Now that we’re all on the same page, what if I told you that recent research suggests that some chubby chasers (i.e. EVERY RAPPER EVER) might just be stressed out? That is, what if psychological stress leads one to chase the chubby? Let’s explore this hypothesis further in today’s post.

So, if I don’t state upfront that women of all sizes are beautiful (and they are), then the people of the Internets will yell at me. That aside – let’s be real. As a woman, I can tell you that there’s a not-so-subtle message in society that goes something like this:

Feel free to get into some kind of deep philosophical debate in the comments section about your own convictions and opinions on this matter, but I basically just called it like it is.

Women should either be thin but not too thin, or thick but not too thick. For the sake of this post, however, let’s focus on the thick ones. Women like Kim Kadashian and Beyoncé Knowles have done much to put “thick” women on a bit of a pedestal. The field of rap music would appear to concur:

With the exception of Drake, whose lyrics aren’t always what I would call self-explanatory, these rappers are all obviously concurring that bigger is better when it comes to women’s bodies.

Now, because I spin this as a science blog, let’s talk about science: what factors are influencing whether men (or women) go for heroin chic or pleasingly plump? This is quite the burning question in today’s society and, lucky for us, researchers from London published the results of their experiments on this very matter last month.

British!

Eighty-one White British heterosexual males ranging from ages 18 to 42 were divided into two groups: Group One contained 41 men who would undergo a stressful experience, and Group Two contained 40 men who would not experience stress. And what exactly was the “stress” experience? It went like this:

You walk into a room where four people are sitting at a table with tape recorders and video cameras. Then you stand in front of them at a microphone and try to give a speech off the top of your head for five agonizingly long minutes, hoping to convince them that they should hire you for some fictional job. And, just in case this type of hideous task happens to be your thing, you have to stay up there at the mic and try to subtract 13 from 1022 over and over again (i.e. 1022, 1009, 996, 983…) as fast and as accurately as possible. I’m not making this up, kids; unrehearsed public speaking and mental math — if that doesn’t stress you out then I’d like to know what does.

Oh, and in the mean time, the Group Two guys were just sitting quietly and unknowingly while the Group One guys were being tortured. Unfair.

After all this stressing or not-stressing, all men in the study were told to look at women with body types covering everything in the range from emaciated to obese. The men had to rate the ideal body, and the thinnest and largest bodies that they would still consider physically attractive. Thus, the men established an “attractiveness range.”

The results were pretty straightforward: men who had been stressed gave significantly higher ratings to normal and overweight women’s figures, chose a significantly heavier women’s frame as their “ideal,” and reported a significantly wider attractiveness range, almost exclusively due to the inclusion of larger women. Awesome!

If I had to wave my hands around and explain this, I’d say: the male mind, being a product of evolution, knows that when things get tough, one needs a female who can handle the stresses of the environment. That is, women who have more fat deposits and can go longer with scarce food stores, women who are more physically apt to fight off bears and whatnot, women whose bodies are more likely to carry a fetus to term when the metaphorical, ecological s–t hits the fan.

I’m NOT saying that skinny women have any less inherent value than women of other sizes. Not even close. I’m just telling you the first thing that comes to my mind when I see an experiment that shows stressed guys preferring bigger girls. I’m not a medical doctor or a psychologist or anything beyond an overly flippant blogger and an MIT/Harvard trained biologist, ooooh snap.

In summary:

• A lot of rappers are probably really stressed out from all the gun violence and drug dealings so evident in their lyrics, inclining them to lust after women of the thicker type.
• Rosie O’Donnell could probably take down a bear before Lindsay Lohan could.
• If you ask your man whether you look fat in your outfit and he says “no,” he’s either being honest with you, lying to your face, or so stressed out at work that he sees your fatness as an evolutionarily sweet deal.

Stay nerdy!

Oh! And did you like what you read here today? Then click around, especially on those social media buttons! Over to the right, look, along the side of the page — there are buttons to get to us on Facebook or Twitter, or to grab our RSS feed. At the bottom of this post you can share it, like it, tweet it, dig it — so many options! Heck, go crazy, buy something from the online store! Use the Donate button in the sidebar and have a blast! Remember, I’m just a lowly graduate student who is about to go have a bag of popcorn for breakfast+lunch and who chooses to skip work to make blog posts just for the pure love and enjoyment of it. And for the entertainment and edification of my dear, dear readers.

