality. The cross-sectional study showed that partnered sex with orgasm as well as masturbation with orgasm are perceived to reduce sleep latency while increasing sleep quality in men and women. Both men and women found that partnered sex and masturbation without orgasm increased sleep latency and decreased sleep quality, albeit men perceived stronger negative effects. The longitudinal study yielded diverging results. Specifically, while partnered sex with orgasm significantly shortened sleep latency and improved sleep quality, masturbation with orgasm did not affect the respective sleep variables. The effects of partnered sex without orgasm and masturbation without orgasm did not have strong enough effects on sleep latency or sleep quality to be detectable in the present design. Although women indicated a higher average sleep quality than men, gender was not found to significantly moderate the relation between sexual activity and sleep.

The present results largely support the hypothesis that sexual activity with orgasm results in reduced subjective sleep latency and increased subjective sleep quality in both men and women. While both studies found significant effects of partnered sex, masturbation – though retrospectively perceived as sleep-promoting – did not exert detectable effects in the longitudinal study. As masturbation with orgasm was indeed perceived to effectively promote sleep when assessed in retrospect, the results may suggest that, in fact, both sex with a partner and masturbation impact sleep latency and sleep quality, while the effect of partnered sex may be stronger and thus more salient. This postulate aligns with findings by Brody and Krüger (2006), who have shown that orgasm following sexual intercourse results in a 400% higher post-coital prolactin surge than masturbation-induced orgasm. As prolactin promotes sleep and is part of a feedback loop communicating sexual satiety, the increased post-coital surge of prolactin may explain why partnered sex is often perceived as more satisfying than masturbation and why the sleep-facilitating effect of sexual activity with orgasm is more salient when a partner is involved, as also found by Pallesen et al. (2020) and Gallop et al. (2021).

The finding that both partnered sex and masturbation without orgasm yielded no – or even negative – effects on sleep point to the relevance of orgasm and its concomitant psychophysiological effects. As orgasm is established to increase the heart rate and blood pressure and results in the release of oxytocin and prolactin – hormones, both postulated to influence sleep (Brody & Krüger, 2006; Fekete et al., 2014; Gianotten et al., 2021; Lipschitz et al., 2015) – neuroendocrine changes following orgasm may contribute to the reduction in sleep latency and increase in sleep quality following partnered sex with orgasm. The present observations are in accordance with earlier findings by Pallesen et al. (2020). Although Lastella et al. (2019) found that sexual activity is also reported to affect sleep when orgasm is not taken into consideration, the percentage of men and women reporting improved sleep latency and sleep quality increased when specifically asked about sex with orgasm. Further, reported gender differences indicating that perceived effects of sex on sleep are stronger in men were non-apparent when orgasm was assessed and may therefore emanate from a gap in orgasm frequency between men and women. Therefore, the discrepancy in results may also stem from less nuanced wording of items applied by Lastella et al. (2019). In a more recent study, Sprajcer et al. (2022) found that orgasm frequency explained 3.1% of the variance in subjective sleep latency, as participants reporting an orgasm “every time” sexual activity occurs fell asleep on average 12 min faster than those who less frequently or never report orgasm.

