Human Behavior!

Human behavior psychology is a very complex topic, no matter how you try to discuss it or even attempt
an explanation of how and why we function the way we do! According to a few well-known psychologists
"Myers-Briggs" and "Keirsey" there are about sixteen distinct personality types, which defines our
personality. And somewhere mixed into all of this information they can tell us if we are either a
extroverted or introverted type of person. You know the "Mouse" and "Lion" type's.
If you want to learn more about your own personality, here would be a good place to start looking.
http://www.keirsey.com/ Note! Be sure to make your way back here and finish the rest of the review. We'll
leave the lights on.
Now! That you're back, you can see why we're not going into any great length, accept to say, its well
beyond the scope of what we are doing here today.

Nevertheless, after all the things we do and don't know about human behavior and our different
personalities and anxieties. Ranking very high on our list of anxieties, we find things like, the fear of death
and taxes and many more things we humans fear. And very high on the list of fears we humans have is
the fear of "Speaking in public."
Its important to note that no two people will react the same to any given event that may be on there list of
things they fear. So you may also have many of the same fears they do and didn't realize it! But a good
number of us do have one thing in common, that is when we suddenly find ourselves thrust into the lime
light, so to speak, facing a group of people with the task of presenting a report or a presentation of some
type, will or I should say we typically will go immediately into and experience various of stages of stage
fright or even experience an anxiety attack at the mere mention of public speaking.
This condition can range anywhere from just having a very mild case of the jitters and being a little
nervous about speaking or it can effect a person up to a point where the person is rendered completely
unable to speak a word or they may even pass out cold!
Why? Because it is considered a normal behavioral trait that we humans all have. We usually exhibit
these types of symptoms, plus a few more, when we are suddenly taken outside of our own comfort zone.
Once we're forced outside of our comfort box, we immediately begin looking for ways to return to the
relative safety and comfort of our own little world. First we begin by "Visualizing" the worst and then
verbalizing to ourselves, saying things like " Why me, No way, I would rather die first, than speak before a
group of people." Or am just going to embarrass myself, because I do not have a clue where to start or
what to say, these are just a few of the many excuses we will use to retreat with if possible back to our
own little space we call our comfort zone, where we are in control again of our non-treating environment.
All of us at times have experienced these very same feeling and have made similar excuses in the hopes
it would keep us from doing something we didn't want to do or we felt uncomfortable about doing. What
we are really saying to ourselves is that we lack self-confidence in ourselves.

A reality check is in order here! Many may consider yourself as an expert in your chosen field, but the
simple truth of the matter is just because you now have decided to become an instructor, lecturer,
speaker or teacher in some form in your chosen field, that alone in themselves does not shield you or me
from experiencing or showing signs of even the most basic human emotions, such as nervousness, stage
fright or anxiety. In some cases experiencing these emotions are enough to make even the most
experienced amongst us want to run away and hide.

Those who are seeking to become a instructor/trainer should have a working knowledge of the Principles
of Educational and Human Behavior Psychology. However, this is not a mandatory requirement you must
do before you can teach others. Nevertheless, taking on the role as a professional trainer and being
familiar with the terms and principles of teaching others is, anyone considering entering the training world
should have a good working knowledge of the principles used. The better you understand how we
humans function when it comes to learning and how we learn and what motivate us to learn, the more
successful you will be as an instructor/trainer. However, for now only the areas that deals directly with the
learning process will be briefly discussed here today.
First things first, what is a definition of learning? We all know we begin the learning process the day we
are born, and it continues until the day we die. What happens to a person when they are learning? What
process does he or she go through? (I have to say at this point, we are still learning how we learn things,
it's still an on going learning process.)
We mainly learn new things because of our individual experiences, which may change our way of
thinking, feeling, doing, or seeing the world around us. So basically, it would be safe to say learning is a
change in behavior as the result of an experience. This change or learning, can be openly observed or it
can be in the mind as a feeling, which is hard to see at times.
The characteristics of learning, learning concepts and generalizations, the laws of learning, factors that
affect learning, and the transfer of learning are the many things that we need to understand as trainers.
The more we do understand the learning process it only increases our chances of creating an effective
learning environment and becoming a successful trainer.

Let's work our way through some of these learning processes by starting with:
CHARACTERISTICS OF LEARNING!
Most people have a very definite ideals of what they want to do and achieve. A student brings his or her
goals into the classroom. Some of these goals may be very personal and some they will share with you
and their classmates. A student will learn best what will help them meet his or her goals. The learner's
goal or purpose is of chief importance in the act of learning. A good instructor tries to relate learning
material to the student's goal.
Learning comes through experience. Learning is a very individual process and must be done by the
student themselves . . . the instructor cannot do this for them. Research has concluded that learning and
knowledge is a part of a person. A person knowledge is gained from his or her experiences, and no two
people react to the experience the same way. Each learns different things depending on how the situation
affects their different needs. Previous experience conditions a person to respond to some things and to
ignore others. Some experiences involve the individual as a whole, while others involve only their eyes,
ears, and memory.

There are a number of factors in combination that affect the way in which an individual learns new
information.
Major factors contributing to your learning style include:
• Sensory Modalities: Auditory, Visually, and Kinesthetic
• Reasoning Types: deductive, inductive
• Learning Environment: interpersonal (working with others), interpersonal (working alone)
Sensory Modalities:
The Senses:
Auditory-Listening:
Prefer verbal instructions to written ones.
Is comfortable using spoken reinforcement mentally as well as aloud?

Visually-Seeing:
Reading-Visualizing
Does well with reading comprehension?
Prefers maps to verbal directions.

Kinesthetic-Moving:
Touching - hands-on
Writing things down clarifies thoughts.
Likes to draw pictures.
Enjoys working with hands-likes lab classes.
Reasoning Type:
Deductive reasoning:
Studies premise first, then draw conclusions.
Sees big picture first, then looks for details.
Inductive reasoning:
Likes to see examples first when learning new information before developing an overview.
Prefers to learn game rules as it is played, not beforehand.

Learning Environment:
Interpersonal: working alone.
Likes to solve problems by oneself.
Does not like to work or study in groups?

Interpersonal: working with others.

Prefers discussion with family and friends before decision is made.
Likes to do assignments and study with others.

Do know how do you take in your information? To determine which methods you prefer, turn to "Appendix
A" in the back of your training manual and take a few minutes to complete a learning inventory sheet. The
information from the learning inventory is a brief inventory to assist you in determining your own style of
learning. Use the information from this user friendly inventory to discover your own learning strengths
which will help you maximize information gathering.
When everyone is finished let's all take a ten minute break!
Now your chance to take a break also. Back to the top or you may continue on, it's your choice!

Now, that you have an indication of your own style of learning, you can see that as an trainer you must
provide to your students with experiences that are meaningful, varied and appropriate to the situation. It's
not as easy as it sounds, but every effort on your part to provide an learning environment where the
student can use their individual learning styles pay's off big both for your students and you. However, it
requires you to work at it, you need to be creative, innovative, and challenging to your students.
For instance, by repetitious drill, a student can learn a long laundry list of principles, for example
leadership. But the list is useless if one can't apply them correctly in real life situations. A person can do
this if their learning experience has been both extensive and meaningful and they understand how to
apply the principles. The learning experience which challenges the student requires involvement with
feelings, thoughts, memory of past experiences, and physical activity is much better than just requiring
the student to memorize a long list of things

Learning is a multifaceted process too. An instructor or teacher who thinks his or her job is only to train a
student's body or memory is wasting their own and as well as the students time. Students may learn
much more than the instructor planned or intended, because, as humans, they do not leave their thinking
mind or feelings at home. As an example, a student studying Aircraft Maintenance may be learning to
perform a check on a particular piece of equipment. However, in the process, they are learning new
concepts and generalizations. The student may also be learning new uses for the principles of
electronics. And may become more interested in black boxes and learn something about handling
electronic equipment in general.

This experience results in changes in the students way of seeing, thinking, feeling, reacting and doing,
even though the instructor's primary objective was to teach the student how to read a multi meter.
Students in a classroom may also be learning cooperation, elements of good dynamics, and good and
bad attitudes about life in general. The list is endless and is sometimes referred to as incidental, but it still
has a great impact on the learning situation.

Learning is an active process. Never assume anything just because it is obvious to you. All too often, after
an instructor has taught a lesson many times in the past, he or she will teach the subject strictly out of
habit. Instead of watching their students, he or she becomes a robot, who walks into the classroom and
begins talking. As if they had just push there on button, and the words begin to flow non-stop, but their
minds are elsewhere.

How can this be avoided? Keep everyone active in the class, the students as well as the instructor. The
more active a student is involved in the class, the greater their chances are for both learning and
remembering. (If a student is to learn, they must react and respond. They are not a sponge that will soak
up knowledge like water. The response may be outward or inward.) Since learning is a change in
behavior as a result of experience, the interaction between students and instructor must be active. This
action can be either answering the instructor questions, or working a practice exercise. The responsibility
of creating active student participation lies with the instructor.
http://www.dynamicflight.com/avcfibook/learning_process/

http://www.adulthumanbehavior.com/index.html e2 ung sa baba adult human

bahavior

Understanding and Resolving Dysfunctional Adult Human

Behavior
Most if not all people experience some degree of dysfunctional adult human
behavior, specifically anxiety, depression and relationship dysfunction.

We can be anxious and not be aware of it. We can live with a certain level of depression and not
know it. Our relationships can be dysfunctional in a way that we do not understand. Despite our
lack of awareness all of these conditions can and do dramatically affect the quality of our life. If
we have become aware we might not understand the nature of the condition that plagues us. If
we understand it, we might not know how to overcome it.
This site is dedicated to the explication of these different disorders and to facilitating their
resolution.
Commonsense definitions and numerous specific examples of each behavior are given. The
examples are often real, personal accounts of the experience of the author. There are also
accounts of the experience and behavior of others which the author has observed. Regular
updates in the form of additional examples and further analysis are provided.

The Essence and Nature of Anxiety

Anxiety is the fear, dread, or anticipation that something undesirable, bad, or awful will or can
happen to us. It is the feeling that we are vulnerable and that we are not safe. When we are
anxious, we expect and anticipate that something bad is about to happen or could happen even if
we are not aware of what it is that we anticipate.Sometimes our anxiety has a specific focus. We
fear something specific, such as being trapped in an elevator or falling from a height. At other
times we are not able to identify the precipitant or immediate cause of our anxiety. We have a
general feeling of being at risk or vulnerable or we might have a sense of fear but not be fully
aware of what it is that we fear.The nature of the potential harm we dread is often not physical in
nature such as an injury or death that might occur from falling from a height. Instead we might
fear emotional harm or loss of sense of self, rejection, or disapproval. The expectation of harm of
any kind can provoke anxiety.
The Symptoms of Anxiety
The anticipation of a specific threat and the general feeling of not being safe both lead to
common and naturally caused symptoms . The number and severity of symptoms depends on the
degree of anxiety that we are experiencing. We might feel troubled or frightened. We might feel
tension inwardly, such as in the form of tightness in our chest or in our body in general. It is
almost as if we are physically bracing ourselves for something bad to happen. We might feel
shaky or we might actually shake, such as when our hands tremble. We might perspire when we
are not exerting ourselves physically. We might worry about the thing which we dread or we
might tend to worry excessively about things in general. We might have difficulty concentrating
on what we are doing because we are distracted by the things we fear, such as when we cannot
concentrate on our work. We might feel as though we cannot catch our breath. We might
experience pain or discomfort because we tense our muscles in preparation for something bad to
happen. Because many of these symptoms are physical in nature, it is understandable that we
might think we are ill or even that we might die.
The Nature of Panic
Sometimes the fear or dread that we experience is at such a pitch that we experience many or all
of these symptoms at once. When this occurs, our anxiety or fear is called panic. This is perhaps
the most distressing form of anxiety. Episodes of panic are usually brief in duration but they can
reoccur.It is not difficult to understand why panic is usually brief in duration. When we panic,
we fear that something bad is imminent. In a relatively short period of time however, we realize,
either on a conscious or subconscious level, that nothing bad has happened or perhaps will
happen in the immediate future. Even though we feel panic, there is no apparent reason to panic,
and our panic subsides. The belief that nothing bad will happen however is short-lived since we
still expect something bad to happen and we experience panic again. This cycle of panic and
relief from panic can and often does continue.

Anxiety and Fashion

I present the next example because I think it is funny and we might as well laugh while we are
discussing anxiety.
I decided long ago that I do not have any sense of fashion or taste when it comes to clothing and
shoes and anything else that falls under the category of fashion. Fortunately my wife and
daughter have a great sense of what looks good and so I almost always rely on them to advise
me.
One day however I decided to venture out on my own to buy a pair of shoes. I found some shoes
in one store and I liked the way they looked (what do I know?) and they were on sale and so I
bought them. I realized after the purchase that I might be wrong because I am often wrong in
these things and I began to feel anxious that I had made a terrible mistake. This was my anxiety.
This mistake could prove to be embarrassing. I should have returned them immediately but
instead I decided to wear them when we visited our daughter who was then living in
Washington, D.C.
There is an interesting dynamic in our family in terms of interpersonal interaction. My wife and
daughter notice everything. They are extraordinarily observant. They may not comment on what
they notice (because they are also extraordinarily polite) but they notice everything and I know
this.
I, on the other hand, am not observant at all except when it comes to the behavior of other
people, including their non verbal behavior. I have always been observant of the behavior of
others in this sense.
Because of these dynamics, much can be communicated in our family without saying a word.
You just have to be ready for it. It can be fun.
In this particular case I wore the shoes in question while we went to visit our daughter, who was
living in Washington, D.C. at the time. My wife had already made no comment about my shoes.
This was not a good sign. My wife’s lack of response strongly suggested that I made a bad
choice. Nevertheless I tried to postpone final judgment until I saw my daughter’s reaction.
We met our daughter outside the hospital complex where she was working for the summer. It is
always good to see her and we all hugged each other before she took us on a tour of the hospital
and laboratory where she worked. As we were walking along the sidewalk back to her lab I
noticed her glance down at my shoes. She said nothing but she had a very slight pained
expression on her face. Like her mother, she made no comment. The message was clear. I chose
badly when it came to the new shoes. I did not need to ask. I did not even want to ask. If I had
asked, she would have given a very polite response which would have made me feel worse. I had
all the information that I needed.
I had been anxious about my choice after making the purchase. I had been more anxious after the
lack of response from my wife. And now I was even more anxious after noticing the slight
pained expression on my daughter’s face. Not only had I made a bad choice but now I had to
suffer the possibility that others would think that I looked foolish. I had already learned from my
two most reliable sources that I looked foolish. Everyone we met would now notice my weird
looking shoes. Not only had two of the most important people in my life disapproved in their
own subtle way but I had to worry what everyone else in Washington D. C. would think. I
became extremely self conscious, even though I knew I was blowing this issue out of proportion.
I was about to meet a number of professional people and scientists. I did not look professional. I
looked goofy. I had goofy looking shoes. I struggled with this angst all day and I changed my
shoes as soon as we got back to our hotel room. Nothing was ever said but I experienced it all
nevertheless.
Even though this is a very small, even silly issue in life, those of us who are anxious know how
awful it is to live in such an unsettled way. We are concerned about what other people will think
of us, especially in the areas of life in which we are insecure. For me, fashion is one of those
areas. I do not understand fashion and I do not have any eye for fashion. If I have to dress for a
social engagement, it may take me an hour to figure out what to wear. If my wife and daughter
are not available to guide me, I become very anxious. Even when I ask them their opinion, I have
to discern whether they are being polite or honest. I ask them, “Are you being polite or honest?”
We have had this discussion a countless number of times.Not long ago I bought more shoes over
the internet. I had not learned my lesson apparently. I did not consult anyone. I received the
shoes in the mail and could not decide if they were acceptable or not. I sent them back with a
note to the seller that I had to consult with my daughter. I laugh when I think about this.
How does a person resolve this kind of anxiety and social angst? Once again it all depends on the
ground of our confidence. If our confidence is based on how fashionable we are and if we have
no sense of fashion, as is true in my case, then we are at high risk of anxiety whenever we dress
or whenever we leave the house. What we wear and what kind of car we drive become
important. People tend to accept or fail to accept us based on these kinds of things. If our
confidence is based on what other people think then we are also at high risk of anxiety because
one person’s sense of fashion can vary widely from another person’s sense of fashion. Our
confidence or lack of confidence would then depend on who we were with at the time and
whether we could discern what they thought of our apparel. All of this is a very unsteady basis
for one’s well being. We need a more stable basis if we can overcome our social anxiety and in
this particular case, our fashion anxiety.