We at TryNerdy thank you!

-K

P.S. That “we” is totally just for effect. There is no “we,” unless “we” is me and my three cats. Nothing like being painfully honest with your readership…love ya!

Swami V, & Tovée MJ (2012). The Impact of Psychological Stress on Men’s Judgements of Female Body Size. PloS one, 7 (8) PMID: 22905153

Read on to find out how scientists analyzed millions of Twitter accounts and drew conclusions that left me thinking, “Tell me something I don’t know…?”

These two scientists from Cornell wanted to learn more about how people’s moods change over the course of a day, and across seasons. This type of information has been studied plenty in the past, but, to the authors’ credit, analyzing Tweets removes the risk of people inaccurately recalling their past emotions, as with surveys, and there’s no issue of response bias where people try to give answers they think sound good. Twitter can tell you how people are feeling in real time, with minimal pretense.

So these researchers looked at 509 million Tweets made between February 2008 and January 2010, representing 2.4 million Twitter users. The Tweets were analyzed by something called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a lexicon that basically matches words to various behavioral and psychological concepts. For example, the word “cried” would be matched to five categories: sadness, negative emotion, overall affect, verb, and past tense verb. Scores are assigned to categories so that the words in a Tweet can basically be translated into a numerical measure of “positive affect” or “negative affect.”

Would probably be interpreted as a sad Tweet.

Don’t get me wrong, these guys definitely had a nice experimental setup, and they were careful about the caveats of their study: they don’t know the gender, race, occupation, or anything really, of the people they’re analyzing — other than that they’re Twitter users. Their results shouldn’t be applied to everyone globally. All they could say was what’s known about Twitter users in general: they’re 51% White, 24% Black, and 17% Hispanic, and generally richer and more educated than the population at-large.

Despite all this, what ultimately amuses me is the conclusions that they make. Below, I’ll highlight some of the main findings of this work:

1. “[Positive mood] levels were generally higher on Saturday and Sunday….” How curious! Even more curious, the peak in happy morning moods on the weekends occurred 2 hours later than on weekdays, so the authors made a bit of a logical stretch and suggested that “people awaken later on weekends.”

2. “[Positive mood] decreased midmorning (at the start of the work day) and increased in the evening (at the end of the work day).” This isn’t my area of study, but I’d hazard a guess that work isn’t most people’s “happy place.” But, again to credit the authors, they point out that the overall ups and downs in mood throughout the day are similar on weekdays and weekends, just shifted in time. Since most people don’t go to work on the weekends, the authors point to “sleep and the biological clock as important determinants of affect.” Sleep? Affecting my mood? The concept is a little unorthodox, but I’ll allow it.

A likely candidate for some sleep-induced "emotional refreshment."

3. “…People may be emotionally “refreshed” by sleep.” I just don’t know about this one…aren’t the happiest people usually the ones who pull all-nighters and make it through the day on energy drinks and high anxiety? Oh well, I can be open-minded.

4. “Most people are most active in the afternoon and evening….” Odd. I hear so many voices on the street outside my window at, say, 3AM. I’m actually not joking about this one….

5. “…Baseline [positive mood]…is higher when change in daylength is positive (as the summer solstice approaches) than when it is negative (as the winter solstice approaches).” Well, I can only speak for myself here, but I feel like the existence of seasonal affective disorder kind of beat these guys to the punch. Always nice when your data make sense, though.

To end on a nice note, this research is definitely worth a look. The methodology was cool, and they did get into the fact that differences in nationality and culture can manifest as differences in mood patterns across time. And in all seriousness, the idea of scientifically analyzing Twitter on a large scale for the purposes of learning about human behavior and psyche is an immensely cool concept. Maybe in the future this sort of analysis can be done on even more complex psychological parameters, if such can be gleaned from 140-character Tweets. For doing something that’s never quite been done before, I give these researchers props.

Speaking of Twitter…hit up our Facebook/Twitter/RSS (way over on the right-hand side of your screen)! Your support makes our nerdy world go ’round

Scott A. Golder, & Michael W. Macy (2011). Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures Science, 333 (6051), 1878-1881 DOI: 21960633