Given that masturbation with orgasm did not produce significant changes in longitudinally assessed sleep, orgasm per se does not sufficiently explain the reduction of sleep latency and increased sleep quality following partnered sex with orgasm. Other factors accompanying partnered sex with orgasm may also contribute to its positive effects on sleep, such as the mere experience of intimacy with one's partner promoting couple bonding (Kruger & Hughes, 2011), well-being, and emotion regulation (Gianotten et al., 2021) and may thereby improve sleep. Germane to this, non-sexual touch and cuddling have been shown to have calming, sleep-promoting effects, especially for women (Dueren et al., 2022). Compared with masturbation, partnered sex is often associated with more intense and longer-lasting physical activity – resulting in a heightened relaxed state afterwards – which may explain why partnered sex without orgasm resulted in a borderline-significant effect on sleep quality in the diary study despite being reported significantly less frequently than partnered sex with orgasm (n = 85 vs. n = 173). Lastly, the psychological effects of relationship satisfaction, loving and feeling loved, as well as having a sense of belonging or security also warrant consideration and have been shown to impact sleep (Kent et al., 2015; Troxel et al., 2007). Sprajcer et al. (2022) found that individuals who are emotionally satisfied fall asleep on average 10–12 min faster than emotionally unsatisfied individuals, and that orgasm frequency and emotional satisfaction are higher if sexual activity occurrs with a long-term partner, compared with casual sexual relationships. These findings highlight the importance of considering emotional and relationship factors when deriving inferences on the effects of sexual activity on sleep. Anyhow, if penetration has occurred, the positive effects of intimacy on sleep may be undermined if women, and even more so men, do not achieve orgasm. Both women and men retrospectively reported negative effects of sexual activity without orgasm on sleep. This negative perception, although not supported by the longitudinal findings, may be attributed to adjuvant emotions such as frustration, dissatisfaction, uncomfortable bodily sensations resulting from sexual arousal without orgasm, or confounding events that prevented sexual activity from resulting in orgasm.

The hypothesised gender difference suggesting that the effects of sexual activity on sleep are stronger in men than in women was not supported, as changes in subjective sleep latency and sleep quality following partnered sex with orgasm did not differ between men and women. This finding corresponds to results of Kruger and Hughes (2011), who also did not find any gender differences in the influence of sexual activity on sleep, and of Lastella et al. (2019), who did not find a gender difference when sex with orgasm had occurred. The absence of gender differences in the sleep effects of sexual activity with orgasm may be due to comparable endocrine processes following orgasm in men and women (Georgiadis et al., 2009; Mah & Binik, 2002). The widely held notion that men fall asleep faster than women after sexual activity may have emanated from the existing gender gap in achieving orgasm, i.e., women are less likely to reach orgasm during heteronormative sexual activity than men (Blair et al., 2018). Case numbers of the present study corroborate this notion, as although the sample consists of more than twice as many women as men, men reported a higher number of occurrences of both partnered sex and masturbation with orgasm. While following heteronormative scripts, women tend to engage in sexual activities that frequently result in orgasm for men but less often for women (e.g., vaginal penetration only, which does not suffice to achieve orgasm for most women; Lloyd, 2022). Research has further shown that the male orgasm frequently signifies the end of sexual intercourse (Opperman et al., 2014), which decreases the opportunities to achieve an orgasm for women. Women might simply reach orgasm less often and, therefore, less frequently benefit from the sleep-promoting effects of orgasm, which, in turn, may explain why society and cross-sectional research relying on self-report data postulate that men fall asleep faster following sexual intercourse with orgasm.

4.1 Limitations and future directions

While the results of the present study underpin the positive effect of sexual activity on sleep, several aspects may limit the interpretability of the findings. The convenience sampling procedure that also made use of a university-student participant pool of a Dutch University possibly limits the generalisability of the results, as most of the participants are young adults from western countries. As the understanding of sexuality concepts varies greatly across cultures (Hall & Graham, 2012), using a more diverse, inclusive sample is encouraged in future replications to increase external validity. Furthermore, suggestive wording in the pre-test items and normative responding based on the general widespread opinion of the sleep effects of sexual activity possibly resulted in recall and acquiescence bias and might contribute to the variability in results between the cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. The longitudinal study was a preliminary attempt to bring a more thorough and objective insight into the impact of sexual activity on sleep. Yet, the borderline-significant effect of sexual activity without orgasm on sleep quality warrants further investigation, as it may point to a possible effect in the population that was underpowered (power = 0.51) and not detectable due to a small number of cases of partnered sex without orgasm (n = 85), of which the majority (n = 71) was reported by women. Thereby, examining this effect with a higher number of cases may be valuable, especially for female samples in which sexual activity without orgasm is particularly frequent, compared with male samples.

Due to the purely observational nature of the present study, future research might benefit from investigating the relationship between partnered and solo sexual activity, genital responses, the endocrine processes possibly underlying the effect sex has on sleep, and the psychophysiological markers of sleep in an experimental setting, thereby furthering what has only been done by Brisette et al. (1985). Another pathway could be to use a multi-modal machine learning approach implementing wearable devices to detect whether subjective and objective relations of sex and sleep patterns correlate. Self-monitoring the beneficial effect of sexual activity on sleep may have positive psychological effects and promote self-awareness.