The Essence and Nature of Depression

Depression is giving up. This is the essence or nature of depression. When we give up we are
depressed and when we are depressed there is something in our life upon which we have given
up.When I write “when we give up we are depressed” I do not mean that we are necessarily
experiencing the emotions that are associated with depression. I was talking to someone recently
who had abandoned his goal of diet and exercise. He had completely abandoned this goal and he
had no immediate plans to resume work toward this goal. He had given up. I asked him how he
was feeling and he indicated he was feeling fine. His face and demeanor however did not
indicate that he was fine. He had a depressed affect and he had depressed eyes but he was not
aware of it. This means that it is possible to give up on something which is important to us and
not experience the feelings associated with depression. There are many possible reasons for this.
A man might suppress his feelings and therefore avoid the experience. A woman might deny her
feelings to herself and to others and avoid the experience. A person might give up to a degree
which is not sufficient to produce noticeable or recognizable feelings. In other words that person
might only be mildly depressed and therefore the feelings might escape their notice. Nevertheless
I am suggesting that when we give up on some goal in life that is important to us we are
depressed regardless of the degree to which we experience such feelings.
The corollary to the above concept is that when we feel depressed we have given up on
something. It is not uncommon for patients to come to me and to complain that they are
depressed. It is also not uncommon for a patient to be unaware of the cause of the depression. I
usually ask how long he has been depressed and then ask what has happened to him in that
period of time. I am trying to discover upon what they have given up. It is usually not hard to
find. A depressed person might have given up on a relationship or on work or on a personal goal
in his or her life and this giving up behavior will precipitate depression. If I point it out to them
they can make the connection and the way out of the depression becomes clearer.
If depression is giving up then resolution of depression will involve a change in our behavior. If
we have given up we have to overcome our inertia and start once again. Inevitably once we start
once again we feel better and the depression is reduced.
This definition of depression is useful because it is clear and because it gives us a direction in
which to go in order to resolve our depression. The actual experience of depression is much less
clear. It consists not only of a behavior change but also of a change in our way of thinking and a
change in our feelings. The full force of all these changes complicates the experience and makes
it seem all that much more overwhelming. But in the end it is still true that depression is giving
up or stopping and overcoming depression involved starting once again.The anecdotes that
follow will illustrate and address some of the complexities of the experience of depression.
Work and Depression
Emotional issues and emotional disorders do not limit themselves to one’s personal life.
Emotional disorders also affect work.
One of my patients is a highly skilled and extraordinarily gifted police investigator. As one might
expect his boss sends a lot of cases his way since he is so talented in solving them. Each year he
solves a large number of cases but with each case comes a significant amount of paper work.
Paperwork is my patient’s downfall. It is his Achilles Heel.
The department in which he works requires that investigators make notations on each case on a
regular basis. Investigators make these notations electronically on a computer system. My
patient’s boss and his boss’s superiors have access to the data base and can review the progress
made on a case at any time. In addition the computer keeps track of the time and date of each
entry. It is relatively easy for my patient’s boss to tell how long it has been since my patient has
updated any one of his cases.
Since my patient has scores of open cases, it is not hard to understand how he might become
overwhelmed with the paperwork.
In the past few months my patient has been coming to his sessions and has consistently
complained that he is profoundly depressed. Whenever a patient tells me they are depressed I
look for the area or areas in their life in which they have given up. It was apparent that he had
given up on his paperwork. It was not that he did not make any entries into the system. He did.
But he was not making progress in getting caught up with his work. He was simply maintaining
he status quo. He was treading water. He was no closer to getting caught up on his paper one
week than he was the previous week or the subsequent week. It seemed like an overwhelming
and impossible task. Because he believed he could not get caught up he did not even try. He
spent his time off trying to escape his work rather than doing his work.
Each week we would talk about strategies he could implement to get on top of his paperwork.
Each week he failed to implement the strategies. Each week he would report that he was
profoundly depressed. Finally I realized that I had to confront him more firmly. I told my patient
that until he got on top of his paperwork he could expect to continue to be profoundly depressed.
I said that he could also expect to be very anxious about his job security since his boss will
eventually find out the extent of his delinquency and it is uncertain what he would do about it.
This apparently had some impact. The investigator left the session and spent most of the
weekend working on updating his cases. He successfully completed updating his highest profile
case and actually closed the case on the system. On Sunday night I received an email from him.
He wrote that he had worked all weekend and that he successfully completed one report and
closed his highest profile case. In addition he wrote that he felt “like a million bucks”.
This was very good news. The patient’s depression was related to his giving up behavior in
relation to his paperwork. He felt significant alleviation from his depression when he stopped
giving up and when he completed his work.
This does not mean that he will never again be depressed. It does not mean that he will never
again fall behind in his paperwork. In fact he is still behind. He may have closed his highest
profile case but he has many other cases to document and many to close. The extent to which he
is successful at doing this is the extent to which he can feel less depressed. The extent to which
he is successful at doing this he will feel empowered.

The Value and Problem with Relationships

Our lives consist of a complex web of relationships in which we constantly move. We have
relationships with significant others. There are relationships with children and close family
members. We also have relationships with friends and social acquaintances. There are work
relationships and professional relationships. We have relationships with neighbors and vendors
and business people and service providers and the list goes on. All relationships are important
even though there is variation in the degree of importance which we ascribe them.
Despite the ubiquitous nature of relationships in our lives and the degree to which we need and
depend on these relationships and the value that we ascribe to them, they are often fraught with
problems. The problems that we experience in relationships inhibit the level of their function and
we are not able to easily achieve the specific goal or goals of the relationship. Less functional
relationships seem to introduce more problems than they resolve and this might lead to
termination of a relationship.
For example, let’s consider what might be the most highly valued relationship in our society,
one’s relationship with a significant other. People enter into intimate relationships seeking love,
romance and companionship. Many people do not want to go through life alone. Many, if not
most, people seek a partner with whom they can live. Such partnership or companionship may be
a fundamental need for most people, if not all people, although the degree to which individuals
experience this need certainly varies.
There are many problems that attend these highly valued relationships. People seem to know
what they want in a partner but they do not know how to go about finding what they want. Or
they enter into a relationship thinking they have found what they want only to discover that what
they found is different from what they thought they had. As a result many relationships are full
of conflict and many relationships end. That relationships end is not necessarily a bad thing.
Some relationships should end. Some relationships should never begin or they should end shortly
after they begin. When to begin and when to end a relationship, how to evaluate the quality of a
relationship that exists, and how to identify and resolve problems that exist in any specific
relationship are issues that perplex and mystify most people.
Since one of the conditions that I treat is the relationship disorder, I see a lot of different
relationships and different kinds of relationships with many different degrees of dysfunction. A
big part of my work is to help people resolve the dysfunction that exists in their relationships.
Another part of my work is to help people evaluate the quality of a relationship which they have
so they can decide whether to continue in it. Not one of these issues is easy to resolve but all can
be achieved. Some people have a longer row to hoe than other people in terms of the number of
problems they have to resolve and the severity of each problem. But every person in every
relationship has problems. No one is exempt. All relationships can move along the continuum
that ranges from dysfunctional to functional. No relationship ever arrives at perfection and all
can improve regardless of the point at which they are on the continuum.
How to do this is another matter. Most people do not have the time or energy or interest to
devote to analyzing and understanding the nature of relationships or even the nature of their own
relationships. Some of us do.
At the bottom of this page are links to pages that address different aspects of relationships and
relationship function. Like other pages on this site, the author attempts to present concepts that
are clear and straightforward. Examples and illustrations of the concepts are also provided.

Relationships and Confrontation

There are some essential skills or “tools” that adults need for the adult stage of life and for adult
relationships. These skills are more characteristic of the adult stage of life rather than earlier
stages of development. It is important for most if not all adults to understand and to be able to
use these tools or skills. Without them we might fall short of adult behavior and we might
continue to function in a way more characteristic of an earlier stage of development. Without
these skills relationships stagnate and suffer and remain in a dysfunctional state. With these skills
relationships have the opportunity to progress and develop in a very positive way. With these
skills we assume our adult role in the family and in the community and in the world.
The first skill is that of confrontation. Confrontation consists of telling another person what he or
she is doing or what he or she has done. It consists of making an observation of another person’s
behavior. It sounds so easy to speak of it in this manner. Let me assure you it is anything but
easy. It is a significant and challenging behavior for most people.
We have defined confrontation as making an observation of another person’s behavior. Behavior
consists of many things. Behavior might refer to some physical act. For example, I once had a
patient who was arguing with her spouse. Actually she was not arguing with him. He was angry
with her. The conflict occurred early in the morning and her husband, the angry one, was getting
ready for work. At some point he left the house and he vented his anger by slamming the door on
his way out. Obviously he had not resolved his anger before he left the house. As soon as his
wife heard the door slam, she remembered what her therapist had told her and she ran to the
door, opened it, and said to her husband as he was walking to his car, “You slammed the door”.
That is all that she said. It was a perfect confrontation. She told him what he had done. She did
not exaggerate what he had done. She did not say it in anger. She simply told him what he had
done and left it at that.
He did not respond to her confrontation because he was on his way to work and he did not want
to further engage her in regard to the issue about which he was angry. When I saw him he told
me that his wife had confronted his door slamming behavior and as he was telling me the story
he smiled and said, “You know, I could not argue with her. She was absolutely right. I did slam
the door.”
His response was perfect because he accepted full responsibility for his door slamming behavior.
This is one of the reasons why it is important to confront someone when they act in an
inappropriate manner. One of the goals is to provide an opportunity for the person who acts out
to accept responsibility for his behavior.
This outcome is one which is desirable not only for a marriage relationship but also for an
employer-employee relationship. Employers would love employees to accept responsibility for
their behavior on the job. Let me give another example.
One of my patients owns his own business and he is very successful. There is a warehouse
associated with his business and he employs a number of people to work in his warehouse. One
of the responsibilities of the workers is to put away the product that is shipped to the warehouse.
He has had a problem with one of his workers. The problem worker will put away the product
but he will leave the wooden pallets, on which the product was shipped, in the middle of the
aisle. My patient admits that in the past he has become very angry with this worker and he has
spoken to him in a very disrespectful manner about his work habits. In the course of counseling
he learned that when someone acts in an inappropriate manner the best course of action might be
to simply confront the person in regard to what he has done. The patient decided to apply this
advice to his work situation.
When he sees one or more pallets in the aisle he goes up to the worker who left them there and
he says in a calm voice, “you left the pallets in the middle of the aisle”. He may or may not add
that the pallets are in the way of other workers or that it is hazardous to leave them there. Then
he simply waits for a response from the worker or he walks away. He simply calls the workers
attention to what he did or did not do. He leaves it up to the worker to resolve the problem.
My patient, the warehouse owner, has reported two outcomes. The first is that inevitably the
worker puts the pallets away immediately. The second outcome was not anticipated. Other
workers have come to him to comment on how calm he has been and how much nicer it is to
work there. The work environment has become much less stressful and much friendlier.
By giving the other person the opportunity to change their behavior the person who confronts
shows great respect for the person whom they are confronting. It can be (although it is not
always) a win-win situation.

Confrontation and Persistence

I had the great privilege of speaking with one delightful couple who presented some issues over
which they had conflict.
One of the issues was a coffee cup. The wife complained to me that her husband had a habit of
leaving his mother’s coffee cup on her countertop. Each morning the husband would go upstairs
to his parent’s apartment to have coffee with his mother and father. Each morning he would
come downstairs to go to work and as he was leaving he would set his coffee cup, which came
from upstairs, on his wife’s sink or countertop. This was a daily occurrence and the wife became
frustrated with the responsibility of returning the coffee cup to its rightful place.
The frustration was understandable from my perspective since it was not her cup and it was not
her responsibility to return it. When she did return the cup she was not only assuming a
responsibility that was not hers but she was enabling her husband to continue to be irresponsible
in this particular situation.
I should say in the husband’s defense that he is extraordinarily responsible and he demonstrates
this in many ways. It was just that in this particular situation he failed to do what he needed to
do.
His wife asked me what to do. I suggested she tell her husband that he left his coffee cup on the
kitchen counter. I suggested that she tell him this every time it happened. She was willing to do
this. She told him this every day for thirty (30) days. Her confrontation had no effect whatsoever
until the 30th day. On the 30th day she told her husband that he left his cup on the counter. Her
husband turned to her and said in a raised voice and in a mocking tone, “Oh, I left the cup on the
counter did I? Well here is what you can do with your coffee cup! He opened the back door and
threw the cup into the deep snow in the backyard.
His wife came to me that day and told me what happened and asked what to do. I suggested that
she tell her husband that he left his coffee cup in the snow in the backyard.
Now I love this story because I am very fond of this couple but also because it illustrates the
need for patience and persistence in confrontation. After the incident on day 30 the husband
never again left his coffee cup downstairs.
This story also illustrates the fact that there is no guarantee that the person you confront will
accept the confrontation with equanimity. This was the case with this husband. When he finally
responded to his wife’s confrontation he responded with anger. But after this initial disruption,
he took responsibility for his coffee cup.

Do Not Make A Mountain Out Of A Molehill

Effective confrontation is characterized by objectivity and impartiality. Effective confrontation is
matter of fact. The person who confronts most effectively avoids taking personally the behavior
which they observe.
My wife is the one who confronts me more often than anyone else. The reason for this no doubt
is because she spends the most time with me and knows most all of my dysfunctional behavior.
Let me give an example. One late summer day I decided to work out in the yard. My wife could
not join me because she was not feeling well. It was a very productive day and at the end of the
day I came in to wash before dinner. As I was washing my hands in the bathroom my wife said
to me from the next room (the television room), “You left the Bilco doors (the doors to the
basement) open.” That is all that she said. I heard her but I did not respond because I did not
think a response was necessary. I appreciated her observation and intended to go out to close
them as soon as I was finished washing my hands. I do remember thinking that what she said
was a perfect confrontation. I admired her for that. A few minutes later she said, “You left the
tools in front of the barn.” Apparently she walked into our bedroom from where you can see the
barn and she saw that I left my work tools in front of the barn. Once again she told me what I had
done. Once again I did not respond because like the first time I understood what she said and
intended to go right out and put them away. But I distinctly remember admiring the fact that she
made two perfect confrontations in a row and I wondered further whether she had been listening
to me as I discussed different aspects of human behavior.
It is obvious by now that I do not close doors and put away tools when I work. My wife’s
confrontations are exceedingly helpful and I appreciate them. She does not make a mountain out
of a molehill. She does not rant and rave (that would be completely out of character for her). She
does not tell me I am irresponsible. She does not say that I have lost nearly every tool I have ever
purchased (even though there is probably some truth to that). She does not get angry. She simply
tells me what I have done and leaves the rest to me.
Once again what can work in a marriage relationship can also work in a professional
relationship. Confrontation is a very functional way to handle dysfunctional behavior in any
context.
One of my patients is an extraordinarily gifted school administrator. She was complaining one
day that one of the teachers is consistently late to work. The entrance to the building is near my
patient’s office and she can literally see the teacher walk into the building late every day. My
patient, the administrator, was considering holding a meeting with the teacher to discuss the
problem.
I suggested that a meeting might be overdoing it a little. Meetings also take a considerable
amount of time which is always in short supply. I suggested that the administrator simply
confront the teacher as he walks into the building. She could say to the teacher, “Tom, you are
late.” Then it’s over. The administrator has successfully addressed the problem. Her work is
done. No meeting was required.
If the teacher comes in late the next day, the administrator can say, “Tom, you are late.” This is
somewhat repetitive but the behavior is repetitive and repetition in confrontation is a good thing.
If it continues to happen the administrator should continue to address it. The administrator can
even say, “Tom, you are late again”. The administrator can further intensify the confrontation by
saying, “Tom, you are late again and this is the 15th time you have been late this semester.”
Someone might consider this to be nagging. It is not. Nagging is asking something of someone
repeatedly. When we ask someone to do something that they have not done or are not willing to
do we might fall into the trap of asking repeatedly. This is nagging.
In contrast what the administrator is doing is observing. There is no request even though there is
an underlying expectation. There is only an observation. By confronting the teacher the
administrator is giving the teacher the opportunity (repeatedly) to assume responsibility for his
behavior. The administrator is really doing the teacher a great favor.
Behavior however is slow to change. People in positions of responsibility, leadership, or
management need to become adept at confrontation.
Since behavior is slow to change our administrator might need to further intensify the
confrontation. The administrator could say, “You are late again and you are contracted to be here
on time”. That would heat things up. In most cases repeated confrontation will have some result.
It is the first step that one should take in addressing dysfunctional behavior.
To confront someone on the job or in a marriage is to give the employee or husband an
opportunity to change his behavior. It is good for the employee and it is good for the employer. It
puts responsibility on the employee where it belongs. It is also respectful because it implies the
employee or husband has the ability and wherewithal to resolve the problem.

Does Confrontation Work?

