Westermarck Effect
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Westermarck Effect
The Westermarck effect, also known as reverse sexual imprinting, is a psychological hypothesis that people tend not to be attracted to peers with whom they lived like siblings before age six. This hypothesis was first proposed by Finnish anthropologist Edvard Westermarck in his book ''The History of Human Marriage'' (1891) as one explanation for the incest taboo. Research since Westermarck The Westermarck effect has achieved some empirical support.''Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo: The State of Knowledge at the Turn of the Century'', Arthur P. Wolf and William H. Durham (Editors), Stanford University Press, 2004, . Introduction Proponents point to evidence from the Israeli kibbutz system, from the Chinese Shim-pua marriage customs, and from closely related families. In the case of the Israeli kibbutzim (collective farms), children were reared somewhat communally in peer groups, based on age, not biological relations. A study of the marriage patterns of these children ...
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Genetic Sexual Attraction
Genetic sexual attraction is a concept in which a strong sexual attraction may develop between close blood relatives who first meet as adults. There is no evidence for genetic sexual attraction being an actual phenomenon, and the hypothesis is regarded as pseudoscience. Background The term was popularized in the United States in the late 1980s by Barbara Gonyo, the founder of Truth Seekers in Adoption, a Chicago-based support group for adoptees and their new-found relatives. Gonyo first heard the term used during an American Adoption Congress conference in the early 1980s. She developed sexual feelings for her son when she met him after he was adopted away, but he did not want to be part of any such contact. Because many traits are at least partially determined by genetics, genetic sexual attraction is presumed (according to those who believe in the concept) to occur as a result of genetic relatives meeting as adults, typically as a consequence of adoption. However, this is a v ...
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Incest
Incest ( ) is human sexual activity between family members or close relatives. This typically includes sexual activity between people in consanguinity (blood relations), and sometimes those related by affinity (marriage or stepfamily), adoption, or lineage. It is strictly forbidden and considered immoral in most societies, and can lead to an increased risk of genetic disorders in children. The incest taboo is one of the most widespread of all cultural taboos, both in present and in past societies. Most modern societies have laws regarding incest or social restrictions on closely consanguineous marriages. In societies where it is illegal, consensual adult incest is seen by some as a victimless crime. Some cultures extend the incest taboo to relatives with no consanguinity such as milk-siblings, step-siblings, and adoptive siblings, albeit sometimes with less intensity. Third-degree relatives (such as half-aunt, half-nephew, first cousin) on average have 12.5% common genetic heri ...
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Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection, non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits, or noise. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and the liver, is common in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking in psychology, arguing that just as the heart evolved to pump blood, and the liver evolved to detoxify poisons, there is modularity of mind in that different psychological mechanisms evolved to solve different adaptive problems. These evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent p ...
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Child Development
Child development involves the Human development (biology), biological, developmental psychology, psychological and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the conclusion of adolescence. Childhood is divided into 3 stages of life which include early childhood, middle childhood, and late childhood (preadolescence). Early childhood typically ranges from infancy to the age of 6 years old. During this period, development is significant, as many of life's milestones happen during this time period such as first words, learning to crawl, and learning to walk. There is speculation that middle childhood/preadolescence or ages 6–12 are the most crucial years of a child's life. Adolescence is the stage of life that typically starts around the major onset of puberty, with markers such as menarche and spermarche, typically occurring at 12–13 years of age. It has been defined as ages 10 to 19 by the World Health Organization. In the course of development, the individu ...
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Current Anthropology
''Current Anthropology'' is a peer-reviewed anthropology academic journal published by the University of Chicago Press for the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Founded in 1959 by the anthropologist Sol Tax1907-1995. ''Current Anthropology'' is one of very few journals that publishes research across all sub-disciplines of anthropology, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, physical and linguistic anthropology as well as ethnology, ethnohistory, archaeology, prehistory and folklore. Laurence Ralph of Princeton University replaced Mark Aldenderfer (University of California, Merced) as the editor-in-chief of the journal on January 1, 2019. Ralph is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. According to the ''Journal Citation Reports'', the journal has a 2017 i ...