Future research may consider differences between the effects in hetero- and homosexual couples and non-binary individuals, which were underrepresented in the present sample, as well as the effects different types of sexual activity have on sleep. Further, it is important to highlight that, by reducing sexual activity to partnered sex and masturbation, the present study applied a comprehensive – but restricted – definition of sexual activity. This served the extension of previous research in order to establish an underlying relationship between sexual activity and sleep. For future research, it would be important to apply a more inclusive, integrative conceptualisation of sexual activity by including a wide variety of sexual practices. Moreover, circumstantial factors such as having a new-born or small children, which possibly require frequent night-time engagement, may also be considered in future work, as both sex and sleep endure significant challenges and changes following the birth of a child (Kahn et al., 2022).

4.2 Strengths and implications

As the first to build upon previously conducted cross-sectional studies while also including a longitudinal design, the present study corroborated and extended the evidence for a sleep-promoting effect of sexual activity on sleep. By conducting an analysis in which the data are not aggregated but analysed with respect to their nested structure using MLM, the present study offered the opportunity to clarify diverging results regarding gender differences, type of sexual activity (masturbation vs. partnered sex), and the role of orgasm appraised by prior research. Moreover, controlling for relevant covariates, especially alcohol consumption which appeared to obscure the relationship between sexual activity and sleep, was valuable in the present study and is recommended for future research. The 14-day duration of the diary study, that includes weekdays as well as weekends, demands increased commitment of participants and further increases the value of inferences.

By using a cross-sectional design resembling the study conducted by Pallesen et al. (2020), their main findings could be replicated. The present study shows that both men and women perceive sexual activity followed by orgasm to reduce sleep latency and increase sleep quality (Gallop Jr. et al., 2021; Lastella et al., 2019; Pallesen et al., 2020). The results of the diary study corroborate the finding that sexual activity improves sleep while highlighting the effect partnered sex has on sleep, compared with masturbation. The heightened effect of partnered sex may partly be explained by the increased neuroendocrine changes following intercourse-induced orgasm, in combination with the valuable effects of experiencing intimacy with one's partner. Penetration and sexual intercourse aligned to heteronormative scripts may not necessarily be required to experience the beneficial effects of sexual activity on sleep. This notion is supported by the borderline-significant effect of partnered sex without orgasm on sleep quality, which is frequently reported by women and shows that intimacy alone may be sufficient to experience positive effects on sleep.

The present discordance of results between the cross-sectional study measuring the perception of the effects and the longitudinal study measuring the actual experience underlines the importance of applying objective measures and prospective measures appraising the perceived effect to the concepts of interest, as the subjective experience of sleep was shown to be a strong predictor of physical and mental well-being and cross-sectional methods are prone to be influenced by expectations and norms surrounding sexuality. In general, the same heteronormative implications of sexuality that underlie the orgasm gap between women and men may influence conceptions about “normal” sexuality – thereby resulting in confounded popular notions, such as men falling asleep first following sexual intercourse. Therefore, culture-specific norms and beliefs surrounding sexuality warrant consideration when interpreting the results of subjective research on sexuality.

The outcomes of the present research have important implications for sleep- and sexual medicine, as they highlight the value of considering partnered sex, masturbation, orgasm, and intimacy as a means to promote good sleep. The establishment of a relationship between sexual activity and sleep serves as a directive for future research to identify possible underlying mechanisms, such as endocrine or social-psychological processes, and to attempt an establishment of the effect using objective measures.

What if Diversity Trainings Are Doing More Harm Than Good?

What if Diversity Trainings Are Doing More Harm Than Good? Jesse Singal. The New York Times, Jan 17 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/opinion/dei-trainings-effective.html

Diversity trainings have been around for decades, long before the country’s latest round of racial reckoning. But after George Floyd’s murder — as companies faced pressure to demonstrate a commitment to racial justice — interest in the diversity, equity and inclusion (D.E.I.) industry exploded. The American market reached an estimated $3.4 billion in 2020.