Yes and No.
I once had the opportunity of speaking with a very nice couple about some issues in their
relationship. In one session the woman was addressing her husband about some of her concerns
and he became angry. He announced suddenly that he had heard all that he wanted to hear. He
stood up and stormed out of the office. On his way out he slammed the door to the office so hard
that I thought the wall might crack. As he was passing through the waiting area, he threw his
water bottle and it careened around that room. He left the building.
His behavior was a bit startling but it was far from over. I finished the session with his wife and
planned to address the man’s behavior at the next session.
They returned one week later. Both the man and his wife greeted me as they walked in and sat
down. Everyone was all smiles. Nothing was said about the man’s behavior the week
before.Unlike most sessions, I started this session. I looked directly at the man and said, “Last
week ten minutes into the session, you became very angry. You stormed out of the office and on
your way out you slammed the door. You slammed it so hard that I thought the wall might crack.
I also heard you throw your water bottle in the waiting room.”
At that point I stopped and waited for a response to my confrontation. He smiled and said, “Well,
Dr. McEvoy, last week you were not exactly on your “A” game.”
This was an astonishing response. The man blamed me for his behavior. It was plain
unadulterated blame.
I responded, “Not only did you engage in all those behaviors that I mentioned but now you are
blaming me for your behavior.”Again I waited for a response. If I recall correctly he denied
blaming me for his behavior and then he restated his blame in words that were less direct.
Again I confronted him and again he responded in a manner which I would call defensive. He
resorted to a number of defenses and each time I confronted him. It was challenging because this
man is very intelligent, far more intelligent than I am. But I did not relent in my confrontation. If
I was going to help him at all I needed to continue to give him opportunities to accept
responsibility for his behavior. The back and forth interaction between this man and myself
lasted 50 minutes. I was a fairly long 50 minutes. It was work. During this time his wife sat
somewhat stunned at what was happening. Occasionally I would look at her and she was
incredulous.
Fifty minutes into the session, in response to one of my confrontations, the man finally said,
“Okay, you’re right. My behavior was inappropriate.”
I was shocked again. I was determined to continue to confront him as needed but after 50
minutes I did not know if he was going to benefit from what I had to say. When he did, I was
very impressed. For anyone to overcome defensive behavior is very impressive. He was able to
accept responsibility for his behavior completely.
Did this confrontation work? It depends on how one defines effective confrontation. If
confrontation is effective when the person who is confronted accepts responsibility for his
behavior and changes that behavior, then this was effective. But if this is how we define
effectiveness, it depends on the other person’s response to confrontation. I think a more accurate
definition of effective confrontation is the dispassionate observation of another person’s
behavior, regardless of the response.Let me give another example. I go to the gym each morning
to work out before I go to the office. One morning I noticed someone doing an exercise in such a
manner he might hurt himself. Out of a desire to warn him of the risk, I suggested to the man that
he might be at risk of hurting his back if he continues to perform the exercise that way.
In response to my unsolicited advice, the man began to yell. He said that I was the last person in
the world from whom he would seek advice and he did not care in the least what I might have to
say. He called me a “jerk” and told me to “get lost”.This was a rather startling response to an
attempt to help someone. I could not simply let the man vent in that manner and not say
anything. So I responded, “You are angry.”
As you might expect, the man did not respond well to my confrontation. The confrontation was
nevertheless effective. By confronting the angry man I was placing responsibility for his
vociferous and rude behavior on him. His anger had nothing to do with me and had nothing to do
with my unsolicited advice. He is just an angry man who apparently is susceptible to venting his
anger at the least provocation.
It is important that we do not carry around responsibility for the behavior of other people. We
have enough problems of our own. In addition we do not want to enable the inappropriate
behavior of others.
One of my patients said that confrontation is like a tennis match. When someone acts
inappropriately he places responsibility for his behavior on me. When I confront such a person
responsibility is put back where it belongs. Even if he does not accept responsibility,
confrontation alleviates the victim of any responsibility.

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human sexual behaviour

Physiological aspects

Physiological aspects » Sexual response

Sexual response follows a pattern of sequential stages or phases when sexual activity is
continued. First, there is the excitement phase marked by increase in pulse and blood pressure, an
increase in blood supply to the surface of the body resulting in increased skin temperature,
flushing, and swelling of all distensible body parts (particularly noticeable in the penis and
female breasts), more rapid breathing, the secretion of genital fluids, vaginal expansion, and a
general increase in muscle tension. These symptoms of arousal eventually increase to a near
maximal physiological level, the plateau phase, which is generally of brief duration. If
stimulation is continued, orgasm usually occurs. Orgasm is marked by a feeling of sudden
intense pleasure, an abrupt increase in pulse rate and blood pressure, and spasms of the pelvic
muscles causing vaginal contractions in the female and ejaculation by the male. Involuntary
vocalization may also occur. Orgasm lasts for a few seconds (normally not over ten), after which
the individual enters the resolution phase, the return to a normal or subnormal physiological
state. Up to the resolution phase, males and females are the same in their response sequence, but,
whereas males return to normal even if stimluation continues, continued stimulation can produce
additional orgasms in females. In brief, after one orgasm a male becomes unresponsive to sexual
stimulation and cannot begin to build up another excitement phase until some period of time has
elapsed, but females are physically capable of repeated orgasms without the intervening “rest
period” required by males.
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Physiological aspects » Genetic and hormonal factors

While all normal individuals are born with the neurophysiology necessary for the sexual-
response cycle described above, inheritance determines the intensity of their responses and their
basic “sex drive.” There is great variation in this regard: some persons have the need for frequent
sexual expressions; others require very little; and some persons respond quickly and violently,
while others are slower and milder in their reactions. While the genetic basis of these differences
is unknown and while such variations are obscured by conditioning, there is no doubt that sexual
capacities, like all other physiological capacities, are genetically determined. It is unlikely,
however, that genes control the sexual orientation of normal humans in the sense of individuals
being predestined to become homosexual or heterosexual. Some severe genetic abnormality can,
of course, profoundly affect intelligence, sexual capacity, and physical appearance and hence the
entire sexual life.
While the normal female has 44 autosomes plus two X-chromosomes (female) and the normal
male 44 autosomes plus one X-chromosome and one Y-chromosome (male), many genetic
abnormalities are possible. There are females, for example, with too many X-chromosomes
(44+XXX) or too few (44+X) and males with an extra female chromosome (44+XXY) or an
extra male chromosome (44+XYY). No 44+YY males exist—an X-chromosome is necessary for
survival, even in the womb.
One’s genetic makeup determines one’s hormonal status and the sensitivity of one’s body to
these hormones. While a disorder of any part of the endocrine system can adversely affect sexual
life, the hormones most directly influencing sexuality are the androgens (male sex hormones),
produced chiefly in the testicles, and the estrogens (female sex hormones), produced chiefly in
the ovaries. In early embryonic life there are neither testicles nor ovaries but simply two
undifferentiated organs (gonads) that can develop either into testicles or ovaries. If the embryo
has a Y-chromosome, the gonads become testicles; otherwise, they become ovaries. The testicles
of the fetus produce androgens, and these cause the fetus to develop male anatomy. The absence
of testicles results in the development of female anatomy. Animal experiments show that, if the
testicles of a male fetus are removed, the individual will develop into what seems a female
(although lacking ovaries). Consequently, it has been said that humans are basically female.
After birth and until puberty, the ovaries and testicles produce comparatively few hormones, and
little girls and boys are much alike in size and appearance. At puberty, however, these organs
begin producing in greater abundance, with dramatic results. The androgens produced by boys
cause changes in body build, greater muscular development, body and facial hair, and voice
change. In girls the estrogens cause breast development, menstruation, and feminine body build.
A boy castrated before puberty does not develop masculine physical characteristics and
manifests in adult life more of a feminine body build, lack of masculine body and facial hair, less
muscular strength, a high voice, and small genitalia. A girl who has her ovaries removed before
puberty is less markedly altered but retains a childlike body build, does not develop breasts, and
never menstruates. Castrated individuals or persons producing insufficient hormones can be
restored to a normal condition by administration of appropriate hormones.
Beyond their role in developing the secondary sexual characteristics of the body, the hormones
continue to play a role in adult life. An androgen deficiency causes a decrease in a man’s sexual
responsiveness, and an estrogen deficiency adversely affects a woman’s fertility and causes
atrophy of the genitalia. A loss of energy may also result in both men and women.
Androgen seems linked in both males and females with aggressiveness and strength of sexual
drive. When androgen is given to a female in animal experiments, she becomes more aggressive
and displays behaviour more typical of males—by mounting other animals, for example.
Estrogen increases her sexual responsiveness and intensifies her female behaviour. Androgen
given to a male often increases his sexual behaviour, but estrogen diminishes his sex drive.
In humans the picture is more complex, since human sexual behaviour and response is less
dependent on hormones once adulthood has been reached. Removing androgen from an adult
male reduces his sexual capacity; but this occurs gradually, and sometimes the reduction is small.
Giving androgen to a normal human male generally has little or no effect since he is already
producing all he can use. Giving him estrogen reduces his sex drive. Administration of androgen
to an adult human female often increases her sex drive, enlarges her clitoris, and promotes the
growth of facial hair. Giving estrogen to a normal woman before menopausal age generally has
no effect whatsoever—probably because human females, unlike other female mammals, do not
have hormonally controlled periods of “heat” (estrus).
Hormones have no connection with the sexual orientation of humans. Male homosexuals do not
have more estrogens than normal males (who have a little) nor can their preferences be altered by
giving them androgen.
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Physiological aspects » Nervous system factors

The nervous system consists of the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system.
The brain and spinal cord constitute the central system, while the peripheral system is composed
of (1) the cerebrospinal nerves that go to the spinal cord (afferent nerves), transmitting sensory
stimuli and those that come from the cord (efferent nerves) transmitting impulses to activate
muscles, and (2) the autonomic system, the primary function of which is the regulation and
maintenance of the body processes necessary to life, such as heart rate, breathing, digestion, and
temperature control. Sexual response involves the entire nervous system. The autonomic system
controls the involuntary responses; the afferent cerebrospinal nerves carry the sensory messages
to the brain; the efferent cerebrospinal nerves carry commands from the brain to the muscles; and
the spinal cord serves as a great transmission cable. The brain itself is the coordinating and
controlling centre, interpreting what sensations are to be perceived as sexual and issuing
appropriate “orders” to the rest of the nervous system.
 The parts of the brain thought to be most concerned with sexual response are the
hypothalamus and the limbic system, but no specialized “sex centre” has been located in the
human brain. Animal experiments indicate that each individual has coded in its brain two sexual
response patterns, one for mounting (masculine) behaviour and one for mounted (feminine)
behaviour. The mounting pattern can be elicited or intensified by male sex hormone and the
mounted pattern by female sex hormone. Normally, one response pattern is dominant and the
other latent but capable of being called into action when suitable circumstances occur. The
degree to which such inherent patterning exists in humans is unknown.
While the brain is normally in charge, there is some reflex (i.e., not brain-controlled) sexual
response. Stimulation of the genital and perineal area can cause the “genital reflex”: erection and
ejaculation in the male, vaginal changes and lubrication in the female. This reflex is mediated by
the lower spinal cord, and the brain need not be involved. Of course, the brain can override and
suppress such reflex activity—as it does when an individual decides that a sexual response is
socially inappropriate.
Physiological aspects » Development and change in the reproductive system
One’s anatomy and sexuality change with age. The changes are rapid in intra-uterine life and
around puberty but are much slower and gradual in other phases of the life cycle.
The reproductive organs first develop in the same form for both males and females: internally
there are two undifferentiated gonads and two pairs of parallel ducts (Wolffian and Müllerian
ducts); externally there is a genital protrusion with a groove (urethral groove) below it, the
groove being flanked by two folds (urethral folds). On either side of the genital protrusion and
groove are two ridgelike swellings (labioscrotal swellings). Around the fourth week of life the
gonads differentiate into either testes or ovaries. If testes develop, the hormone they secrete
causes the Müllerian duct to degenerate and almost vanish and causes the Wolffian duct to
elaborate into the sperm-carrying tubes and related organs (the vas deferens, epididymis, and
seminal vesicles, for example). If ovaries develop, the Wolffian duct deteriorates, and the
Müllerian duct elaborates to form the fallopian tubes, uterus, and part of the vagina. The external
genitalia simultaneously change. The genital protrusion becomes either a penis or clitoris. In the
female the groove below the clitoris stays open to form the vulva, and the folds on either side of
the groove become the inner lips of the vulva (the labia minora). In the male these folds grow
together, converting the groove into the urethral tube of the penis. The ridgelike swellings on
either side remain apart in the female and constitute the large labia (labia majora), but in the male
they grow together to form the scrotal sac into which the testes subsequently descend.
At birth both male and female have all the neurophysiological equipment necessary for sexual
response, although the reproductive system is not at this stage functional. Sexual interests, sexual
behaviour, and sexual response are seen with increasing frequency in most children from infancy
on. Even newborn males have penile erections, and babies of both sexes seem to find pleasure in
genital stimulation. What appears to be orgasm has been observed in infant boys and girls, and,
later in childhood, orgasm definitely can occur in masturbation or sex play.
Puberty may be defined as that short period of time (generally two years) during which the
reproductive system matures and the secondary sexual characteristics appear. The ovaries and
testes begin producing much larger amounts of hormones, pubic hair appears, female breasts
develop, the menstrual cycle begins in females, spermatozoa and viable eggs are produced, and
males experience voice change and a sudden acceleration in growth. Puberty generally occurs in
females around age 12–13 and in males at about 13–14, but there is much individual variation.
With puberty there is generally an intensification or the first appearance of sexual interest.
Puberty marks the beginning of adolescence.
Adolescence, from a physical viewpoint, is that period between puberty and the attainment of
one’s maximum height. By the latter point, which occurs around age 16 in females and 18 in
males, the individual has adult anatomy and physiology. In late adolescence the majority of
individuals are probably at their peak in terms of sexual capacity: the ability to respond quickly
and repeatedly. During this period the sex drive is at its maximum in males, although it is
difficult to say whether this is also true of females, since female sexuality, in many societies, is
frequently suppressed during adolescence.
Following adolescence there are about three decades of adult life during which physiological
changes are slow and gradual. While muscular strength increases for a time, the changes may
best be described as slow deterioration. This physical decline is not immediately evident in
sexual behaviour, which often increases in quantity and quality as the individual develops more
social skills and higher socio-economic status and loses some of the inhibitions and uncertainties
that often impede adolescent sexuality. Indeed, in the case of the United States female, the
deterioration is more than offset by her gradual loss of sexual inhibition, and the effect of age is
not clear until menopausal symptoms begin. In the male, however, there is no such masking of
deterioration, and the frequency of sexual activity and the intensity of interest and response
slowly, but inexorably, decline.
If one must arbitrarily select an age to mark the beginning of old age, 50 is appropriate. By then,
most females have experienced menopausal symptoms, and most males have been forced to
recognize their increasing physical limitations. With menopause, the female genitalia gradually
begin to atrophy and the amount of vaginal secretion diminishes—this is the direct consequence
of the cessation of ovarian function and can be prevented, or the symptoms reversed, by
administering estrogen. If a female has had a good sexual adjustment prior to menopause and if
she does not believe in the fallacy that it spells the end of sexual life, menopause will have no
adverse effect on her sexual and orgasmic ability. There is reason to believe that if a woman
remains in good health and genital atrophy is prevented, she could enjoy sexual activity
regardless of age. Males in good health are also capable of continuing sexual activity, although
with an ever-decreasing frequency, throughout old age. The male has more difficulty in
achieving erection, cannot maintain erection as long, and must have longer and longer “rest
periods” between sexual acts. The amount of ejaculate becomes less, but most old males are still
fertile. The Cowper’s gland secretion (called “precoital mucus”) diminishes or disappears
entirely. According to Kinsey’s data, about one-quarter of males are impotent by age 65, one-
half by age 75, and three-quarters by age 80. One must remember, however, that some unknown
but certainly substantial proportion of this impotence may be attributed to poor health.
In general, the female withstands the onslaughts of age better than the male. The reduction in the
frequency of marital intercourse or even its abandonment is more often than not the result of
male deterioration.

human sexual behaviour

Overview
Tendencies and behaviour of human beings with regard to any activity that causes or is otherwise
associated with sexual arousal.
It is strongly influenced by the genetically inherited sexual response patterns that ensure
reproduction (see reproductive behaviour), societal attitudes toward sex, and each individual’s
upbringing. Physiology sets only very broad limits on human sexuality; most of the enormous
variation found among humans results from learning and conditioning. What is deviant in one
society may be normal in another.

human sexual behaviour

Overview
Tendencies and behaviour of human beings with regard to any activity that causes or is otherwise
associated with sexual arousal.
It is strongly influenced by the genetically inherited sexual response patterns that ensure
reproduction (see reproductive behaviour), societal attitudes toward sex, and each individual’s
upbringing. Physiology sets only very broad limits on human sexuality; most of the enormous
variation found among humans results from learning and conditioning. What is deviant in one
society may be normal in another.

lesbianism
also calledsapphismorfemale homosexuality

Main
the quality or state of intense emotional and usually erotic attraction of a woman to another
woman.
As it was first used in the late 16th century, the word lesbian was the capitalized adjectival term
referring to the Greek island of Lesbos. Its connotation of “female homosexuality” was added in
the late 19th century, when an association was made with the tender and often passionate poetry
written by Lesbian poet Sappho (c. 610–c. 580 bc) to and about other women in her female
coterie. The history of lesbianism to the present has been largely reconstructed by late 20th-
century European and American theorists; perceptions from other cultures are not readily
available.
Just as heterosexual orientation produces a great variety of behaviours, so, too, lesbianism
presents no unified face. Some lesbians hide or deny their orientation, marrying in order to be
accepted by their families and communities. Others—often in the relative anonymity of an urban
setting—prefer to live openly as lesbians, sometimes bearing and rearing children.
Broadly speaking, in Europe and North America, many of the issues faced by lesbians at the turn
of the 21st century were not radically different from those that concerned either heterosexual women
or many gay men. Like heterosexual women, lesbians are affected by such issues as equal pay or
the historical exclusion of women from medical research studies, the latter of which has led to a
lack of understanding about the effect of lesbian sexuality on women’s health. Like many gay
men, many lesbians in long-term relationships regret the lack of legal recognition for same-sex
unions. Other issues of concern to lesbians include child rearing (ranging from the inability to
adopt a partner’s offspring to laws barring same-sex adoption), the sharing of medical health
benefits with a partner, the right to make health decisions for a partner, taxes, inheritance, and so
on.

lesbianism
also calledsapphismorfemale homosexuality

Main
the quality or state of intense emotional and usually erotic attraction of a woman to another
woman.
As it was first used in the late 16th century, the word lesbian was the capitalized adjectival term
referring to the Greek island of Lesbos. Its connotation of “female homosexuality” was added in
the late 19th century, when an association was made with the tender and often passionate poetry
written by Lesbian poet Sappho (c. 610–c. 580 bc) to and about other women in her female
coterie. The history of lesbianism to the present has been largely reconstructed by late 20th-
century European and American theorists; perceptions from other cultures are not readily
available.
Just as heterosexual orientation produces a great variety of behaviours, so, too, lesbianism
presents no unified face. Some lesbians hide or deny their orientation, marrying in order to be
accepted by their families and communities. Others—often in the relative anonymity of an urban
setting—prefer to live openly as lesbians, sometimes bearing and rearing children.
Broadly speaking, in Europe and North America, many of the issues faced by lesbians at the turn
of the 21st century were not radically different from those that concerned either heterosexual women
or many gay men. Like heterosexual women, lesbians are affected by such issues as equal pay or
the historical exclusion of women from medical research studies, the latter of which has led to a
lack of understanding about the effect of lesbian sexuality on women’s health. Like many gay
men, many lesbians in long-term relationships regret the lack of legal recognition for same-sex
unions. Other issues of concern to lesbians include child rearing (ranging from the inability to
adopt a partner’s offspring to laws barring same-sex adoption), the sharing of medical health
benefits with a partner, the right to make health decisions for a partner, taxes, inheritance, and so
on.

