Red hot

Dating's racial landscape; and write your way to health

(Wesley Bedrosian for the Boston Globe)

Red hot

SOME QUICK ADVICE: if you want to be sexy, try red. In multiple experiments on college students, psychologists found that red has a strong influence on sexual attraction. Men were more attracted to pictures of women with red backgrounds or red shirts and were even willing to spend more money on the women. Men were unaware of this effect and didn't rate these women as more likable, kind, or intelligent. The authors also found "preliminary evidence that a display of red on a man indeed increases his attractiveness to women." Women did not rate other women in red as more attractive, suggesting that red is acting as a primal mating signal.

Elliot, A. and Niesta, D., "Romantic Red: Red Enhances Men's Attraction to Women," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (November 2008).

Dating's racial landscape

DESPITE ALL THE attention being paid to breaking down racial and gender barriers in politics, strong barriers persist in our romantic lives. A study of the Internet dating profiles of white people found they had clear, though varied, racial preferences. Among whites who expressed racial preferences, women were more likely to exclude minorities (especially Asians) than men, though men were more likely to exclude blacks. Overweight white women were far less likely to exclude blacks. There were also geographical differences: white men in New York were far less likely to exclude blacks than white men in Atlanta; white women in Chicago were far more likely to exclude Asians than their counterparts in Atlanta.

Feliciano, C. et al., "Gendered Racial Exclusion among White Internet Daters," Social Science Research (forthcoming).

Write your way to health

SOME RESEARCH HAS found that expressive writing has positive effects on both mind and body. Two psychologists decided to see if even a fleeting episode of writing could make a difference. College students were given just two minutes on two consecutive days to write about a traumatic experience, a positive experience, or a prosaic topic. A month later, the students were asked to report symptoms of ill health. Students who had written about emotionally charged experiences - either positive or negative - reported fewer health complaints than the others.

Burton, C. and King, L., "Effects of (Very) Brief Writing on Health: The Two-Minute Miracle," British Journal of Health Psychology (February 2008).

The case for pretty good

PRACTICE MAY MAKE perfect, but perfectionism may not. Psychologists in Britain gave students a timed proofreading test. Students with perfectionist standards tended to find errors even where there were none and were less accurate in a given amount of time. Moreover, perfectionist students who generally feel that they underperform tended to be more cautious and to underreport errors. Perfectionists take note: relax and you may do better.

Stoeber, J. and Eysenck, M., "Perfectionism and Efficiency: Accuracy, Response Bias, and Invested Time in Proof-Reading Performance," Journal of Research in Personality (forthcoming).

The inside man

RUMORS OF THE death of the old boy network may be exaggerated. Three finance professors at the University of Michigan examined insider trading records for public companies over a 30-year period to see how women executives compared to men. Although all executives tended to profit when buying their own company's stock, men did better on average than women in the same position. This difference was not explained by greater confidence, risk-taking, or opportunism on the part of men. Instead, the data suggest that it's because men seem to have better access to inside information - a leg up on networking with the other (mostly male) executives.

Bharath, S. et al., "Are Women Executives Disadvantaged?" University of Michigan (September 2008).

Kevin Lewis is an Ideas columnist. He can be reached at kevin.lewis.ideas@gmail.com.