When it comes to your desires when it comes to a partner…

What you ‘say’?

Isn’t always what you get.

[via Science] Stating that you don’t care if you land a partner who is “hot” or “sexy” is relatively commonplace. But what people say they want and what they actually want are often two very different things when it comes to romantic attraction.

However, a new methodology that measures people’s implicit, split-second responses gets around this problem. Research from Northwestern University and Texas A&M University measures whether people’s implicit preferences actually predict how much you like the hotties.

“People will readily tell you what they value in a romantic partner,” said Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern and co-author of the study. “But study after study shows that those preferences don’t predict whom daters are actually attracted to when they meet flesh-and-blood partners. Now we can get under the hood with this quirky methodology to see what people actually prefer in live-interaction settings.”

Paul W. Eastwick, assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M University and lead author of the study, says that the findings raise questions about the way we determine what people want in a partner. [Read More]

And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

It proves people are more likely to act on their true inner desires?

As opposed to repressing…

Which?

Not a bad thing.

[via io9] 10 Ways of (Semi) Scientifically Quantifying Desire

Though desire and its associated effects – lust, love, aggression, ambition – are generally the purview of poets, that hasn’t stopped generations of thinkers from trying to explain it scientifically (and pseudoscientifically). Can desire really be described using the scientific method? Here are ten ways that researchers have answered that question with a resounding “yes.”

1. Psychoanalysis: Desire is structured like a steam engine
Though many philosophers and writers addressed the nature of desire before the rise of psychoanalysis in the nineteenth century, almost none of them proposed to subject this intense human emotion to the rigors of the scientific method. Sigmund Freud and his colleagues, for all their failings, bravely set out to prove that even our feelings could be studied rationally – and this radical idea led directly to areas like neuroscience and cognitive science today. Long before fMRI machines and self-help books, Freud proposed that desire functions like the steam in an engine. If you block one exit valve, the steam will find another way out, even if it cracks the whole engine open. Freud believed that sexual repression acted as a block on exit valves, and that caused all manner of weird symptoms as people tried to unleash their desire in other ways. He believed that some of these repressed people let off steam by becoming fetishists, sexualizing objects like shoes instead of the bodies they’d been told it was naughty to desire. Other repressed people, he thought, released their desire by engaging in obsessive behaviors, developing neurotic tics, and blurting out those proverbial Freudian slips.
The upshot: you can never get rid of desire, only displace it. [Read More - More Scientific Explanations For Desire]

Especially considering?

Freud’s proposed consequences if you do.