External Web sites

The topic lesbianism is discussed at the following external Web sites.
Advocate.com

Gay and lesbian magazine. Contains news stories and reviews of books,
movies, and music, as well as articles on topics such as entertainment,
health, and politics. Also offers a message board and chat.
reproductive behaviour
Overview zoology

Overview
In animals, any activity directed toward perpetuation of a species.
Sexual reproduction, the most common mode, occurs when a female’s egg is fertilized by a
male’s sperm. The resulting unique combination of genes produces genetic variety that
contributes to a species’ adaptability. The stages of approach, identification, and copulation are
well developed to avoid predators and the wastage of eggs and sperm. Most one-celled and some
more-complex organisms reproduce asexually. See also courtship behaviour.

reproductive behaviour
Overview zoology

Overview
In animals, any activity directed toward perpetuation of a species.
Sexual reproduction, the most common mode, occurs when a female’s egg is fertilized by a
male’s sperm. The resulting unique combination of genes produces genetic variety that
contributes to a species’ adaptability. The stages of approach, identification, and copulation are
well developed to avoid predators and the wastage of eggs and sperm. Most one-celled and some
more-complex organisms reproduce asexually. See also courtship behaviour.

Main
any activity directed toward perpetuation of a species. The enormous range of animal
reproductive modes is matched by the variety of reproductive behaviour.
Reproductive behaviour in animals includes all the events and actions that are directly involved
in the process by which an organism generates at least one replacement of itself. In an
evolutionary sense, the goal of an individual in reproduction is not to perpetuate the population
or the species; rather, relative to the other members of its population, it is to maximize the
representation of its own genetic characteristics in the next generation. The dominant form of
reproductive behaviour for achieving this purpose is sexual rather than asexual, although it is
easier mechanically for an organism simply to divide into two or more individuals. Even many of
the organisms that do exactly this—and they are not all the so-called primitive forms—every so
often intersperse their normal asexual pattern with sexual reproduction.
Basic concepts and features » Natural selection and reproductive behaviour
Natural selection places a premium on the evolution of those physiological, morphological, and
behavioral adaptations that will increase the efficiency of the exchange of genetic materials
between individuals. Organisms will also evolve mechanisms for sensing whether or not the
environment is always permissive for reproduction or if some times are better than others. This
involves not only the evolution of environmental sensors but also the concurrent evolution of
mechanisms by which this information can be processed and acted upon. Because all seasons are
not usually equally conducive, individuals whose genetic backgrounds result in their reproducing
at a more favourable rather than less favourable period will eventually dominate succeeding
generations. This is the basis for the seasonality of reproduction among most animal species.
Natural selection also results in the evolution of systems for transmitting and receiving
information that will increase the efficiency of two individuals’ finding each other. These
attraction systems are usually, but not always, species specific (see evolution: Species and
speciation). Once the proper individuals have found each other, it is clearly important that they
are both in a state of reproductive readiness. That their sensory receptors are tuned to the
same environmental stimuli is usually sufficient to achieve this synchrony (proper timing) in the
lower organisms. Apparently, however, this is not enough in the more complex organisms, in
which the fine tuning for reproductive synchrony is accomplished chiefly by a process called
courtship. Another evolutionary necessity is a mechanism that will guide the partners into
the proper orientation for efficient copulation. Such mechanisms are necessary for both internal
and external fertilization, especially the latter, where improper orientation could result in a
complete waste of the eggs and sperm.
In most organisms, the period of greatest mortality occurs between birth or hatching and the
attainment of maturity. Thus, it is not surprising that some of the most elaborate evolutionary
adaptations of an organism are revealed during this period. Natural selection has favoured an
enormous variety of behaviour in both parents and offspring that serves to ensure the maximum
survival of the young to maturity. In some animals this involves not only protecting the young
against environmental vicissitudes and providing them with adequate nutrition but also giving
them, in a more or less active manner, the information they will need to reproduce in turn.
External and internal influences
As mentioned at the beginning of this discussion, the anatomical, physiological, and neurological
aspects of reproduction and behaviour are dealt with in other articles. It is useful here, however,
to consider briefly the external and internal factors that initiate reproductive behaviour.
External and internal influences » Environmental influences
Light, usually in the form of increasing day length, seems to be the major environmental
stimulus for most vertebrates and many invertebrates, especially those living in areas away from
the Equator. That this should be such an important factor is quite reasonable in an evolutionary
sense: increasing day length signifies the onset of a favourable period for reproduction. In
equatorial regions, where changes in day length are usually insignificant throughout the year,
other environmental stimuli, such as rain, predominate.
Superimposed on day length are usually several other factors, which, if lacking, often override
the stimulating effect of light. Many insects, for example, will not initiate a reproductive cycle if
they lack certain protein foods. Many animal groups have an internal cycle of cellular activity
that must coincide with the external factors before reproduction can occur; a familiar
example is the estrous cycle in most mammals except primates. Females are sexually receptive
only during a brief period when they have ovulated (released an egg from the ovary).
External and internal influences » Hormonal influences
Although the exact way by which light affects the reproductive cycle is still disputed, it
undoubtedly varies from group to group. In birds, light passes either through the eyes or through
the bony tissue of the skull and stimulates the development of certain cells in the forepart of the
brain. These cells then secrete a substance that stimulates the anterior pituitary gland,
which is located at the base of the brain, to produce an array of regulatory substances
(hormones), called gonadotropins, that are carried by the blood to the gonads (ovaries and
testes), where they directly stimulate the development of eggs and sperm. The gonads, in turn,
produce the sex hormones—estrogen in the female and testosterone in the male—that directly
control several overt aspects of reproductive behaviour.
Unlike the higher animals, the gonads of insects apparently do not themselves secrete hormones.
Instead, stimulation by the corpus allatum, an organ in insects that corresponds in function to the
pituitary gland, causes the secretion of liquid substances on the body surface. These substances
are transmitted as liquids, or, even more significantly, as gases, to the recipient, in which they are
usually detected by olfaction or taste. Such substances, which are called ectohormones, or
pheromones, may serve as the major regulation and communication system for reproduction as
well as other behaviour in insects.
In the absence of all other stimuli, many types of sexual behaviour can be induced simply by an
injection of the appropriate gonadal hormone. Conversely, removal of the gonads usually inhibits
most sexual behaviour. The apparent failure of complete hormonal control over reproductive
behaviour has been a subject of much investigation and dispute. There is much evidence that
many types of reproductive behaviour are or can be controlled solely by neural mechanisms,
bypassing the hormonal system and any effect that it might exert on the nervous system to
produce behaviour. Several types of reproductive behaviour controlled solely or almost solely by
neural mechanisms are involved in or triggered by the processes that are initiated by courtship.
Modes of sexual attraction
The chief clues by which organisms advertise their readiness to engage in reproductive activity
are visual, auditory, and olfactory in nature. Most animals use a combination of two modes;
sometimes all three are used.
Modes of sexual attraction » Visual clues
The appearance of many higher vertebrates changes with the onset of reproductive activity. The
so-called prenuptial molt in many male birds results in the attainment of the nuptial plumage,
which often differs radically from that possessed by the bird at other times of the year or from
that possessed by a nonreproductive individual. The hindquarters of female baboons become
bright red in colour, which indicates, or advertises, the fact that she is in estrus and sexually
receptive. Such changes in appearance are less common in the lower animals but do occur in
many fishes, crabs, and cephalopods (e.g., squids and octopuses).
Often associated with changes in appearance are changes in behaviour, particularly the increase
in aggressive behaviour between males, often a prime feature in attracting females; such changes
have interesting evolutionary implications. In certain grouse, for example, females are most
attracted to males that engage in the greatest amount of fighting. No doubt, fighting in some
groups of mammals also serves this function as well as others.
In many animals the rise in aggression takes the form of territoriality, in which an individual,
usually a male, defends a particular location or territory by excluding from it all other males of
his own kind. Occasionally, other species are also excluded when it is to the advantage of the
defending individual to do so. Territorial behaviour involves many functions, not all of which are
directly concerned with reproduction. For purposes of advertising, however, territoriality
probably reduces the amount of interference between males and also makes it easier for females
to find males at the proper time.
Modes of sexual attraction » Olfactory clues
Researchers have now become aware of the enormous amount of information that is passed
between animals by chemical means. Well known are the urine, feces, and scent markings
employed by most mammals to delimit their breeding territories and to advertise their sexual
state. Males of a number of mammals are capable of determining if a female will be sexually
receptive simply by smelling her urine markings. A substance in the urine of male mice, on the
other hand, actually induces and accelerates the estrous cycle of females. A female gypsy moth is
able to attract males thousands of metres downwind of it simply by releasing minute quantities of
its sex pheromone each second. It has been calculated that one female silkworm moth carries
only about 1.5 micrograms (1.5 × 10-6 gram) of its sex attractant, called bombykol, at any given
moment; theoretically, this is enough to activate more than 1,000,000,000 males. The sex
attractant of barnacles, which are otherwise rather sessile (sedentary) organisms, causes
individuals to aggregate during the breeding period.
Another possible channel of communication occurs in a few fishes, namely electric discharge.
Evidence suggests that weak electric fields and discharges in the Mormyridae of Africa and
Gymnotidae of South America represent the major mode of social interaction in these families.
Courtship
Synchrony is the major factor in achieving fertilization in the lower animals, particularly in
aquatic forms. In most of these groups, the eggs and sperm are simply discharged into the
surrounding water, and fertilization occurs externally. It might be assumed that this procedure
would be roughly the same in the higher animals, with perhaps more overt behaviour to achieve
synchrony, and that, after the two individuals found each other, fertilization would proceed fairly
quickly. This is usually not the case, however. Although fertilization in the higher terrestrial
forms involves contact during copulation, it has been suggested that all of the higher animals
may have a strong aversion to bodily contact. This aversion is no doubt an antipredator
mechanism: close bodily contact signifies being caught. Since females are in an especially
helpless situation during copulation, they are particularly wary about bodily contact. In addition,
males are particularly aggressive during the breeding period, which further increases the
uncertainty of both individuals. These difficulties were solved by the evolution of a collection of
behaviours called courtship. Courtship has been defined as the heterosexual reproductive
communication system leading to the consummatory sexual act.
Courtship behaviour has many advantages and functions, including the reduction of hostility
between the potential sex partners, especially in species in which the male actively defends a
territory. The major aspects of such behaviour seem to be appearance, persistence, appeasement,
persuasion, and even deception. Because courtship behaviour involves the transmission of
information by means of signals, it is useful to define at this point an important group of social
signals called displays.
A social signal may be considered any behavioral pattern that effectively conveys information
from one individual to another. The term display has been restricted by some authorities to social
signals that not only convey information but that, in the course of evolution, have also become
“ritualized.” In other words, such signals have become so specialized and exaggerated in form or
function that they expressly facilitate a certain type of communication. The visual, auditory,
olfactory, tactile, or other patterns by which organisms advertise their readiness to engage in
reproductive activity provide examples of displays. Clearly, the kinds of displays utilized by
organisms depend on the sensory receptors of the receiver. Whereas higher vertebrates tend to
use visual and auditory displays, insects tend toward olfactory and tactile displays.
In animals in which the male takes on a wholly different appearance during the breeding period,
natural selection has eliminated from the female’s appearance the “aggressive badges” of males
that provoke fighting. It is not without significance that the appearance of the adult female in
many species is much like that of the juvenile; this implies to the male a friendly, nonaggressive
relationship. When one male approaches another that has intruded into the former’s territory,
the outsider may either return the aggressive display or flee. Females, however, usually
quietly back up slightly and then slowly move forward again. With each approach, the male’s
hostility lessens toward this appeasing, increasingly familiar individual. Often, as in many birds,
the females resort to displays that resemble the food-begging behaviour normally seen in the
young. Males frequently respond to this display by actually regurgitating food. Male spiders of
some species offer the larger and more aggressive females food as bait, and copulation occurs
while the female is eating the food rather than her potential mate. Mutual feeding displays, often
with nonedible items, are engaged in by a number of insects and birds. In the courtship behaviour
of several birds, extremely elaborate displays are utilized to hide the bill from the potential
partner, because the bills of these birds are their chief weapons. Some aspects of nest building
have been incorporated into the displays of such birds as penguins. Early in the relationship
between the individuals, one or both may offer the other stones that are placed in a pile. The
actual nest is not constructed until much later, however.
All courtship displays resemble functional behaviours that are appropriate to friendly, bonded
situations, such as those between parents and between parents and their offspring. The degree of
elaborateness of the display is governed by a number of factors. One is to prevent cross-mating
between different species, an occurrence that usually results in the waste of the eggs and sperm.
Any specific aspect—i.e., one or more displays—used by an organism in species discrimination
is called an isolating mechanism. In many species, the majority of the displays between
individuals are a series of identity checks.
Modes of sexual attraction » Olfactory clues
Researchers have now become aware of the enormous amount of information that is passed
between animals by chemical means. Well known are the urine, feces, and scent markings
employed by most mammals to delimit their breeding territories and to advertise their sexual
state. Males of a number of mammals are capable of determining if a female will be sexually
receptive simply by smelling her urine markings. A substance in the urine of male mice, on the
other hand, actually induces and accelerates the estrous cycle of females. A female gypsy moth is
able to attract males thousands of metres downwind of it simply by releasing minute quantities of
its sex pheromone each second. It has been calculated that one female silkworm moth carries
only about 1.5 micrograms (1.5 × 10-6 gram) of its sex attractant, called bombykol, at any given
moment; theoretically, this is enough to activate more than 1,000,000,000 males. The sex
attractant of barnacles, which are otherwise rather sessile (sedentary) organisms, causes
individuals to aggregate during the breeding period.
Another possible channel of communication occurs in a few fishes, namely electric discharge.
Evidence suggests that weak electric fields and discharges in the Mormyridae of Africa and
Gymnotidae of South America represent the major mode of social interaction in these families.
Courtship
Synchrony is the major factor in achieving fertilization in the lower animals, particularly in
aquatic forms. In most of these groups, the eggs and sperm are simply discharged into the
surrounding water, and fertilization occurs externally. It might be assumed that this procedure
would be roughly the same in the higher animals, with perhaps more overt behaviour to achieve
synchrony, and that, after the two individuals found each other, fertilization would proceed fairly
quickly. This is usually not the case, however. Although fertilization in the higher terrestrial
forms involves contact during copulation, it has been suggested that all of the higher animals
may have a strong aversion to bodily contact. This aversion is no doubt an antipredator
mechanism: close bodily contact signifies being caught. Since females are in an especially
helpless situation during copulation, they are particularly wary about bodily contact. In addition,
males are particularly aggressive during the breeding period, which further increases the
uncertainty of both individuals. These difficulties were solved by the evolution of a collection of
behaviours called courtship. Courtship has been defined as the heterosexual reproductive
communication system leading to the consummatory sexual act.
Courtship behaviour has many advantages and functions, including the reduction of hostility
between the potential sex partners, especially in species in which the male actively defends a
territory. The major aspects of such behaviour seem to be appearance, persistence, appeasement,
persuasion, and even deception. Because courtship behaviour involves the transmission of
information by means of signals, it is useful to define at this point an important group of social
signals called displays.
A social signal may be considered any behavioral pattern that effectively conveys information
from one individual to another. The term display has been restricted by some authorities to social
signals that not only convey information but that, in the course of evolution, have also become
“ritualized.” In other words, such signals have become so specialized and exaggerated in form or
function that they expressly facilitate a certain type of communication. The visual, auditory,
olfactory, tactile, or other patterns by which organisms advertise their readiness to engage in
reproductive activity provide examples of displays. Clearly, the kinds of displays utilized by
organisms depend on the sensory receptors of the receiver. Whereas higher vertebrates tend to
use visual and auditory displays, insects tend toward olfactory and tactile displays.
In animals in which the male takes on a wholly different appearance during the breeding period,
natural selection has eliminated from the female’s appearance the “aggressive badges” of males
that provoke fighting. It is not without significance that the appearance of the adult female in
many species is much like that of the juvenile; this implies to the male a friendly, nonaggressive
relationship. When one male approaches another that has intruded into the former’s territory,
the outsider may either return the aggressive display or flee. Females, however, usually
quietly back up slightly and then slowly move forward again. With each approach, the male’s
hostility lessens toward this appeasing, increasingly familiar individual. Often, as in many birds,
the females resort to displays that resemble the food-begging behaviour normally seen in the
young. Males frequently respond to this display by actually regurgitating food. Male spiders of
some species offer the larger and more aggressive females food as bait, and copulation occurs
while the female is eating the food rather than her potential mate. Mutual feeding displays, often
with nonedible items, are engaged in by a number of insects and birds. In the courtship behaviour
of several birds, extremely elaborate displays are utilized to hide the bill from the potential
partner, because the bills of these birds are their chief weapons. Some aspects of nest building
have been incorporated into the displays of such birds as penguins. Early in the relationship
between the individuals, one or both may offer the other stones that are placed in a pile. The
actual nest is not constructed until much later, however.
All courtship displays resemble functional behaviours that are appropriate to friendly, bonded
situations, such as those between parents and between parents and their offspring. The degree of
elaborateness of the display is governed by a number of factors. One is to prevent cross-mating
between different species, an occurrence that usually results in the waste of the eggs and sperm.
Any specific aspect—i.e., one or more displays—used by an organism in species discrimination
is called an isolating mechanism. In many species, the majority of the displays between
individuals are a series of identity checks.
Another factor that has an impact upon the complexity of displays is the length of time that the
pair bond will endure. Brief relationships are usually, but not always, associated with rather
simple courtship activity. In a number of insects, birds, and mammals, the males display on a
common courtship ground called a lek or an arena. Females visit these courtship areas, copulate,
and leave. The males do not participate in any aspect of parental care; the bond lasts but a few
seconds. Yet, despite the brevity of this relationship, in no other courtship system is there the
development of such elaborate and almost fantastic displays in both the movements and
appearances of the courting males.

