Tag Archives: human development

Love and marriage in China

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Chinese weddingPrevious articles on the “second wives” of well-to-do Chinese men have focused on how unfair it is that mistresses of corrupt officials become exorbitantly wealthy. Or on the government’s foot-dragging in putting marriage databases online. But in an article ostensibly about the branding of luxury goods, Tom Doctoroff, a leading authority on marketing in China, offers a cultural analysis of the phenomenon. (emphasis added)

Because China has never had a humanist revolution, sex and marriage have always been relatively divorced. That is why many Asian cultures have an immensely commercialised and categorised [sex industry]. … [I]f a husband is a man of means, and has a significant income, then he can take on a second wife without violating his obligation to his first wife. …

Second Wife culture is just one part of a much bigger and more interesting area which is the difference between love and marriage in China and the West. Marriage in the west is rooted in romantic passion, and although that passion evolves over time we basically assume that if it’s is [sic] gone from marriage it’s a shallow marriage. Yes, there are other concerns that surround it – children, money – but it’s not the core of the relationship.

In China it’s fundamentally true that a marriage is not between two individuals, it’s between two clans. Marriage is a way that people connect into a broader society in which the individual is not the basic productive unit. This has always been the case.

In China, a romance is not ideal unless it is also accompanied by commitment. In Chinese, when we translate “a diamond is forever”, we don’t mean that passion lasts forever. It translates as “he will do anything for you, forever”. And that’s why people buy a lot of things for their mistresses – that affection needs to be demonstrated, too. Read more

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Are married people happier? Are parents?

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Happy Family Hugging Each OtherResearch tells us that married people are happier than the unmarried, that is, they’re happier than those who are single, separated, divorced, widowed, or simply living together. This doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a cause and effect relationship going on here: Get married, be happy. It could be that happy people are more inclined to marry in the first place and that we enjoy staying married to a happy spouse.

While studies (PDF) find that marriage increases a sense of “well-being” (another term for happiness), that state of mind may be only temporary. After a few years, bride and groom seem to return to the level of happiness they enjoyed before the big day.

As Derek Bok points out in The Politics of Happiness, conflicting answers to questions about marriage and happiness may result from observing two different groups: Those who become happier with the years and those whose marriages go sour. When you combine the two, the results may very well cancel each other out.

The end of a marriage. The health benefits of marriage.

So we don’t have a definitive answer to the question “Are married people happier?” What is certain, however, is that the end of a marriage – whether through separation, divorce, or death – is followed by a sharp decline in happiness. On a scale of 100, the average drop in happiness following divorce is 5 points and, following separation, the drop is 8 points. Why the greater unhappiness with separation? Perhaps, as Bok suggests, those who divorce were unhappier with their marriage to begin with, so they now feel some relief. Or perhaps the separated are still adjusting to the change, whereas the divorced have had more time to adapt.

We do know that married people live longer. One study (PDF), for example, found that the impact of marriage on how long we live was much greater than the impact of how much we earn. The longevity benefit for men can be quantified as equivalent to a lifetime of not smoking. The longevity benefits for married women are only half as much as for men. Hmmm.

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Babies are individuals: Don’t fret the milestones

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Nice post on Slate about how developmental milestones can be meaningless and create needless worry.

A little less than a century ago, Arnold Gesell, a developmental scientist at Yale, proposed that motor skills were related to the maturing of the brain. This led to the pronouncement that all infants would pass through the same steps of development – sitting, walking, talking – in the same order and at the same time.

Babies are remarkably adaptable

It turns out that the theory was just plain wrong. Not only were the developmental milestones inaccurate, but so was the fundamental assumption that muscular activity is strictly a function of how the brain matures.

Human beings have a remarkable ability to adapt to their environment. That’s what has allowed humans to thrive in climates from the tropics to the Arctic. Babies develop in response to the culture and environment in which they’re raised.

One study found that mothers of different cultural backgrounds, living in the same city at the same time, could accurately predict the development of motor skills in their infants, even though the milestones for each group differed by several months.

A total of 124 mothers from three cultural groups living in the same British city were asked to give the ages at which they expected their one-month-old infants to achieve three motor milestones. Jamaican mothers expected their infants to sit and walk much earlier than their English and Indian counterparts. The Indian mothers gave later estimates for crawling than those of the other two groups. The actual ages at which the abilities were attained closely reflected the cultural differences in expectations between the Jamaican and English mothers. Jamaican mothers were particularly accurate in predicting sitting age.