D.E.I. trainings are designed to help organizations become more welcoming to members of traditionally marginalized groups. Advocates make bold promises: Diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on. The only problem? There’s little evidence that many of these initiatives work. And the specific type of diversity training that is currently in vogue — mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems — may well have a net-negative effect on the outcomes managers claim to care about.

Over the years, social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence base for diversity trainings have frequently come to discouraging conclusions. Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is “disappointing,” wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, “considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.”

Dr. Paluck’s team found just two large experimental studies in the previous decade that attempted to evaluate the effects of diversity trainings and met basic quality benchmarks. Other researchers have been similarly unimpressed. “We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade,” wrote the sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in 2018, “with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around.” (To be fair, not all of these critiques apply as sharply to voluntary diversity trainings.)

If diversity trainings have no impact whatsoever, that would mean that perhaps billions of dollars are being wasted annually in the United States on these efforts. But there’s a darker possibility: Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them.

That’s partly because any psychological intervention may turn out to do more harm than good. The late psychologist Scott Lilienfeld made this point in an influential 2007 article [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-6916.2007.00029.x] where he argued that certain interventions — including ones geared at fighting youth substance use, youth delinquency and PTSD — likely fell into that category. In the case of D.E.I., Dr. Dobbin and Dr. Kalev warn that diversity trainings that are mandatory, or that threaten dominant groups’ sense of belonging or make them feel blamed, may elicit negative backlash or exacerbate pre-existing biases.

Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary re-understanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” trainings are intentionally designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression trainings are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence [https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/how-microaggression-training-could-harm-minority-students.html], that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these trainings run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.

Just ask employees at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which had to issue an apology after it posted an Okunesque graphic that presented rational thought, hard work and “emphasis on scientific method” as attributes of “white culture.”

Then there are the lawsuits. As The New York Times Magazine noted in 2020, at least half a dozen people who had been employed by the New York City Department of Education filed lawsuits or won settlements in cases relating to mandatory D.E.I. trainings. Racial affinity groups, a popular intervention in which participants are temporarily separated by race so they can talk about, well, race, have perhaps proved even more problematic. They’ve sparked complaints in places like Jacksonville, Fla. (where a principal was temporarily reassigned after she attempted to separate white students from students of color to discuss “cultural issues”), and Wellesley, Mass. (where the creation of racial affinity groups for students provoked a now-settled lawsuit from a conservative group).

Not every complaint is valid, not every lawsuit has merit and backlash to conversations about racial justice is nothing new. Martin Luther King Jr. had an unfavorable rating of 63 percent before his assassination. If common diversity trainings definitively made institutions fairer or more inclusive in measurable ways, then one could argue they are worth it, backlash and mounting legal fees notwithstanding. But there’s little evidence that they do.

So what does work? Robert Livingston, a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School who works as both a bias researcher and a diversity consultant, has a simple proposal: “Focus on actions and behaviors rather than hearts and minds.”

Dr. Livingston suggests that it’s more important to accurately diagnose an organization’s specific problems with D.E.I. and to come up with concrete strategies for solving them than it is to attempt to change the attitudes of individual employees. And D.E.I. challenges vary widely from organization to organization: Sometimes the problem has to do with the relationship between white and nonwhite employees, sometimes it has to do with the recruitment or retention of new employees and sometimes it has to do with disparate treatment of customers (think of Black patients prescribed less pain medication than white ones).

The legwork it takes to actually understand and solve these problems isn’t necessarily glamorous. If you want more Black and Latino people in management roles at your large company, that might require gathering data on what percentage of applicants come from these groups, interviewing current Black and Latino managers on whether there are climate issues that could be contributing to the problem and possibly beefing up recruitment efforts at, say, business schools with high percentages of Black and Latino graduates. Even solving this one problem — and it’s a fairly common one — could take hundreds of hours of labor.

The truth, as Dr. Livingston pointed out, is that not every organization is up to this sort of task. Ticking a box and moving on can be the more attractive option. “Some organizations want to do window dressing,” he said. “And if so, then, OK, bring in a white fragility workshop and know you’ve accomplished your goal.”