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The Journal Of Psychohistory
The ''Journal of Psychohistory'' (,) is a journal established in 1973 in the field of psychohistory, edited by Lloyd deMause and published by the Institute for Psychohistory (IP) . The journal has been originally published as ''History of Childhood Quarterly'' and since 1976 as ''The Journal of Psychohistory''. The journal aims to provide "a new psychological view of world events — past and present". The journal is published quarterly and contains subjects such as childhood and the family (especially child abuse), psychobiography with extensive childhood material, political psychology and psychological studies of anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi .... References External links Journal home page Psychoanalysis journals Sociology journals Works ab ...
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Nature (journal)
''Nature'' is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, ''Nature'' features peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. ''Nature'' was one of the world's most cited scientific journals by the Science Edition of the 2019 ''Journal Citation Reports'' (with an ascribed impact factor of 42.778), making it one of the world's most-read and most prestigious academic journals. , it claimed an online readership of about three million unique readers per month. Founded in autumn 1869, ''Nature'' was first circulated by Norman Lockyer and Alexander Macmillan as a public forum for scientific innovations. The mid-20th century facilitated an editorial expansion for the journal; ''Nature'' redoubled its efforts in exp ...
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Oedipus Complex
The Oedipus complex (also spelled Œdipus complex) is an idea in psychoanalytic theory. The complex is an ostensibly universal phase in the life of a young boy in which, to try to immediately satisfy basic desires, he unconsciously wishes to have sex with his mother and disdains his father for having sex and being satisfied before him. Sigmund Freud introduced the idea in ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' (1899), and coined the term in his paper ''A Special Type of Choice of Object made by Men'' (1910). Freud later developed the ideas of castration anxiety and penis envy to refer to the differences of the sexes in their experience of the complex, especially as their observations appear to become cautionary; an incest taboo results from these cautions. Subsequently, according to sexual difference, a ''positive'' Oedipus complex refers to a child's sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and hatred for the same-sex parent, while a ''negative'' Oedipus complex refers to the desire ...
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Kibbutz Communal Child Rearing And Collective Education
Communal child rearing was the method of education that prevailed in the collective communities in Israel (kibbutz; plural: kibbutzim), until about the end of the 1980s. Collective education started on the day of birth and went on until adulthood. At the time it was considered a natural outcome of the principle of equality, which was part and parcel of the kibbutz life. The education authority of the kibbutz was responsible for the rearing and well-being of all the children born on the kibbutz, taking care of their food, clothing, and medical treatment. Everybody received the same share of everything. Parents were not involved economically in the upbringing of their children. Children's lives had three focal points: the children's house, parents' house, and the whole kibbutz. They lived in the children's house, where they had communal sleeping arrangements and visited their parents for 2–3 hours a day. Non-selectivity was a fundamental principle of collective education; eve ...
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Accidental Incest
Accidental incest is sexual activity or marriage between persons who were unaware of a family relationship between them which would be considered incestuous. The laws of many jurisdictions void incestuous marriages, even if entered into without awareness of the kinship. If an incestuous relationship is suspected, DNA testing may be used. Some jurisdictions permit offspring of IVF donations access to donation records or to adoption records. Causes People may be unaware of a kinship relationship between them in a number of circumstances. For example, artificial insemination with an anonymous donated sperm may result in offspring being unaware of any biological relations, such as paternity or half siblings. To reduce the likelihood of accidental incest, fertility clinics usually limit the number of times that a donor's sperm may be used. Some countries have laws limiting the number of children a donor can father, while others limit sperm donations based on family numbers to enable ...
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Sexual Imprinting
In psychology and ethology, imprinting is any kind of phase-sensitive learning (learning occurring at a particular age or a particular life stage) that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behaviour. It was first used to describe situations in which an animal or person learns the characteristics of some stimulus, which is therefore said to be "imprinted" onto the subject. Imprinting is hypothesized to have a critical period. Filial imprinting The best-known form of imprinting is ''filial imprinting'', in which a young animal narrows its social preferences to an object (typically a parent) as a result of exposure to that object. It is most obvious in nidifugous birds, which imprint on their parents and then follow them around. It was first reported in domestic chickens, by Sir Thomas More in 1516 as described in his treatise ''Utopia'', 350years earlier than by the 19th-century amateur biologist Douglas Spalding. It was rediscovered by the early ethologist ...
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