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male

work by Kinsey
Main
Aspects of the topic Sexual-Behavior-in-the-Human-Male are discussed in the following places
at Britannica.
Assorted References
• discussed in biography ( in Alfred Charles Kinsey (American scientist) )
Kinsey’s inquiries into human sex life led him to found the institute and to publish Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).
These reports, based on 18,500 personal interviews, indicated a wide variation in
behaviour. Although interviews were carefully conducted and certain statistical criteria
met, the studies were criticized...
• work by Institute for Sex Research ( in Kinsey Institute for Research in
Sex, Gender, and Reproduction (research organization, Bloomington, Indiana,
United States) )
The first two works sponsored by the institute were Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), both of which were widely
recognized as comprehensive and important surveys of the norms, extent, and variability
of American sexual behaviour.

Citations
MLA Style:

"Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." Encyclopædia Britannica.

2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 13 Sep. 2009

<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/537099/Sexual-Behavior-in-the-
Human-Male>.

APA Style:

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. (2009). In Encyclopædia

Britannica. Retrieved September 13, 2009, from Encyclopædia

Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/537099/Sexual-
Behavior

Sexual Behavior in the Human Female

work by Kinsey

Main
Aspects of the topic Sexual-Behavior-in-the-Human-Female are discussed in the following
places at Britannica.
Assorted References
• discussed in biography ( in Alfred Charles Kinsey (American scientist) )
Kinsey’s inquiries into human sex life led him to found the institute and to publish Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).
These reports, based on 18,500 personal interviews, indicated a wide variation in
behaviour. Although interviews were carefully conducted and certain statistical criteria
met, the studies were criticized...
• work by Institute for Sex Research ( in Kinsey Institute for Research in
Sex, Gender, and Reproduction (research organization, Bloomington, Indiana,
United States) )
The first two works sponsored by the institute were Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), both of which were widely
recognized as comprehensive and important surveys of the norms, extent, and variability
of American sexual behaviour.

Citations
MLA Style:

"Sexual Behavior in the Human Female." Encyclopædia Britannica.

2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 13 Sep. 2009

<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/537096/Sexual-Behavior-in-the-
Human-Female>.
APA Style:

Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. (2009). In Encyclopædia

Britannica. Retrieved September 13, 2009, from Encyclopædia

Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/53

adultery
sexual behaviour

Main
sexual relations between a married person and someone other than the spouse. Written or
customary prohibitions or taboos against adultery constitute part of the marriage code of virtually
every society. Indeed, adultery seems to be as universal and, in some instances, as common as
marriage.
Social and cultural aspects » Social control of sexual behaviour
Societies differ remarkably in what they consider socially desirable and undesirable in terms of
sexual behaviour and consequently differ in what they attempt to prevent or promote. There
appear, however, to be four basic sexual controls in the majority of human societies. First, to
control endless competition, some form of marriage is necessary. This not only removes both
partners from the competitive arena of courtship and assures each of a sexual partner, but it
allows them to devote more time and energy to other necessary and useful tasks of life. Despite
the beliefs of earlier writers, marriage is not necessary for the care of the young; this can be
accomplished in other ways.
Second, control of forced sexual relationships is necessary to prevent anger, feuding, and other
disruptive retribution.
Third, all societies exert control over whom one is eligible to marry or have as a sexual partner.
Endogamy, holding the choice within one’s group, increases group solidarity but tends to isolate
the group and limit its political strength. Exogamy, forcing the individual to marry outside the
group, dilutes group loyalty but increases group size and power through new external liaisons.
Some combination of endogamy and exogamy is found in most societies. All have incest
prohibitions. These are not based on genetic knowledge. Indeed, many incest taboos involve
persons not genetically related (father–stepdaughter, for example). The prime reason for incest
prohibition seems to be the necessity for preventing society from becoming snarled in its own
web: every person has a complex set of duties, rights, obligations, and statuses with regard to
other people, and these would become intolerably complicated or even contradictory if incest
were freely permitted.
Fourth, there is control through the establishment of some safety-valve system: the formulation
of exceptions to the prevailing sexual restrictions. There is the recognition that humans cannot
perpetually conform to the social code and that well-defined exceptions must be made. There are
three sorts of exceptions to sexual restrictions: (1) Divorce: while all societies encourage
marriage, all realize that it is in the interest of society and the individual to terminate marriage
under certain conditions. (2) Exceptions based on kinship: many societies permit or
encourage sexual activity with certain kin, even after marriage. Most often these kin are a
brother’s wife or a wife’s sister. In addition, sexual “joking relationships” are often expected
between brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, and cousins. While coitus is not involved, there is much
explicit sexual banter, teasing, and humorous insult. (3) Exceptions based on special
occasions, ranging from sexual activity as a part of religious rites to purely secular
ceremonies and celebrations wherein the customary sexual restrictions are temporarily lifted.
Turning to particular forms of sexual behaviour, one learns from anthropology and history that
extreme diversity in social attitude is common. Most societies are unconcerned over self-
masturbation since it does not entail procreation or the establishment of social bonds, but a few
regard it with disapprobation. Sexual dreams cause concern only if they are thought to be the
result of the nocturnal visitation of some spirit. Such dreams were once attributed to spirits or
demons known as incubi and succubi, who sought out sleeping humans for sexual intercourse.
Petting among most preliterate societies is done only as a prelude to coitus—as foreplay—rather
than as an end in itself. In some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, however, petting is used as a
premarital substitute for coitus in order to preserve virginity and avoid pregnancy. There is great
variation in petting and foreplay techniques. Kissing is by no means universal, as some groups
view the mouth as a biting and chewing orifice ill-suited for expressing affection. While some
societies emphasize the erotic role of the female breast, others—such as the Chinese—pay little
attention to it. Still others regard oral stimulation of the breast unseemly, being too akin to
infantile suckling. Although manual stimulation of the genitalia is nearly universal, a few
peoples abstain because of revulsion toward genital secretions. Not much information exists on
mouth–genital contact, and one can say only that it is common among some peoples and rare
among others.
A considerable number of societies manifest scratching and biting in conjunction with sexual
activity, and most of this is done by the female. Sadomasochism in any other form, however, is
conspicuous by its absence in preliterate societies.
An enumeration of the societies that permit or forbid premarital coitus is complicated not only by
the double standard but also by the fact that such prohibition or permission is often qualified. As
a rough estimate, however, 40 to 50 percent of preliterate or ancient societies allowed premarital
coitus under certain conditions to both males and females. If one were to count as permissive
those groups that theoretically disapprove but actually condone such coitus, the percentage
would rise to perhaps 70.
In marital coitus, when sexual access is not only permitted but encouraged, one would expect
considerable uniformity in frequency of coitus. This expectation is not fulfilled: social
conditioning profoundly affects even marital coitus. On one Irish island reported upon by a
researcher, for example, marital coitus is best measured in terms of per year, and among the
Cayapas of Ecuador, a frequency of twice a week is something to boast of. The coital frequencies
of other groups, on the other hand, are nearer to human potential. In one Polynesian group, the
usual frequency of marital coitus among individuals in their late 20s was 10 to 12 per week, and
in their late 40s the frequency had fallen to three to four. The African Bala, according to one
researcher, had coitus on the average of once or twice per day from young adulthood into the
sixth decade of life.
Marital coitus is not unrestricted. Coitus during menstruation or after a certain stage of
pregnancy is generally taboo. After childbirth a lengthy period of time must often elapse
before coitus can resume, and some peoples abstain for magical reasons before or during
warfare, hunting expeditions, and certain other important events or ceremonies. In modern
Western society one finds menstrual, pregnancy, and postpartum taboos perpetuated under an
aesthetic or medical guise, and coaches still attempt to force celibacy upon athletes prior to
competition.
Extramarital coitus provides a striking example of the double standard: it is expected, or
tolerated, in males and generally prohibited for females. Very few societies allow wives sexual
freedom. Extramarital coitus with the husband’s consent, however, is another matter. Somewhere
between two-fifths and three-fifths of preliterate societies permit wife lending or allow the wife
to have coitus with certain relatives (generally brothers-in-law) or permit her freedom on special
ceremonial occasions. The main concern of preliterate societies is not one of morality, but of

more practical considerations: does the act weaken kinship ties and loyalty? Will
it damage the husband’s social prestige? Will it cause pregnancy and complicate inheritance or
cause the wife to neglect her duties and obligations? Most foreign of all to Western thinking is
that of those peoples whose marriage ceremony involves the bride having coitus with someone
other than the groom, yet it is to be recalled that this practice existed to a limited extent in
medieval Europe as jus primae noctis, the right of the lord to the bride of one of his subjects.
Sexual deviations and sex offenses are, of course, social definitions rather than natural
phenomena. What is normative behaviour in one society may be a deviation or crime in another.
One can go through the literature and discover that virtually any sexual act, even child–adult
relations or necrophilia, has somewhere at some time been acceptable behaviour. Homosexuality
is permitted in perhaps two-thirds of human societies. In some groups it is normative behaviour,
whereas in others it is not only absent but beyond imagination. Generally, it is not an activity
involving most of the population but exists as an alternative way of life for certain individuals.
These special individuals are sometimes transvestites—that is, they dress and behave like the
opposite sex. Sometimes they are regarded as curiosities or ridiculed, but more often they are
accorded respect and magical powers are attributed to them. It is noteworthy, however, that aside
from these transvestites, exclusive homosexuality is quite rare in preliterate societies.
In conclusion, the cardinal lesson of anthropology is that no type of sexual behaviour or attitude
has a universal, inherent social or psychological value for good or evil—the whole meaning and
value of any expression of sexuality is determined by the social context within which it occurs.

industrial design

New PhD: Human Behavior and Design.

Human Ecology, November 2008

Cornell will offer a new doctorate in human behavior and design (HBD), the first program of its
kind in New York State beginning in the fall 2009. Offered in the College of Human Ecology's
Department of Design and Environmental Analysis (DEA), the program will draw on DEA's
specialties in ergonomics; social, cognitive, and environmental psychology; facility planning and
management; and interior and industrial design…
Lexile Reading Level: 1190

Main
the design of mass-produced consumer products. Industrial designers, often trained as architects
or other visual arts professionals, are usually part of a larger creative team. Their primary
responsibility is to help produce manufactured items that not only work well but please the eye
and, therefore, have a competitive advantage over similar products. The work of an industrial
designer often relates to or includes graphic design, such as advertising and packaging, corporate
imagery and branding, and interior design (also called interior architecture or environmental
design), the arrangement of man-made spaces.
Origins of modern design: Germany and Europe

Industrial design is a largely 20th-century phenomenon. The first industrial

designer is often considered to be German architect Peter Behrens, who was heavily influenced
by the 19th-century English designer and poet William Morris and by the Arts and Crafts
movement, with which Morris was closely associated. Beginning in 1907, Behrens was the
artistic adviser for AEG (the Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft, or Universal Electric
Company), for which he designed not only industrial buildings but also small electrical
appliances, from teakettles to fans. In addition, he determined the company’s corporate
identity, packaging, and advertising. Behrens’s approach was an extension of what architects
such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Karl Friedrich Schinkel long practiced: total control of a
designed environment at all levels. Behrens, however, created designs for a corporate client,
intent on selling a service and related goods to the public, rather than for a middle-class
residential client or a royal patron, as in the cases of Wright and Schinkel, respectively.
Behrens was a leading member of the Deutscher Werkbund (founded in 1907), a society of
artists, architects, and craftsmen akin to English arts-and-crafts societies. The Deutscher
Werkbund catalyzed communication among German design professionals and sponsored major
exhibitions, such as those in Cologne (1914) and Stuttgart (1927); the latter was the
Weissenhofsiedlung, a renowned exhibition of model homes designed by Europe’s leading
modern architects and the epitome of the International Style of minimalist architecture.

Behrens himself influenced many architect-designers of the next generation,

including Walter Gropius, founder of Germany’s famed Bauhaus school of design, and Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, who served as a later director of the school. Founded in 1919 in Weimar,
Ger., the Bauhaus aimed to elevate and coordinate the design and production of crafts and
industrial goods for a new postimperial age. Both Gropius and Mies designed buildings as well
as smaller-scale objects. For instance, Gropius was the architect of the new Bauhaus building
when the school moved to Dessau in 1925, but he also designed interiors of Adler automobiles
(1930–33). The furnishings designed at the Bauhaus were characterized by the extensive use of
bent metal, something that was developed with the assistance of the Junkers Aircraft Company in
Dessau, a firm known for its early development of the all-metal airplane in 1918, at the end of
World War I. Mies—who directed the Bauhaus from 1930 to 1933, when the Nazi Party came to
national power and closed it—designed some renowned examples of steel-framed furniture, such
as the MR chair (1927), the Barcelona chair (1929), and the Brno chair (1930). During the
worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s, when he had few architectural commissions, Mies
earned a living from the royalties of those furniture sales. The Bauhaus produced other icons of
modern design, notably the sleek glassware and streamlined table lamps of Wilhelm
Wagenfeld.

Beyond those designers specifically associated with the Bauhaus, other German
architects of the time created high-profile designs; for instance, Fritz August Breuhaus de Groot
created the interiors of the steamship Bremen (1929) and the airship Hindenburg (1931–35), and
in the 1930s Gropius protégé Carl August Bembé designed motorboats for Maybach, a company
that built internal-combustion engines for airplanes and boats and automobiles for the German
car manufacturers Opel and Adler.