The history of diversity trainings is, in a sense, a history of fads. Maybe the current crop will wither over time, new ones will sprout that are stunted by the same lack of evidence, and a decade from now someone else will write a version of this article. But it’s also possible that organizations will grow tired of throwing time and money at trainings where the upside is mostly theoretical and the potential downsides include unhappy employees, public embarrassment and even lawsuits. It’s possible they will realize that a true commitment to D.E.I. does not lend itself to easy solutions.

Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) is the author of “The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills” and a co-host of the podcast “Blocked and Reported.” He writes the newsletter Singal-Minded.

Women respond more strongly to negative, but not positive emotional stimuli than men

Are women truly “more emotional” than men? Sex differences in an indirect model-based measure of emotional feelings. Ella Givon, Rotem Berkovich, Elad Oz-Cohen, Kim Rubinstein, Ella Singer-Landau, Gal Udelsman-Danieli & Nachshon Meiran. Current Psychology, Jan 16 2023. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-022-04227-z

Abstract: Common beliefs regard women as being more emotional than men. However, assessing differences in emotional feelings holds methodological challenges because of being based on explicit reports. Such research often lacks an explicit measurement model, and reports are potentially biased by stereotypical knowledge and because of existing sex differences in the ease of emotion-label retrieval. This pre-registered analysis employed an evidence accumulation model that has previously been validated for describing binary (un)pleasantness reports made in response to normed emotion-eliciting pictures. This measurement model links overt binary (un)pleasantness reports with the latent variables processing efficiency and a bias to report a certain emotional feeling. Employing online rather than retrospective reports that do not involve intensity rating, together with an explicit measurement model overcome the aforementioned methodological challenges. Across nine different experiments (N = 355) women generated negative emotions more efficiently than men. There was no sex difference in the bias to report negative emotions and in positive emotions. Post hoc account of the results emphasizes the greater relevance of negative emotions for women, given their evolutionary role as primary caregivers who should show enhanced sensitivity for dangers to their offspring (“fitness threat”), given their heightened likelihood of being themselves exposed to physical violence and given their traditional social roles that still remain relevant in many societies.

No form of pandemic preparedness helped to ameliorate or shorten the pandemic; compared to other countries, the US did not perform poorly because of cultural values such as individualism, collectivism, selfishness, or lack of trust

Is it possible to prepare for a pandemic? Robert Tucker Omberg, Alex Tabarrok. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 38, Issue 4, Winter 2022, December 14 2022, Pages 851–875, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grac035

Abstract: How effective were investments in pandemic preparation? We use a comprehensive and detailed measure of pandemic preparedness, the Global Health Security (GHS) Index produced by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHU), to measure which investments in pandemic preparedness reduced infections, deaths, excess deaths, or otherwise ameliorated or shortened the pandemic. We also look at whether values or attitudinal factors such as individualism, willingness to sacrifice, or trust in government—which might be considered a form of cultural pandemic preparedness—influenced the course of the pandemic. Our primary finding is that almost no form of pandemic preparedness helped to ameliorate or shorten the pandemic. Compared to other countries, the United States did not perform poorly because of cultural values such as individualism, collectivism, selfishness, or lack of trust. General state capacity, as opposed to specific pandemic investments, is one of the few factors which appears to improve pandemic performance. Understanding the most effective forms of pandemic preparedness can help guide future investments. Our results may also suggest that either we aren’t measuring what is important or that pandemic preparedness is a global public good.

