The study was published last week…” story continued here at ScienceDaily.

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

She's probably lactating.

“…You don’t want to mess with mama grizzlies.” – Sarah Palin, May 2010, in reference to novice female political candidates.

Yes, “mama grizzly” Sarah Palin is right, you don’t want to mess with a mother bear, in particular when her cubs are involved. Turns out, you don’t want to mess with mama humans, either, especially the lactating kind.

In a fitting follow-up to my bumpy nipples post, I’ve come across new research that shows for the first time that human mothers, just like other nonhuman mammal mothers, display heightened aggressiveness for the duration of lactation. As an extra bonus to the enhanced protection of their young, the aggression of breastfeeding moms also relieves stress.

Because there’s nothing like the will to kill for the sake of your offspring to really help you unwind.

The concept of aggressively protective mother animals in nature is nothing new. However, UCLA scientists are now the first to actually do a behavioral experiment to prove this phenomenon occurs in human mothers, and that it is directly linked to lactation, as it is in nonhuman mammals.

The subjects in this study were divided in to three groups: breast-feeding women, formula-feeding women, and nulliparous women (women who had never given birth). These women were individually introduced to female competitors who were actually just actors working for the study. The test subject women were told that they were going to play against their competitors in separate rooms in a reaction-time test, and that if they won, they could choose the volume and duration of the buzzer sound played for the loser. In reality, the test subject women were just playing against a pre-set computer program that measured how aggressive the mothers chose to be with the buzzer sound.

Even though the three groups of women studied reported themselves to be equally aggressive, they clearly weren’t, as the data show (note that women were assessed for aggression before and after feeding their babies, but no difference was observed relating to feeding time):

Get a load of those aggressive breast feeders! There isn’t even a significant difference between formula-feeding women and women who’ve never had babies.

Now, aggression definitely isn’t an inherently bad thing. When you have offspring carrying on your genetic information, it behooves you to be extra protective. Not only that, but while the breastfeeding mothers were letting out their aggression during the test, they had lower blood pressures than either of the other two groups of women. I imagine it’s also probably a good thing for mothers of young infants to keep their blood pressure down.

Interestingly, women with more committed romantic partners or with higher incomes showed less aggression. This probably makes sense, because having someone to help protect a child, or having a wealth of resources, could take the pressure off of a mother to be as aggressively protective.

In summary, maybe Sarah Palin didn’t need to use a metaphor about grizzlies at all – human mothers are a force to be reckoned with in their own right.

Stay nerdy And check out the new sidebar addition, “What I’ve Been Reading”! It’ll be updated periodically, and you can probably count on finding something kind of nerdy there.

Hahn-Holbrook J, Holt-Lunstad J, Holbrook C, Coyne SM, & Lawson ET (2011). Maternal defense: breast feeding increases aggression by reducing stress. Psychological science, 22 (10), 1288-95 PMID: 21873570