Early developments in industrial design were not, however, taking place solely in
Germany. In the first decades of the 20th century, architects and designers in other countries
were also creating distinctively designed consumer products. These include such items as the
undulating Savoy vase (1936) by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, the avant-garde geometric
porcelain teapots and cups (1923) by Russian Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich, the classic
double-lever corkscrew (1930) by Italian designer Dominick Rosati, and the ubiquitous, highly
flexible Anglepoise desk lamp (1932) by the British automotive engineer George Carwardine.
Modern design in the United States
Despite what is often seen as German leadership in creating industrial design as a profession, the
United States has an equally compelling claim to being industrial design’s parent country. The
United States emerged from World War I (1914–18) physically undamaged; in contrast, many
European cities and industrial facilities were not only damaged but in some cases downright
decimated by those years of war and by the subsequent socialist and communist revolutions. In
some ways the radical sociopolitical change of the interwar years catalyzed equally radical
changes in attitudes toward design, as can be seen in the growing popularity of the Bauhaus
within Weimar Germany. European society was in a state of turmoil and radical reform, but the
United States, despite its share of social unrest, was somewhat more stable. During the war the
country had established a reputation for large industrial production, and afterward its wartime
factories were adapted for the civilian consumer economy. With this great output capability,
most probably, came a tendency toward planned obsolescence. This term was supposedly coined
after World War II by American industrial designers and writers to indicate industry’s desire to
produce consumer items that would be replaced even before their actual utility expired. Although
the concept is often linked with the second half of the 20th century, it is likely that American
industrialists saw this profit-making opportunity well before then.
The United States at this time was thus ripe for the development of the industrial design
profession. In fact, the U.S. Patent Office recognized the term industrial designer in 1913, and,
as in Europe, organizations were formed to unite the visual arts professionals who helped create
consumer products and environments. The American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen
(founded in 1927), for instance, was followed by the American Designers Institute (1938) and
the Society of Industrial Designers (1944), all of which eventually merged to form the Industrial
Designers Society of America (1965). As with the Deutscher Werkbund and most professional
organizations, these served to validate the profession in the view of the public and to facilitate
communication among their members.
One of the first major public expressions of the newfound commitment to showcasing well-
designed consumer products was Macy’s department store’s Art in Trade Exposition (1927),
which was designed by the scenic designer and Theatre Guild founder Lee Simonson and owed a
major conceptual debt to the Arts Décoratifs exposition that had taken place in Paris two years
earlier. Throughout the rest of the interwar years, other exhibitions were likewise mounted to
inform the public and endorse the objects and artists exhibited as well as to promote well-crafted
consumer items. Even museums such as the new Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York
began to recognize the field; MoMA established a department of architecture and design (1932)
and organized important exhibitions of industrial design, such as “Machine Art” (1934).
Moreover, department stores and direct-mail merchants, including Montgomery Ward and Sears,
Roebuck and Company, created corporate design departments to control the look of their
merchandise. Montgomery Ward was probably the first store in the United States to do so
(1934), hiring design educator Ann Swainson to be their first woman executive and architect
Dave Chapman to be the head of product planning. Sears followed soon afterward, scooping the
competition by hiring noted German Modernist architect Karl Schneider, a Gropius and Behrens
protégé, to design furniture and furnishings for the company’s line (1938–45). In 1926 Walter
Paepcke founded the Container Corporation of America, and in 1936 he hired Egbert Jacobson to
establish a consistent design identity for its products and advertising, a development that had far-
reaching consequences in the American graphic design and advertising worlds.

At this time several outstanding industrial designers were at work

in the United States—among them Donald Deskey, Henry Dreyfuss, Walter Dorwin Teague,
Raymond Loewy, and Norman Bel Geddes, who are often considered to be the founders of the
industrial design profession in the United States. They created iconic items, ranging in scale from
large (locomotive engines) to small (table lamps), that typify great moments in American design.
These designers came from a variety of professional backgrounds, mostly in the visual arts. For
instance, Donald Deskey was a furniture and interior designer who used an elaborate Art Deco
style in his product design; his masterpiece was the interior of Radio City Music Hall in New
York’s Rockefeller Center (a contract he was awarded in 1932). Henry Dreyfuss is best known
for his interest in ergonomics, particularly in his design of Bell telephones (1930 and later), but
he is equally acclaimed for his bullet-shaped Hudson J3a locomotive (1938) for the New York
Central Railroad, his interiors for Lockheed Aircraft and American Airlines, and his products for
Thermos and Hoover. Engineer Raymond Loewy designed appliances for Sears, Roebuck and
Company, but he is perhaps best remembered for his transportation design, from the S1
locomotive (1937) for the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Scenicruiser bus (1944 and later) for
Greyhound to Studebaker automobiles (1953 and later). Packaging and advertising specialist
Walter Dorwin Teague is best known for his design work on Kodak Brownie cameras (1927–30
and later) and on gas stations and corporate imagery for the Texas Fuel Company (1935–36; later
renamed Texaco), as well as his long-term work on Boeing airliner interiors, from the
Stratocruiser (1945) through the 707 (1957–59). His firm, Walter Dorwin Teague Associates,
continued to design Boeing airliner interiors into the 21st century. Joining those active and
important practitioners was the more theoretically minded Norman Bel Geddes, a set designer
best known for the futuristic transportation designs featured in his General Motors Pavilion and
Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair (1939–40) and in his books Horizons (1932) and
Magic Motorways (1940). The streamlined teardrop shape of his Motor Car No. 8 (1931)
prefigured the similarly shaped Dymaxion car of American inventor R. Buckminster Fuller,
unveiled at the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago. Clean lines and streamlined
shapes, suggestive of movement and speed, were characteristic of American design of the time
and paralleled the design work produced by the aviation industry’s wind-tunnel research of the
1920s and ’30s.

During World War II (1939–45) industrial designers came into

their own, creating design solutions and products to help win the war, such as the Walkie-Talkie,
a two-way FM radio invented by Galvin Manufacturing (later called Motorola, Inc.) in 1943 and
used by the U.S. Army. These designers also helped to usher in a postwar consumer society after
the long hiatus in individual spending that had begun with the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Henry Dreyfuss, for example, worked for the Consolidated-Vultee Aircraft Company during the
war; he proposed (1944) to convert the company’s B-24 bombers into postwar airliners, and he
planned and tested the Convair car (1947), a flying vehicle whose wings could be unbolted and
whose fuselage could then function as an automobile, with that same company. Walter Dorwin
Teague worked on converting the C97 military transport for Boeing into the double-decked
Stratocruiser (1945) airliner, the conceptual forerunner of that company’s jumbo jets.
Buckminster Fuller reshaped his military Airbarac (1946), designed to serve as a metal barracks
for the members of the army and air corps, into the all-aluminum Dymaxion House for the Beech
Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kan. (today on exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn,
Mich.). The war years catalyzed something else that had started during the Great Depression:
architects’ and designers’ use of new and plentifully available materials, from aluminum and
plastic to wood laminates. The postwar era witnessed a boom in industrial design throughout the
world, as factories accustomed to churning out tens of thousands of machines for war
transitioned to making mass-produced consumer goods. This was particularly so in the United
States, where factories were not damaged or destroyed by wartime bombing. In a way, this
circumstance guaranteed that American designers would be at the forefront of making consumer
products immediately after the war.
American hegemony and challenges from abroad
American designers continued to be at the forefront of industrial design, at least in its initial
postwar manifestation. Some major examples include advertising and packaging designer Walter
Landor, who established Landor Associates (1941), a design consultancy renowned for creating
brand identity and corporate imagery; industrial designer Charles Butler, a protégé of Raymond
Loewy who in the 1950s and ’60s designed British airliner interiors, from Viscounts for Capital
Airlines (1955) to the Concorde (1969 and later); Harley Earl, the creator of the design
department at General Motors who was responsible for putting the fins on Cadillacs (1948 and
later) and who also developed the Corvette sports car (1952–53); and Charles and Ray Eames,
the husband-and-wife design team that popularized molded plywood furniture in the 1940s and
’50s. The design impact of the Eameses extended throughout American society, in part because
they did not limit themselves to the design of furniture and furnishings. They created a number
of important educational films, most notably Powers of Ten (1977), and they designed a number
of significant public exhibitions, such as “Mathematica” (1961), that were shown throughout the
nation and within World’s Fair pavilions. Other designers who made important contributions to
American industry in the postwar era include Eliot Noyes, an employee of Norman Bel Geddes
who in the 1950s and ’60s redesigned IBM’s product line, most notably the Selectric typewriter
(1961); Richard Ten Eyck, who designed Cessna airplanes and Hesston tractors and is best
known for creating the Vornado fan (1945–59, with 1988 and later variants) for the O.A. Sutton
Corporation; and John Frassanito, a former Loewy employee who designed Datapoint computers
in the early 1970s and spacecraft for NASA beginning in the mid-1980s.
Museums, both large and small, often showcased the work of such designers; the Albright Art
Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., for instance, organized the early exhibition “Good Design Is Your
Business” in 1947, and MoMA displayed the best of design in its “Good Design” exhibitions
(1950 and later). Also in those decades there was an expansion of the design curriculum within
art and architectural schools. The Hungarian-born Bauhaus artist and educator László Moholy-
Nagy established the trendsetting New Bauhaus in Chicago (1937) and subsequently developed
the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology (1944). It and similar schools began to

train the next generation of American industrial designers.

Industrial design flourished in postwar Europe as well. Even in war-ravaged West Germany,
design was given a boost by the establishment of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, or the
Ulm Design School (1953–68), which was often considered a successor to the Bauhaus. One of
its founders was the typeface designer Otl Aicher, a corporate-branding specialist, noted author
of graphic standards manuals for his clients, and designer whose clients included Lufthansa and
Munich’s transportation authority. Aicher’s contributions to the development of postwar graphic
design and corporate identity may have even surpassed those of the legendary Herbert Bayer, the
Bauhaus typeface designer who introduced a surrealistic collage style into periodicals of the
1930s and who continued his work in the United States with Gropius at Harvard after leaving
Germany in 1938. After World War II, Bayer continued typeface innovations while helping
design aficionado and industrialist Walter Paepcke to develop Aspen, Colo., as a resort and think
tank location with the establishment of the Aspen Institute (1950). West Germany produced
other great designers, such as Dieter Rams, who, beginning in 1955, was the creative force
behind all Braun electric appliances, which epitomized the clean, minimalist look of modern
German design.
After World War II, Japanese design benefited from an active reconnection to Europe and the
United States. Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), formed in 1949, sent

Japanese industrial designers for study abroad in an effort to upgrade the quality
of the country’s products, which were considered, in the immediate postwar era, to be cheap
imitations of Western products. Under this program Takuo Hirano—founder of one of Japan’s
largest industrial design firms, Hirano & Associates (1960)—studied at the Art Center College of
Design in Pasadena, Calif. In 1957 MITI established the Good Design Awards (formerly the
Good Design Selection System), or G-Marks. The G-Mark award system consists of an annual
juried competition of new consumer products, with awards given for products within various
categories and one grand prize that spans all. Awards are based on aesthetics of design as well as
a product’s features related to safety, function, value, and even post-sales consumer service.
Such measures helped Japan become a worldwide leader in the export of home electronics and
automobiles in the 1980s. Other countries also developed in terms of consumer product design
after World War II. In Denmark, for instance, architect Arne Jacobsen established an
international reputation with his iconic plywood-and-steel Ant chair (1951), and Jacob Jensen
designed minimalist Bang & Olufsen stereo equipment from 1963 to 1993. In England the
economical Mini automobile was created in 1959 by Morris Motors chief engineer Alec
Issigonis and became an icon of the 1960s. The French architect Jean Prouvé created Modernist
wood-and-metal furniture before and after the war. But perhaps the most remarkable postwar
industrial design occurred in Italy.

In the second half of the 20th century, Italian design was showcased for American
museum audiences in exhibitions ranging from “Italy at Work” (1950) at the Art Institute of
Chicago to “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” (1972) at the MoMA in New York. In the
former exhibition, Italian design captured the public’s imagination with its sensual curvilinear
forms; in the latter, museum visitors were shown the flexibility of modular furniture. Examples

of great Italian product design created during the middle decades of the 20th
century include Corradino d’Ascanio’s peppy Vespa motor scooters (1946–48); Carlo Mollino’s
sensuous Arabesque table (1950); architect Vico Magistretti’s lacquered aluminum Eclisse lamp
(1965; also called the Eclipse lamp), which resembles a space helmet; artist Joe Colombo’s
innovative molded-plastic furniture, such as his 4867 Chair (1965) and popular Boby trolley
(1970); Mario Bellini’s calculators for the office-equipment company Olivetti beginning in the
1960s and continuing through the 1980s; Alessandro Mendini’s work in design publishing as
well as kitchen-accessory design for the Italian design factory Alessi in the 1980s; and architect
Ettore Sottsass’s lifelong contributions to design for Olivetti (1958–80) and his founding in 1980
of the Memphis group of architects and designers. With its tendency to imbue its creations with
whimsical historical references, this group was the epitome of postmodern design. Sottsass’s
work within the group includes his multicoloured Carlton room divider (1981).
Postmodern design and its aftermath
In the mid- to late 1970s, architects around the world began to question the validity of minimal
Modernist architecture and design as providing the universal solution to all environments. There
was a renewed appreciation of history and historic details and of local and regional historic
contexts and a renewed expression of those historicist interests within popular exhibitions of the
era, such as MoMA’s renowned display in 1975–76 of 19th-century architectural renderings in
watercolour from the École des Beaux-Arts and the First International Architecture Exhibition
for the 1980 Venice Biennale, which took as its title and theme “The Presence of the Past.” For
this show, contemporary architects were encouraged to create streetscapes that related to
traditional architectural environments.
It was particularly in the postmodern 1980s that architects such as Michael Graves, Stanley
Tigerman, and Hans Hollein created home accessories for companies such as Alessi in Milan and
Swid Powell in the United States. Certain designers, including Sottsass and his Memphis
colleague Matteo Thun of Austria, became household names, much as Mies and Breuer had been
in the Modernist era, when their furniture designs were reissued by Knoll Associates and other
companies. International exhibitions and publications, such as “Design Heute” (1988; “Design
Today”), a traveling show organized by the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt,
displayed these often-outlandish postmodern creations for members of the public and
professionals alike. This individualism reached its apex in the late 1980s, just before the
recession of the early 1990s induced design to assume a more-subdued profile and pushed
architecture into a more-sober focus on value engineering, an examination of the cost of the
service and product provided in relation to its fulfillment of function.
provided in relation to its fulfillment of function.

Since then, two pronounced tendencies have been evident in industrial design:
one showcases the artistic creations of a talented star designer, and the other relies on teamwork
among design and engineering professionals to shape the final product. The former model is still
evident in the field of architecture; witness the international celebrity achieved by Frank Gehry
when he designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1991–97). In product design and

industrial design at the turn of the 21st century, however, few individuals
achieved that sort of status. One exception is French designer Philippe Starck, whose plywood
bucket chair called the Costes chair (1982) was popularized after he used it extensively in the
Café Costes in Paris (1984). Starck continued to design dramatic interiors—most notably for
hotels developed by entrepreneur Ian Schrager in the 1980s and ’90s—as well as consumer
products such as vases and toothbrushes. In a broadening of the public appeal for “designer”
products, the department-store chain Target hired Michael Graves to develop a line of home
furnishings, and, after that proved successful, Target enlisted Starck to do the same, with his
products reaching stores in 2002. The wide public awareness of Starck’s strong designs was an
exception for industrial designers at the time.
The more-prevalent tendency in industrial design is for the designer to be part of a larger team
that creates the marketable product. One important firm that embraced this approach was Frog
Design. A company founded in 1969 by Hartmut Esslinger, it upheld the founder’s idea that
“form follows emotion,” in contrast to the traditional Modernist dictum “form follows function.”
Frog Design is best known for its work on Sony Trinitron televisions (1978) and early Apple
computers (1984). In the mid-1990s it expanded with offices in Europe and the United States to
accommodate more clients, such as Lufthansa, for which it designed gate areas and airplane
interiors, and Microsoft, which it advised on the design interface of the Windows XP operating
system. Frog Design’s Lufthansa work provides a good example of the firm’s shift from
expressing “function” to expressing corporate “emotion.” The ribbed silver curvilinear design of
Lufthansa’s business-class seats relates to the tradition of the corrugated aluminum German
airliners of the 1920s and ’30s with their bucket seats. The check-in counters and waiting areas
blend that early aviation vocabulary with medieval heraldic references, using curved forms to
suggest a knight’s shield protecting the check-in agents.

Another teamwork-oriented design firm active at the start of the

21st century was IDEO. Founded in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1991 by Bill Moggridge, Mike Nuttall,
and David Kelley, it grew rapidly, adding offices in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston as well
as London, Munich, and Shanghai. With its design studios operating globally, IDEO stressed the
team approach to the design process. Its successfully executed projects are diverse and include
the overall image and design of Amtrak’s high-speed train Acela (2000), the original computer
mouse for Microsoft (1987), modems for 3Com (2000), printers for Apple (1994) and Hewlett-
Packard (1999), personal digital assistants for Palm, Inc. (1999), and for Palm’s competitor
Handspring (2000), and even everyday items such as toothbrushes for Oral-B (1997) and CD-
ROM cases for TDK (2000).
In their global reach, both Frog Design and IDEO were typical of the design world at the turn of
the millennium. Unlike their 20th-century counterparts (at least, perhaps, until the postmodern
1980s), such design firms practice internationally. This has contributed to the blurring of national
identity in the look of designed products, with the exception of those few designers, like Starck,
whose work is characterized by its individuality, though it is marketed throughout the world and
on a very popular level through retail stores such as Target.