JEL H12 - Crisis Management I10 - General I18 - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

According to AAA, "about 70 percent of the entire increase in driver fatal crash involvement [between May and December of 2020] was specifically among males under the age of 40"

Traffic Safety Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Fatal Crashes Relative to Pre-Pandemic Trends, United States, May–December 2020. Brian C. Tefft, Meng Wang.  AAA Foundation for
Traffic Safety, Dec 2022. https://aaafoundation.org/traffic-safety-impact-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-fatal-crashes-relative-to-pre-pandemic-trends-united-states-may-december-2020

Abstract: Despite a brief reduction during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people killed in motor vehicle crashes in the United States surged in 2020 to its highest level in over a decade. The purpose of the research reported here is to advance the understanding of how safety on U.S. roads changed during the pandemic, beyond its initial months, by comparing the involvement of specific crash-, vehicle-, and driver-related factors in fatal crashes during the eight-month period of May through December 2020 to what would have been expected had the pandemic not occurred and pre-pandemic trends continued. Data from all fatal crashes in the U.S. from 2011 through 2019 were used to develop statistical models of the monthly number of fatal crashes through December 2019. These models were then used to forecast how many fatal crashes would been expected in each month of 2020 without the pandemic. Overall, the number of traffic fatalities in 2020 was 2,570 (7.1%) more than expected based on pre-pandemic trends. However, a sharp decrease in traffic fatalities in March and April 2020 partially offset an even larger increase later in the year. During the eight-month period of May through December 2020, the number of traffic fatalities was 3,083 (12.1%) more than expected. Importantly, however, this increase was not uniform across all factors examined. This Research Brief identifies specific crash-, vehicle-, and driver-related factors that contributed most to the overall increase in traffic fatalities during this period, as well as others that continued to follow pre-pandemic trends or that even decreased.

Key Findings: A total of 38,824 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the U.S. in 2020, 2,570 (7.1%) more than forecast from models developed using data from 2011 through 2019 (Figure). In April 2020—the first full month of the pandemic—the number of fatalities was much lower than what would have been expected based on pre-pandemic trends. By May 2020, however, the actual number of fatalities was similar to historical levels. The number of fatalities greatly exceeded forecasts based on pre-pandemic trends for the remainder of 2020. In May through December collectively, there were a total of 28,611 traffic fatalities nationwide, which was 3,083 (12.1%) more than expected based on pre-pandemic trends.

The increase in traffic fatalities was not uniform across crash-, vehicle-, and driver-related factors. Scenarios present in greater than expected numbers in fatal crashes in 2020 included evening and late-night hours, speeding drivers, drivers with illegal alcohol levels, drivers without valid licenses, drivers of older vehicles, drivers of vehicles registered to other people, crash involvement and deaths of teens and young adults, and deaths of vehicle occupants not wearing seatbelts. In contrast, several crash types followed pre-pandemic trends (e.g., crashes in the middle of the day; crash involvements of drivers with valid licenses; pedestrian fatalities), and a few decreased (e.g., crashes of elderly drivers; crashes during typical morning commute hours).

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Road Deaths Surged Alongside Covid — But Who Died, Exactly? Kea Wilson. StreetsBlog USA, Jan 9 2023. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/01/09/road-deaths-surged-alongside-covid-but-who-died-exactly

Excerpts:

The study verified that the absence of traffic jams played some role in allowing drivers to reach dangerous speeds on too-wide roads, but the researchers also found that the most significant differences between their forecast and real-world death totals happened in the dead of night, when most roads have always been congestion-free.

Between 10 p.mm and 1:59 a.m., deaths were nearly 22 percent higher than expected; during the typical morning rush hours, by contrast, deaths were actually 6.3 percent lower than the model anticipated they'd be. The late afternoon and evening rush hour, meanwhile, "did not differ significantly from the forecast."

2020 also saw an increase in hit-and-runs, which clocked in at 31.2 percent higher than originally forecast.

According to AAA, "about 70 percent of the entire increase in driver fatal crash involvement [between May and December of 2020] was specifically among males under the age of 40." Tefft suspects that increase may have been particularly driven by the minuscule subset of young, male motorists who were emboldened to do risky things on the road when the world shut down, though the data doesn't tell him exactly why.

