Hugs and kisses or XOXO is a term used for expressing sincerity, faith, love, or good friendship at the end of a written letter, email or SMS text message.
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How could Veronica know enough from that one kiss to give up on a relationship that could have lasted a lifetime? When people push their lips together, they appear to exchange an enormous amount of biological information—and research says there is a very good chance that women are covertly picking up pheromones and genetic information that might inform their decision. In a landmark study , for example, Claus Wedekind of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland found that women prefer the scents of men whose MHC major histocompatibility complex genes are different from their own—which would produce offspring with stronger immune systems.
From this perspective, kissing is just sniffing in disguise. According to a paper , as people kiss on the lips their brain activity spikes and harmonizes.
In fact, the degree of synchronization between canoodling brains correlates with the self-reported quality of the kiss. The ubiquity of romantic sniffing suggests that it has some evolutionary function. For decades, researchers assumed that evolution hard-wired human lovers to kiss on the lips.
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In the s, British zoologist Desmond Morris suggested that kissing might have arisen from the primate practice of a mother chewing food and then pushing it with her tongue into the mouth of an infant. There are plenty of ways for courting lovers to synchronize brain activity and collect subterranean genetic information. What are those conditions?
There are no similar studies of same-sex couples kissing. A study ran two experiments to find out how important a kiss was to deciding whether to move ahead with a partner. When examined in light of previous findings that women are the more selective sex during the mate assessment process, and are particularly attuned to, and discriminating about, cues signaling superior genetic fitness, this result is highly suggestive of the conclusion that kissing may convey some mate quality information.
Male-dominant chimpanzees kiss much more often than female-dominant bonobos, says anthropologist Amy Parish, although kisses can mean many things, including submission. People are nearly twice as likely to lean right instead of left when puckering up, according to a study published in a issue of Nature. Lips are extraordinarily sensitive. Women sometimes kiss each other in front of men in part to "try out" alternative sexual identities, according to a paper.
The Subversive Power of the Kiss
A study documented "dispositional proneness to disgust" when heterosexual people see same-sex couples kiss—and that disgust was associated with seeing homosexuality as an immoral choice as opposed to a part of identity. Kissing boosts testosterone in a woman and oxytocin in a man, which helps him bond with her—and also to stay away from her rivals, says a study. While humans seem to have always had ways to get in close and sniff prospective partners, many pre-kissing cultures did not give brides a whole lot of choice.
Amy Parish, an anthropologist based at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, thinks that kissing might be one way to hold onto mates in a voluntary—and therefore unstable—family situation. Examples of complex and stratified societies range from ancient Babylon and Egypt to the Aztecs and the Incas, to our virtually all present-day nations. In this view, choice triggers anxiety, especially when other people are freer to make their own choices about you , both before and during marriage.
Kissing—the multilayered sensory experience it offers—is a behavioral adaptation to stimulate desire and loyalty in a socially powerful male. For many modern women, it seems, kissing is an expression of power, not of powerlessness. Two researchers are watching the transformation of sexual and marital relationships in the Middle East.
There is speculation on the Internet from at least one original source that the 'O' is of North American descent: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Look up xoxo in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. For other uses, see XOXO disambiguation.
Hugs and kisses - Wikipedia
For the Swedish film, see Hugs and Kisses film. Not to be confused with Kisses and Hugs. Archived from the original on July 12, The custom goes back to the early Christian era, when a cross mark or "X" was the same as a sworn oath. The cross referred to the cross of Calvary and the first letter of the Greek word for Christ, Xristos. Archived from the original on October 31, This tertiary source reuses information from other sources but does not name them.
Retrieved 19 March In The Joys of Yiddish by Leo Rosten , it is noted that illiterate immigrants or those who did not know Roman-English letters would generally sign entry forms with an "X" but Jews preferred an "O" to avoid making something that looked like a cross.