Further evidence of the globalization of industrial design can be seen in the

automotive industry; many non-U.S. car companies maintain their design offices in California
with staff members from around the world. One of the most-noted auto designers is J Mays, an
American who trained at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., and then worked
for German auto companies BMW and Audi in the 1980s. From 1989 to 1993 he served as chief
designer of Volkswagen of America, where he devised the concept for the new Beetle (1998),
the bulbous form of which recalled the basic lines of the original, designed by Ferdinand Porsche
some 60 years earlier. In 1997 Mays was appointed head of Ford’s design studio, which, under
his direction, introduced the retro-looking Thunderbird (2002). International boundaries were
likewise blurred when German carmaker BMW enlisted American designer Frank Stephenson to
create the new Mini (2002), a revival of the iconic British car of the 1960s.
Design in the 21st century: technology and democracy
As in earlier decades, museums have continued to present industrial design to the public. Many
museums specifically devoted to design were constructed, expanded, or remodeled during the
1980s and ’90s; examples include the Design Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum,
both in London, the museums of applied art in Frankfurt and Vienna, the Musée des Arts
Décoratifs in Paris, and the Neue Sammlung (New Collection) in Munich.
Even more spectacular new museums featuring industrial design products were established in
the 21st century, the most notable being the Glass Pavilion of the Toledo Museum of
Art in Ohio, U.S., designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (opened 2006); the
Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Ger., designed by Ben van Berkel of UN Studio (opened
2006); and the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, Wis., U.S., designed in 2006 by Jim
Biber of Pentagram Architecture.
While museum buildings and exhibits lent a seriousness to the field of industrial design, the
general public was increasingly obtaining firsthand experience with affordable designed artifacts
through successful chains of specialty stores that concentrated on home furnishings, such as
Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, IKEA, and the EXPO Design Centers created
by Home Depot. Those stores owed an enormous debt to the design mogul Sir Terence Conran
and his pioneering designs for the Habitat Stores (1964 and later).
Conran wanted his stores to promote affordable, attractive, and functional modern goods to the
general public. His consistently well-designed displays and products prefigured contemporary
efforts by manufacturers such as Apple to effectively retail their products within a compatibly
designed space. Tim Kobe of the San Francisco architectural firm Eight Inc. designed the
standard Apple computer stores from the earliest establishments in San Francisco (2001) to
shopping malls and renovated buildings across the United States (2001–04), including larger new
structures in Chicago (2003) and New York (2006). In part because of the success of these
spaces, Kobe’s firm is planning and building similar standardized stores across the world for
other firms. In all, these environments consistently present a company’s products in a way that is
both ennobling, as in a museum, and approachable. In one particular, specially designed stores
are more effective tools than design museums because the consumer can actually touch and take
home the products on display.
The public’s increasing access to well-designed objects has been accompanied by a growing
integration of technology into design. In part, this has been made possible by the wealth of new
materials available to designers, from electronic liquid crystal displays to composites such as
carbon fibre, which provides great strength despite its light weight. Since the 1980s, industrial
designers have helped produce the small electronic appliances—including laptop computers,
mobile telephones with video capabilities and GPS (Global Positioning System) devices, and
iPods—that have permeated people’s lives around the world.
John Zukowsky
Additional Reading
Good surveys of 20th-century international design include Volker Albus, Reyer Kras, and
Jonathan M. Woodham, Icons of Design: The 20th Century (2000), which is popular and readily
available; Charlotte Fiell and Peter Fiell (eds.), Designing the 21st Century (2001), a pictorial
survey of global design; Catherine McDermott, 20th C[entury] Design (1997), another pictorial
survey with short texts; and Michael Tambini, The Look of the Century (1996), an affordable,
extensive pictorial survey of design compiled by one of the founders of Pentagram, a major
design firm. Among the classic works on industrial design are Sheldon Cheney and Martha
Candler Cheney, Art and the Machine: An Account of Industrial Design in 20th-Century
America (1936, reissued 1992), on early American industrial design and designers, particularly
during the early era of streamlining; Carma R. Gorman (ed.), The Industrial Design Reader
(2003), an anthology of historic writings compiled by a design historian; and John Heskett,
Industrial Design (1980, reissued 2003), by one of the leading design writers in the field.
Specific topics, designers, and design companies are discussed in Brook Hodge (ed.),
Retrofuturism: The Car Design of J Mays (2002), an exhibition catalog on the work of this
contemporary auto designer; Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in
America 1925–1939, 2nd ed. (2001), an important text by a major design historian; Jeremy
Myerson, IDEO: Masters of Innovation, rev. ed. (2004); Fay Sweet, Frog: Form Follows
Emotion (1999); and Paul Kunkel, AppleDesign: The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group
(1997), with photographs by Rick English. Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, and Dickran

Tashjian, The Machine Age in America (1983, reissued 2001), is one of the major
exhibition catalogs related to streamlined design; John Zukowsky (ed.), Chicago Architecture
and Design, 1923–1993: Reconfiguration of an American Metropolis (1993, reissued 2000), has
essays by design historians Pauline Saliga and Victor Margolin; and Japan 2000: Architecture
and Design for the Japanese Public, compiled by Naomi R. Pollack, Tetsuyuki Hirano, and
Tetsuro Haka

Clothing and modern human behaviour: prehistoric

Tasmania as a case study.
Archaeology in Oceania, October 2007 by Ian Gilligan

Archaeol. Oceania 42 (2007) 102-111 Clothing and modem human behaviour: prehistoric
Tasmania as a case study IAN GILLIGAN Keywords: Clothing, Tasmania, human cold tolerance
Abstract A general model is outlined showing how the prehistoric development of clothing for
thermal reasons may be relevant to the emergence of modem human behaviour. A distinction is
drawn between simple and complex clothing, with the latter leading to repercussions that can
ultimately became decoupled from thermal contingencies. Archaeological correlates of complex
clothing can be linked to attributes of modem human behaviour, some but not all of which made
a transient appearance in late Pleistocene Tasmania. Cave sites in the southwest of the island
have yielded bone tools and distinctive stone scraper tools, along with evidence for the targeting
of prey species and parietal artworks in some caves. Thermal conditions in late Pleistocene
Tasmania approached the known limits of human cold tolerance, necessitating the use of
clothing. The archaeological record is reviewed in relation to likely technological and other
correlates of the manufacture of clothing. It is argued that thermal parameters were a significant
aspect of the human response to climate change in Tasmania. These developments invite
comparison with those witnessed outside the region during the Upper and late Middle
Pleistocene, particularly in northem middle latitudes and also in Africa, where they are
interpreted as indicating the emergence of modem human behaviour. This paper explores links
between the development of clothing and behavioural modernity and, as a case study, examines
archaeological evidence for human responses to changing thermal conditions during and after the
last ice age in Tasmania. It begins with a brief outline of the main issues in thermal physiology
and their relevance to prehistoric humans. The focus is on the limits of cold tolerance, and how
clothing functions to provide thermal insulation. Protection from wind chill is the most important
aspect, and wind chill levels in Tasmania approached these limits during the late Pleistocene. If
clothing was required, no direct evidence of such garments has survived, but the archaeological
record can be examined for indirect evidence of clothing. The Tasmanian developments are then
considered in relation to trends seen elsewhere across the School of Archaeology and
Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia.
ian.g@bigpond.net.au Pleistocene/Holocene boundary. An 'insular' model based on thermal
principles is outlined, linking environmental and human behavioural change in this crucial period
based on the correlates and repercussions of clothing. Some background material is briefly
covered, such as thermal and clothing physiology and details of palaeoenvironmental
reconstructions. More extensive treatments are available in Gilligan (2007, in press a). A key
assumption is that the origin and development of clothing prior to the Holocene was predicated
largely if not exclusively on human thermal needs (see Gilligan Submitted). Thermal physiology
The principles and experimental findings relating to human responses to varying thermal
conditions have been well documented (e.g. Jessen 2001; Parsons 2003:293-325). The optimal
ambient temperature for lightly-clothed people is 25?C (Fanger 1970:130-131), and shivering
begins at around 13?C. The chilling effect of wind is evident in the wind-chill index (Steadman
1995). Reports of accidental exposure demonstrate how hypothermia can lead rapidly to death
(e.g. Collins 1983; Tanaka and Tokudome 1991). Cold tolerance is improved through
acclimatisation (e.g. Bodley 1978), and routinely unclothed populations such as the Australian
Aborigines show superior cold responses (e.g. Hicks et al. 1931; Scholander et al. 1958), but
these improved defences are 'of little use during intense and continuous exposure' (Jessen
2001:152). Humans can adapt to cold, but only down to a 'critical level' below which
hypothermia begins within hours (Hensel 1981:220). Published findings suggest that the safe
limit for modem- day humans, beyond which the risk of hypothermia can become acute, occurs
at a still-air temperature of approximately -1?C. For habitually unclothed humans, tolerance
extends to around -5?C. While the extent of cold tolerance among some indigenous peoples such
as those of Tierra del Fuego at the southem tip of South America is surprising (e.g. Darwin
1839:234-5), their behavioural cold adaptations included shelters made from tree branches,
guanaco pelts and seal skins, and they also utilised sealskin capes and long robes of woolly
guanaco skins. 102 À Clothing physiology The thermal insulating properties of clothing are
detailed in various studies of clothing physiology (e.g. Siple 1945; Newburgh 1949; Burton and
Edholm 1955:58; Fourt and Hollies 1970; Hensel 1981; Watkins 1984). In essence, clothing
functions as thermal insulation by trapping air in layers and in tiny pockets close to the skin
surface, reducing the thermal gradient between the body and the external environment. The
effective thermal resistance of clothing is indicated by the 'clo' unit (Gagge et al. 1941:429).
Generally, each extra layer of clothing adds nearly 1 clo: donning an overcoat provides about 2
clo of insulation, while Arctic clothing (4 layers) provides about 4 clo of thermal protection
(Sloan 1979:17). However, the utility of clo units for pre-Holocene clothing is limited, for two
reasons. First, the measures are derived from modem-day tailored garments manufactured from
woven fibres, the thermal qualities of which are quite different from those of prepared animal
hides and furs. Second, clo units apply to wind-free conditions, and so may give a misleading
impression of the protective value at colder wind chill levels, especially where prehistoric
garments may have been draped rather than fitted. Simple vs. complex clothes I make a
distinction between what I term 'simple' versus 'complex' clothing (Table 1). This is based on
physiological principles but it also has important archaeological implications. The physiological
distinction arises from two aspects that largely determine the thermal effectiveness of clothing.
First, whether a garment is properly 'fitted', i.e. shaped to fit closely around the body, including
the limbs, as opposed to being loosely draped over the body, leaving the limbs less protected.
The second aspect is the number of layers of garments, with multiple layers requiring that at least
the inner layer(s) are fitted. Or, put another way, if only draped garments are in use, practical
considerations will mean that such clothing is generally restricted to a single layer. Draped,
single-layered clothing provides only limited protection, generally up to around 1-2 clo, although
a thick pelt may provide considerably more, sometimes up to 4-5 clo. However, regardless of the
insulatory potential in still- air conditions, such open-style garments are prone to wind
penetration. In contrast, fitted, multilayered clothing assemblages can readily provide 4-5 clo and
offer superior wind chill protection, sufficient for survival in polar and sub-polar environments.
The former may be termed 'simple' clothing, and the latter 'complex'. Complex clothing consists
of garments that are shaped or fitted to more fully enclose the body and limbs. They can be
combined into multi-layered assemblages, and provide virtually unlimited thermal protection,
particularly in rela- tion to wind chill. Also, the acquisition of complex clothing is associated
with longer-term consequences, including the shifting of decorative and other social functions
from the less-accessible skin surface onto the clothing. Structure fitted number of layers Thermal
physiology wind chill protection still-air protection Technology (palaeolithic) scraping
implements piercing implements cutting implements technological mode Repercussions impairs
cold tolerance acquires decorative role acquires social functions promotes modesty/shame
becomes habitual Simple clothes no 1 poor 1-2 clo (generally) yes no (generally) no 3 no no no
no no Table 1. Features distinguishing simple complex clothes. Complex clothes yes lH-
excellent 2-5 clo yes yes yes 4 yes yes yes yes yes and Complex clothing: archaeology The
archaeological significance of this distinction becomes apparent when we look at the
technological implications. Where the raw materials are animal skins, simple garments require
little more than basic skin-preparation techniques, mainly cleaning and scraping, which can be
achieved with scraper tools. Complex garments, however, demand in addition that the skins be
shaped, which usually means they need cutting, especially in making the separate cylinders to
cover the limbs, and these need to be joined together in some way, usually by sewing. Where
multiple layers are used, the inner garments need to be more carefully prepared, with finer
cutting and sewing to achieve the necessary close fit. Complex clothes, in other words, will tend
to be associated with more specialised scraping, cutting and piercing implements. The advent of
laminar or Mode 4 technologies (Clark 1977) signified a greater emphasis on cutting activities.
For this reason, it also signified a greater capacity to manufacture complex clothing. In a
Pleistocene context, humans with Mode 4 technocomplexes were better placed to manufacture
complex clothing, and those without such clothing were restricted in terms of their potential
environmental range. Complex clothing: repercussions Also of archaeological relevance,
complex clothing differs dramatically from simple clothing in that, once it has been adopted, it
tends to persist. Another consequence is that 103 À complex clothing can set in motion a range
of repercussions, many of which can ultimately become decoupled from thermal contingencies
and even from clothing itself. In themselves, these tend to promote further developments in the
technological, social and economic spheres. I term these repercussions 'insular', meaning they
tend to further insulate or separate humans from contact with their natural environment. The role
of these repercussions in creating the modified environments and insular qualities of modem life
cannot be pursued here (but see Gilligan in prep.). One aspect of archaeological interest is that
complex clothing results in the human body becoming more completely, and routinely, covered.
Not only does it cover more of the skin surface, and is more cumbersome to remove, but it also
results in a more uniformly warm micro- environment around the body, leading to impairment of
cold tolerance, all of which tends to result in its being worn on a less sporadic basis. Body
adornment will therefore tend to shift from decorating the naked skin surface to decorating the
gannents, favouring the development of cultural motives for wearing clothes independent of any
thermal contingencies. At a psychological level, regular use of clothing (especially from infancy)
can promote a sense of shame or modesty in relation to the unclad body, which again will
encourage the use of clothes at a social level in addition to, and almost regardless of,
environmental conditions. Ultimately, these insular effects become self-sustaining and self-
reinforcing. They can promote ongoing cultural developments that become decoupled from their
initial causes. The repercussions of complex clothing, in other words, can persist independently
of thermal conditions, and even more-or-less independently of clothing. Europe in making such
comparisons. The discoveries in parts of Africa (especially southem Africa) are particularly
relevant (e.g. Henshilwood and Sealy 1997; Wurz 1999; Henshilwood et al. 2001). These point
to an African origin of developments more traditionally seen as primarily European phenomena,
including signs of modem human behaviour. There are also recent discoveries (and reinter-
pretations of pre-existing data) in central Eurasia, Siberia and the Russian Far East that provide
archaeological signatures associated with the dispersal of humans into cold environments (e.g.
Hoffecker 2002; Brantingham et al. 2004). For comparative purposes data from Australia, often
overlooked, should be of particular value in terms of unraveling the archaeological signatures of
behavioural modemity. The advent of complex clothing can be linked quite directly to the
increasing capacity of fully modem humans to inhabit cooler environihents (Hoffecker 2005) and
also, less directly, to other archaeological signatures of modem human behaviour (see McBrearty
and Brooks 2000:491-2 for a list). Rather than attributing the emergence of modem behaviour to
purported cognitive changes that are strangely decoupled from the emergence of biological
modemity, the regionally-variable and often delayed appearance of its various components may
be understood as adaptations to changing environmental conditions (d'Errico 2003:199).
Moreover, both the African origins - which predate the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and, in
some instances, predate the last glacial cycle - and the Eurasian intensification of the trends
during the LGM are accommodated, as is the absence or very late appearance of some
archaeological signatures in other parts of the world, notably in the Australian region (e.g.
Brumm and Moore 2005). Pleistocene clothing Despite the archaeological invisibility of
Pleistocene clothing, we can make clothing visible by employing a number of indirect
approaches, such as use wear analyses (e.g. Hayden 1990; Soffer 2004). Another strategy, based
on the thermal origins of Pleistocene clothing, is to combine what is known about human thermal
physiological requirements and past thermal environments. Using this approach, we can draw
reasonable inferences as to whether humans would have needed to wear clothes, and whether
they needed simple (draped, single-layer) or complex (fitted, multiple-layer) clothing. We can
then look for archaeological signatures that might be expected if clothing was manufactured, and
assess the extent to which these correspond to the signs of modem human behaviour. Clothing
and modem human behaviour Here I only outline how such comparisons may allow us to
usefully reinterpret some of the major developments and transitions in human prehistory during
the Pleistocene epoch. A thermal approach suggests we need to look beyond The clue is clothing
Components of modem human behaviour that can be linked to thermal adaptations include not
only technologies (particularly the increasing utilisation of blade-based lithics and bone
implements in the manufacture of complex garment assemblages) but also some of the less
tangible aspects (Table 2). The latter are now viewed as the more archaeologically consistent
indicators of behavioural modemity, whereas lithic technologies (and blade-based forms in
particular) are considered rather unreliable markers (e.g. Hiscock 1996; Bar-Yosef and Kuhn
1999; Bar-Yosef 2002). Among these other aspects are greater control of fire (e.g. more
structured hearths), specialised hunting (for hides as well as food), more sophisticated artificial
shelters, greater residential sedentism (and greater structuring of domestic space), increased use
of pigment (connected with hide preparation as well as decoration), and - especially relevant
with complex clothing - the various archaeological signs of personal adomment and symbolism
(e.g. Van Peer et al. 2003; Mellars 2005). At a more speculative level, some of the further
ramifications of the regular covering of the skin surface by complex clothing can include effects
on human perceptual capacities and cognitive styles, as well as 104 À Moderate Strength
Archaeological signature of hehavioural modemity Strong Range extension to previously
unoccupied environments (cold) New lithic technologies (blades) Tools in novel materials (bone)
Greater control of fire (e…

crying
human behaviour

Main
Aspects of the topic crying are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
Assorted References
• infant development ( in infancy;
Crying is basic to infants from birth, and the cooing sounds they have begun making by
about eight weeks progress to babbling and ultimately become part of meaningful speech.
Virtually all infants begin to comprehend some words several months before they
themselves speak their first meaningful words. By 11 to 12 months of age they are
producing...
in human behaviour: Emotional development )

...life, infants display behavioral reactions suggestive of emotional states. These reactions
are indicated by changes in facial expression, motor activity, and heart rate and of course
by smiling and crying. Infants show a quieting of motor activity and a decrease in heart
rate in response to an unexpected event, a combination that implies the emotion of
surprise. A second behavioral profile,...

humour
human behaviour
Main

communication in which the stimulus produces amusement.