People in more developed and modernized countries experience more love with their partners, but at a high level of modernization, mean love levels tend to drop

Modernization, collectivism, and gender equality predict love experiences in 45 countries. Piotr Sorokowski et al. Scientific Reports volume 13, Article number: 773. Jan 14 2023. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-26663-4

Abstract: Recent cross-cultural and neuro-hormonal investigations have suggested that love is a near universal phenomenon that has a biological background. Therefore, the remaining important question is not whether love exists worldwide but which cultural, social, or environmental factors influence experiences and expressions of love. In the present study, we explored whether countries’ modernization indexes are related to love experiences measured by three subscales (passion, intimacy, commitment) of the Triangular Love Scale. Analyzing data from 9474 individuals from 45 countries, we tested for relationships with country-level predictors, namely, modernization proxies (i.e., Human Development Index, World Modernization Index, Gender Inequality Index), collectivism, and average annual temperatures. We found that mean levels of love (especially intimacy) were higher in countries with higher modernization proxies, collectivism, and average annual temperatures. In conclusion, our results grant some support to the hypothesis that modernization processes might influence love experiences.

Discussion

Many descriptive works show how love experiences may change with various levels of modernization^34,35. Other study supported such claims based on the analysis of incidences of love in narrative fiction throughout centuries¹¹. However, based on quantitative, cross-cultural data, our study is the first to provide evidence on how love experiences vary concerning different levels of human development and modernization indexes. We observed that, in general, participants from countries with higher (compared with countries with lower) levels of HDI, World Modernization Index, and gender equality experienced more love with their partners, controlling for participants’ sex, relationship length, countries’ average annual temperatures, and collectivism level. However, after reaching a certain, relatively high threshold of modernization (e.g., in the case of HDI—0.85), mean love levels tend to drop. Overly simplifying, we can conclude that more modernized countries have a higher level of all love subscales (though this effect is more pronounced for intimacy than passion), but the highest levels of modernization do not promote intense love experiences.

Furthermore, the results provided tentative evidence that higher mean levels of intimacy and commitment are positively related to countries’ level of collectivism. It is especially interesting, considering that previous studies highlighted the importance of romantic love in relationships established in more individualistic cultures^7,23,26 as opposed to more collectivistic cultures, in which, historically, arranged rather than love marriages have been more prevalent^36,37. On the other hand, collectivistic values promote a more relational view of romantic relationships³⁸. Thus, individuals from more collectivistic countries might be more altruistic towards their partners^5,39, which could naturally lead to more intimate and stronger bonds between the lovers⁴⁰. However, the observed relationships ceased to be significant when controlling for participants’ age. Also, we did not observe any links between passion level and country’s collectivism index. Considering the most recent cultural changes in collectivistic values in various countries⁴¹, future studies could investigate whether individual levels of collectivistic beliefs might be more related to experiences love than country-levels of collectivism.

Relatively modest relationships between modernization indexes and passion suggest that passion is rather stable across different modernization levels, and that what carries the relationship between the passionate love (i.e., passion to intimacy ratio) and modernization indexes is higher intimacy in countries with higher modernization indexes. A growing body of research provides evidence for biological antecedents of passion and its role in reproduction (see, e.g.,^42,43,44), and thus, the stability of passionate experiences across various countries seems unsurprising. Furthermore, in line with previous works^3,44,45, we observed lower levels of passion and intimacy, and higher levels of commitment among participants with longer relationship duration.

However, questions regarding the mechanisms behind the observed patterns of changes in intimacy/commitment are more challenging to answer. The simplest explanation might be that people from countries with higher modernization indexes tend to emphasize the friendship aspect of relations with their partners⁴⁶. Indeed, some studies provided evidence that individuals from countries with higher modernization indexes expect love to be based on mutual attraction and emotional closeness^31,47. Apart from the environmental and economic factors already tackled in the introduction (i.e., the growing importance of romantic love in adulthood possibly resulting from changes in parental emotional investment and better living conditions^11,16,48,49), we can also hypothesize other possible explanations.

For instance, cultural changes stem from processes of democratization, emancipation of love^34,50,51, gender shifts, and increasing gender equality^52,53. Because love becomes increasingly dependent on the capitalist market, such processes may also promote specific love patterns (that is, more intimate love but not that much of sexual love^47,54). We might also consider social changes in terms of cultural perception of reproduction or, in general, postponed reproduction in countries with higher modernization indexes^55,56. Several of these factors may be responsible for the observed increasing role of intimacy in societies with higher modernization indexes. Future research should focus on disentangling modernization components, which would shed more light on which specific factors drive the observed patterns.