Here’s a trailer from the movie Babies, which follows four babies from four different cultures from birth to their first steps.

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Evidence of successful aging

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Smiling older womanA personals ad from a recent New York Review of Books:

WOMAN, 79 (LOOKS 78), Upper West Side pseudo-intellectual, Europe 4 years, wants man’s company occasionally for chamber concerts, lectures, meals. Platonic.

I’d love to meet this woman. I imagine her life as a Henry James novel written by Oscar Wilde.

Related posts:
Advertising for love in Victorian times

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Carl Jung's Red Book, an illustrated chronicle of horror and madness

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Carl Jung The Red Book-cover

Source: Amazon

Anyone who has an interest in Carl Jung will want to read this New York Times article on the upcoming publication of Jung’s The Red Book. For most of the last century, the very existence of this work has been only a rumor.
Jung wrote this illustrated journal between the ages of 39 and 55 and kept it locked in a cupboard. The controversial nature of the subject matter prompted his descendants to keep it there after he died in 1961 at age 85. It was transferred to a safe deposit box in the underground vault of a Swiss bank in 1984 and remained there for another 23 years. Jung’s relatives allowed almost no one to view the book. Jung himself commented: “To the superficial observer it will appear like madness.”

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Things that make you go "Oooohhhh!" Why we can’t resist babies

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angelina-jolieMascara, eye-liner, and shadow can make the eyes stand out and look much larger than they actually are. Lipstick can make the lips look rounder and puffier. Why do we find this attractive? Properly applied, eye make-up and lipstick will emphasize facial features that make an adult look more like a baby. And we are irresistibly attracted to the faces of babies.

What is it about the way babies look that makes them so cute?

babyIn addition to those eyes that are extra large compared to the size of their heads, babies’ foreheads are large for their faces, and their heads are large relative to their bodies. They have soft, round, non-angular features. Their cheeks are large and puffy, with no visible cheekbones. Their little hands and fingers, and the joints on their stubby arms and legs, are soft and dimpled.

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Want your wallet returned? Include a baby pic

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wallet-with-baby-picIf you want to increase the chances recovering a lost wallet, be sure to include baby photos.

Researchers set up an experiment in which 240 wallets were left on the streets of Edinburgh. Some of the wallets had photos, either a baby, a cute puppy, a family snapshot, or an elderly couple. One group of wallets contained a card indicating a recent charity donation. The last group was a control: No photos, no cards. None of the wallets contained money. All of the wallets contained a return address.

42% of the wallets were returned. Did the photos make a difference? Here are the results for the returned wallets:

  • Photo of infant – 88% return rate
  • Photo of puppy – 53% returned
  • Family snapshot – 48%
  • Elderly couple – 28%
  • Charity card – 20%
  • Control group – 15%

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How cats control their humans

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cat-asking-for-foodNever underestimate a cat. Researchers in Britain have analyzed a special “meow” many cats use when they want something right now: Food, toys, an open door. It’s called a “solicitation purr” and combines a high-frequency cry within an otherwise pleasant purr. Insistent meowing might be ignored as annoying, but by embedding the high-frequency sound in a purr, cats can convey a subtle sense of urgency.

According to Dr. Karen McComb, the lead author of the study, “Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom.”

The experiment was difficult to design, since cats won’t exhibit this behavior on demand. Cat owners learned to record the sounds their cats made when asking for food. Normal purring in a non-solicitation context was also recorded. Test subjects, who listened to the recordings, included individuals who had never owned cats. When asked to evaluate what they heard, the ‘solicitation’ purrs were consistently identified as more urgent and less pleasant.

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The stages of life

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Laurent Champoussin Stages of Life

Photo by Laurent Champoussin

Click photo for larger view.


I’m currently watching a series of lectures by Malcolm W. Watson on Theories of Human Development. Watson talks mostly about theories of childhood, such as Freud’s outdated theory of the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages. The discussion of Eric Erikson, however, follows stages of development through an entire life. (The lectures are available from The Teaching Company on DVD, CD, and by audio download.)
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