Furthermore, we observed a distinctive drop in the mean levels of love among participants from countries that reached a relatively high level of modernization (e.g., in the case of HDI, the threshold was 0.85). This suggests that, although country’s economic development generally promotes more intense love experiences, reaching a certain developmental point might reverse these beneficial love effects. Such hypotheses have been indirectly laid by ethologists studying animal behaviors^57,58. For instance, in a classical study, Calhoun⁵⁷ observed that mice thrived when granted unlimited access to all necessary resources. However, mice started to lose interest in mating and reproduction when the situation was too good for too long. We can only speculate to which extent such an animal model might apply to humans.

Interestingly, research on the role of temperature in social interactions evokes heated discussions. We found some evidence that a country’s average temperature is positively related to love experiences. When controlling for other factors, we found that participants from countries with higher annual temperatures reported higher levels of love (though this effect was the strongest for passion). However, raw correlations showed the opposite patterns, meaning that participants from countries with higher temperatures experienced lower intimacy and commitment levels. As results of previous studies also yielded contradictory conclusions^28,29, future investigations might attempt to deepen our understanding of the role of climate and temperature on humans’ feelings and behaviors.

Although the current study sheds new light on the cultural evolution of love, it is not free of limitations. First, despite recruiting a relatively large number of participants from various cultures, one needs to bear in mind that the studied sample was not representative of any of the 45 countries. Moreover, our participants were relatively well-educated and from urban areas (see Fig. 3), which makes them even less representative of less modernized countries. Second, although we used one of the most famous love scales, the Triangular Love Scale²⁷, the scale has been criticized for high correlations between love components^59,60. Furthermore, the TLS might not reliably distinguish participants with high levels of love⁶¹. As love measures are not perfectly correlated (their correlations tend to vary from 0.00 to even 0.83, see^62,63), it would be interesting to test the present results' robustness using different love measures. Third, we have focused on cultural and environmental variables at the country-level. Future studies could investigate whether individual-level factors identified in the present study contribute to love experiences in a similar vein. There is some evidence that, for instance, psychological collectivism might impact love patterns differently⁶⁴.

Figure 3

Locations of data collection. Countries (in blue) with corresponding study sites (cities in orange).

In conclusion, our study—one of the largest studies on cross-cultural differences in love experiences to date—provided evidence that, at least at the beginning of the twenty-first century, love is a near universal human experience. The results of the present investigation offer valuable insight into cultural and environmental factors related to countries’ variability of love experiences. Although our research is correlational and no causal conclusions can be made, one may hypothesize that cultural changes in the level of a country’s modernization index may affect patterns of love (i.e., may increase experiences of intimacy and commitment). More studies conducted in countries with lower levels of modernization using a longitudinal design might address this hypothesis.

Our study showed that love experiences differ across cultures. The results corroborate previous research findings on similarities and differences in how people chose their love partners⁶⁵ and how their choices affect their relationship satisfaction^66,67. However, as a concluding remark, we would like to highlight that we believe there is no better or worse way to experience love. On the contrary, understanding different love patterns may be crucial in studying the vast phenomenon of love. Exploring how love differs across cultures may result in identifying the love hardships of couples from different cultural backgrounds, which may, inter alia, promote developing more accurate and effective strategies in couple counseling.

Opiates of the Masses? Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American Religiosity

Opiates of the Masses? Deaths of Despair and the Decline of American Religion. Tyler Giles, Daniel M. Hungerman & Tamar Oostrom. NBER Working Paper 30840, January 2023. DOI 10.3386/w30840

Abstract: In recent decades, death rates from poisonings, suicides, and alcoholic liver disease have dramatically increased in the United States. We show that these "deaths of despair" began to increase relative to trend in the early 1990s, that this increase was preceded by a decline in religious participation, and that both trends were driven by middle-aged white Americans. Using repeals of blue laws as a shock to religiosity, we confirm that religious practice has significant effects on these mortality rates. Our findings show that social factors such as organized religion can play an important role in understanding deaths of despair.