In all its many-splendoured varieties, humour can be simply defined as a type of stimulation that
tends to elicit the laughter reflex. Spontaneous laughter is a motor reflex produced by the
coordinated contraction of 15 facial muscles in a stereotyped pattern and accompanied by altered
breathing. Electrical stimulation of the main lifting muscle of the upper lip, the zygomatic major,
with currents of varying intensity produces facial expressions ranging from the faint smile
through the broad grin to the contortions typical of explosive laughter.
The laughter and smile of civilized man is, of course, often of a conventional kind, in which
voluntary intent substitutes for, or interferes with, spontaneous reflex activity; this article is
concerned, however, only with the latter. Once laughter is realized to be a humble reflex, several
paradoxes must be faced. Motor reflexes, such as the contraction of the pupil of the eye in
dazzling light, are simple responses to simple stimuli whose value to survival is obvious. But the
involuntary contraction of 15 facial muscles, associated with certain irrepressible noises, strikes
one as an activity without any utilitarian value, quite unrelated to the struggle for
survival. Laughter is a reflex but unique in that it has no apparent biological purpose. One might
call it a luxury reflex. Its only function seems to be to provide relief from tension.
The second related paradox is a striking discrepancy between the nature of the stimulus and that
of the response in humorous transactions. When a blow beneath the kneecap causes an automatic
upward kick, both “stimulus” and “response” function on the same primitive physiological level,
without requiring the intervention of the higher mental functions. But that such a complex mental
activity as reading a comic story should cause a specific reflex contraction of the facial muscles
is a phenomenon that has puzzled philosophers since Plato. There is no clear-cut, predictable
response that would tell a lecturer whether he has succeeded in convincing his listeners; but,
when he is telling a joke, laughter serves as an experimental test. Humour is the only form of
communication in which a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a stereotyped,
predictable response on the physiological reflex level. Thus the response can be used as an
indicator for the presence of the elusive quality that is called humour—as the click of the Geiger
counter is used to indicate the presence of radioactivity. Such a procedure is not possible in any
other form of art; and, since the step from the sublime to the ridiculous is reversible, the study of
humour provides clues for the study of creativity in general.
This article deals with the changing concepts and practice of humour from the time of Aristotle
to the influence of the mass media in the contemporary world.
The logic of laughter
The range of laughter-provoking experiences is enormous, from physical tickling to mental
titillations of the most varied kinds. There is unity in this variety, however, a common
denominator of a specific and specifiable pattern that reflects the “logic” or “grammar” of
humour, as it were. A few examples will help to unravel that pattern.
 1. A masochist is a person who likes a cold shower in the morning so he takes a hot one.
 2. An English lady, on being asked by a friend what she thought of her departed husband’s
whereabouts: “Well, I suppose the poor soul is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn’t
talk about such unpleasant subjects.”
 3. A doctor comforts his patient: “You have a very serious disease. Of 10 persons who catch
it, only one survives. It is lucky you came to me, for I have recently had nine patients with this
disease and they all died of it.”
 4. Dialogue in a French film:
“Sir, I would like to ask for your daughter’s hand.”
“Why not? You have already had the rest.”
 5. A marquis of the court of Louis XV unexpectedly returned from a journey and, on entering
his wife’s boudoir, found her in the arms of a bishop. After a moment’s hesitation, the marquis
walked calmly to the window, leaned out, and began going through the motions of blessing the
people in the street.
“What are you doing?” cried the anguished wife.
“Monseigneur is performing my functions, so I am
performing his.”
Is there a common pattern underlying these five stories? Starting with the last, a little reflection
reveals that the marquis’s behaviour is both unexpected and perfectly logical—but of a logic not
usually applied to this type of situation. It is the logic of the division of labour, governed by rules
as old as human civilization. But his reactions would have been expected to be governed by a
different set of rules—the code of sexual morality. It is the sudden clash between these two
mutually exclusive codes of rules—or associative contexts—that produces the comic effect. It
compels the listener to perceive the situation in two self-consistent but incompatible frames of
reference at the same time; his mind has to operate simultaneously on two different wavelengths.
While this unusual condition lasts, the event is not only, as is normally the case, associated with
a single frame of reference but “disociated” with two. The word disociation was coined by the
present writer to make a distinction between the routines of disciplined thinking within a single
universe of discourse—on a single plane, as it were—and the creative types of mental activity
that always operate on more than one plane. In humour, both the creation of a subtle joke and the
re-creative act of perceiving the joke involve the delightful mental jolt of a sudden leap from one
plane or associative context to another.
Turning to the other examples, in the French film dialogue, the daughter’s “hand” is perceived
first in a metaphorical frame of reference, then suddenly in a literal, bodily context.
The doctor thinks in terms of abstract, statistical probabilities, the rules of which are
inapplicable to individual cases; and there is an added twist because, in contrast to what common
sense suggests, the patient’s odds of survival are unaffected by whatever happened before; they
are still one against 10. This is one of the profound paradoxes of the theory of probability, and
the joke in fact implies a riddle; it pinpoints an absurdity that tends to be taken for granted. As
for the lady who looks upon death as “eternal bliss” and at the same time “an unpleasant
subject,” she epitomizes the common human predicament of living in the divided house of faith
and reason. Here again the simple joke carries unconscious overtones and undertones, audible to
the inner ear alone.
The masochist who punishes himself by depriving himself of his daily punishment is governed
by rules that are a reversal of those of normal logic. (A pattern can be constructed in which both
frames of reference are reversed: “A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.”) But there is
again an added twist. The joker does not really believe that the masochist takes his hot
shower as a punishment; he only pretends to believe it. Irony is the satirist’s most effective
weapon; it pretends to adopt the opponent’s ways of reasoning in order to expose their implicit
absurdity or viciousness.
The common pattern underlying these stories is the perceiving of a situation in two self-
consistent but mutually incompatible frames of reference or associative contexts. This formula
can be shown to have a general validity for all forms of humour and wit, some of which will be
discussed below. But it covers only one aspect of humour—its intellectual structure. Another
fundamental aspect must be examined—the emotional dynamics that breathe life into that
structure and make a person laugh, giggle, or smirk.
Laughter and emotion » Aggression and tension

When a comedian tells a story, he deliberately sets out to create a certain tension
in his listeners, which mounts as the narrative progresses. But it never reaches its expected
climax. The punch line, or point, acts as a verbal guillotine that cuts across the logical
development of the story; it debunks the audience’s dramatic expectations. The tension that was
felt becomes suddenly redundant and is exploded in laughter. Replace aggression by sympathy
and the same situation—a drunk falling on his face, for example—will be no longer comic but
pathetic and will evoke not laughter but pity. It is the aggressive element, the detached malice of
the comic impersonator, that turns pathos into bathos, tragedy into travesty. Malice may be
combined with affection in friendly teasing; and the aggressive component in civilized humour
may be sublimated or no longer conscious. But in jokes that appeal to children and primitive
people, cruelty and boastful self-assertiveness are much in evidence. To put it differently,
laughter disposes of emotive excitations that have become pointless and must somehow be
worked off along physiological channels of least resistance; and the function of the “luxury
reflex” is to provide these channels.
 A glance at the caricatures of the 18th-century English artists
William Hogarth or Thomas Rowlandson, showing the brutal merriment of people in a tavern,
makes one realize at once that they are working off their surplus of adrenalin by contracting their
face muscles into grimaces, slapping their thighs, and breathing in puffs through the half-closed
glottis. Their flushed faces reveal that the emotions disposed of through these safety valves are
brutality, envy, sexual gloating. In cartoons by the 20th-century American James Thurber,
however, coarse laughter yields to an amused and rarefied smirk: the flow of adrenalin has been
distilled and crystallized into a grain of Attic salt—a sophisticated joke. The word witticism is
derived from “wit” in its original sense of intelligence and acumen (as is Witz in German). The
domains of humour and of ingenuity are continuous, without a sharp boundary: the jester is
brother to the sage. Across the spectrum of humour, from its coarse to its subtle forms, from
practical joke to brainteaser, from jibe to irony, from anecdote to epigram, the emotional climate
shows a gradual transformation. The emotion discharged in coarse laughter is aggression robbed
of its purpose. The jokes small children enjoy are mostly scatological; adolescents of all ages
gloat on vicarious sex. The sick joke trades on repressed sadism, satire on righteous indignation.
There is a bewildering variety of moods involved in different forms of humour, including mixed
or contradictory feelings; but whatever the mixture, it must contain a basic ingredient that is
indispensable: an impulse, however faint, of aggression or apprehension. It may appear in the
guise of malice, contempt, the veiled cruelty of condescension, or merely an absence of
sympathy with the victim of the joke—a momentary anesthesia of the heart, as the French
philosopher Henri Bergson put it.
In the subtler types of humour, the aggressive tendency may be so faint that only careful analysis
will detect it, like the presence of salt in a well-prepared dish—which, however, would be
tasteless without it. In 1961 a survey carried out among American children aged eight to 15 made
the researchers conclude that the mortification, discomfort, or hoaxing of others readily caused
laughter, but witty or funny remarks often passed unnoticed.
Similar considerations apply to the historically earlier forms and theories of the comic. In
Aristotle’s view, laughter was intimately related to ugliness and debasement. Cicero held that the
province of the ridiculous lay in a certain baseness and deformity. Descartes believed that
laughter was a manifestation of joy mixed with surprise or hatred or both. In Francis Bacon’s list
of what causes laughter, the first place is again given to deformity. One of the most frequently
quoted utterances on the subject is this definition in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651):
The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of
some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own
formerly.
In the 19th century, Alexander Bain, an early experimental psychologist, thought along the same
lines:
Not in physical effects alone, but in everything where a man can achieve a stroke of superiority,
in surpassing or discomforting a rival, is the disposition of laughter apparent.
In Bergson’s view, laughter is the corrective punishment inflicted by society upon the unsocial
individual: “In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to
correct our neighbour.” Sir Max Beerbohm, the 20th-century English wit, found “two elements
in the public’s humour: delight in suffering, contempt for the unfamiliar.” The American
psychologist William McDougall believed that “laughter has been evolved in the human race as
an antidote to sympathy, a protective reaction shielding us from the depressive influence of the
shortcomings of our fellow men.”
However much the opinions of the theorists differ, on this one point nearly all of them agree: that
the emotions discharged in laughter always contain an element of aggressiveness. It must be
borne in mind, however, that aggression and apprehension are twin phenomena, so much so that
psychologists are used to talking of “aggressive–defensive impulses.” Accordingly, one of the
typical situations in which laughter occurs is the moment of sudden cessation of fear caused by
some imaginary danger. Rarely is the nature of laughter as an overflow of redundant tensions
more strikingly manifested than in the sudden change of expression on a small child’s face from
anxious apprehension to the happy laughter of relief. This seems to be unrelated to humour; yet a
closer look reveals in it the same logical structure as in the joke: the wildly barking little dog was
first perceived by the child in a context of danger, then discovered to be a harmless pup; the
tension has suddenly become redundant and is spilled.
Immanuel Kant realized that what causes laughter is “the sudden transformation of a tense
expectation into nothing.” Herbert Spencer, the 19th-century English philosopher, took up the
idea and attempted to formulate it in physiological terms: “Emotions and sensations tend to
generate bodily movements. . . . When consciousness is unawares transferred from great things
to small,” the “liberated nerve force” will expend itself along channels of least resistance—the
bodily movements of laughter. Freud incorporated Spencer’s theory of humour into his own,
with special emphasis on the release of repressed emotions in laughing; he also attempted to
explain why the excess energy should be worked off in that particular way:
According to the best of my knowledge, the grimaces and contortions of the corners of the mouth
that characterise laughter appear first in the satisfied and over-satiated nursling when he drowsily
quits the breast. . . . They are physical expressions of the determination to take no more
nourishment, an “enough” so to speak, or rather a “more than enough” . . . This primal sense of
pleasurable saturation may have provided the link between the smirk—that basic phenomenon
underlying laughter—and its subsequent connection with other pleasurable processes of de-
tension.
In other words, the muscle contractions of the smirk, as the earliest expressions of relief from
tension, would thereafter serve as channels of least resistance. Similarly, the explosive
exhalations of laughter seem designed to “puff away” surplus tension in a kind of respiratory
gymnastics, and agitated gestures obviously serve the same function.
It may be objected that such massive reactions often seem quite out of proportion to the slight
stimulations that provoke them. But it must be borne in mind that laughter is a phenomenon of
the trigger-releaser type, where a sudden turn of the tap may release vast amounts of stored
emotions, derived from various, often unconscious, sources: repressed sadism, sexual
tumescence, unavowed fear, even boredom. The explosive laughter of a class of schoolboys at
some trivial incident is a measure of their pent-up resentment during a boring lecture. Another
factor that may amplify the reaction out of all proportion to the comic stimulus is the social
infectiousness that laughter shares with other emotive manifestations of group behaviour.
Laughter and emotion » Patterns of association
Laughter or smiling may also be caused by stimulations that are not in themselves comic but
signs or symbols deputizing for well-established comic patterns—such as Charlie Chaplin’s
oversized shoes or Groucho Marx’s cigar—or catchphrases, or allusions to family jokes. To
discover why people laugh requires, on some occasions, tracing back a long, involved thread of
associations to its source. This task is further complicated by the fact that the effect of such
comic symbols—in a cartoon or on the stage—appears to be instantaneous, without allowing
time for the accumulation and subsequent discharge of “expectations” and “emotive tensions.”
But here memory comes into play, having already accumulated the required emotions in past
experiences, acting as a storage battery whose charge can be sparked off at any time: the smirk
that greets Falstaff’s appearance on the scene is derived from a mixture of memories and
expectations. Besides, even if a reaction to a cartoon appears to be instantaneous, there is always
a process in time until the reader “sees the joke”; the cartoon has to tell a story even if it is
telescoped into a few seconds. All of this shows that to analyze humour is a task as delicate as
analyzing the composition of a perfume with its multiple ingredients, some of which are never
consciously perceived while others, when sniffed in isolation, would make one wince.
In this article there has been a discussion first of the logical structure of humour and then of its
emotional dynamics. Putting the two together, the result may be summarized as follows: the
“disociation” of a situation or idea with two mutually incompatible contexts in a person’s mind
and the resulting abrupt transfer of his train of thought from one context to another put a sudden
end to his “tense expectations”; the accumulated emotion, deprived of its object, is left hanging
in the air and is discharged in laughter. Upon hearing that the marquis in the story told earlier
walks to the window and starts blessing the people in the street, the intellect turns a somersault
and enters with gusto into the new game. The malicious and erotic feelings aroused by the start
of the story, however, cannot be fitted into the new context; deserted by the nimble intellect,
these feelings gush out in laughter like air from a punctured tire.
To put it differently: people laugh because their emotions have a greater inertia and persistence
than their thoughts. Affects are incapable of keeping step with reasoning; unlike reasoning, they
cannot “change direction” at a moment’s notice. To the physiologist, this is self-evident since
emotions operate through the genetically old, massive sympathetic nervous system and its allied
hormones, acting on the whole body, while the processes of conceptual thinking are confined to
the neocortex at the roof of the brain. Common experience provides daily confirmation of this
dichotomy. People are literally “poisoned” by their adrenal humours; it takes time to talk a
person out of a mood; fear and anger show physical aftereffects long after their causes have been
removed. If man were able to change his moods as quickly as his thoughts, he would be an
acrobat of emotion; but since he is not, his thoughts and emotions frequently become dissociated.
It is emotion deserted by thought that is discharged in laughter. For emotion, owing to its greater
mass momentum, is, as has been shown, unable to follow the sudden switch of ideas to a
different type of logic; it tends to persist in a straight line. Aldous Huxley once wrote:
We carry around with us a glandular system which was admirably well adapted to life in the
Paleolithic times but is not very well adapted to life now. Thus we tend to produce more
adrenalin than is good for us, and we either suppress ourselves and turn destructive energies
inwards or else we do not suppress ourselves and we start hitting people. (From Man and
Civilization: Control of the Mind, ed. Seymour M. Farber and Roger H.L. Wilson. Copyright
1961. Used with permission of McGraw-Hill Book Company.)
A third alternative is to laugh at people. There are other outlets for tame aggression, such as
competitive sports or literary criticism; but they are acquired skills, whereas laughter is a gift of
nature, included in man’s native equipment. The glands that control his emotions reflect
conditions at a stage of evolution when the struggle for existence was more deadly than at
present—and when the reaction to any strange sight or sound consisted in jumping, bristling,
fighting, or running. As security and comfort increased in the species, new outlets were needed
for emotions that could no longer be worked off through their original channels, and laughter is
obviously one of them. But it must be borne in mind that laughter is a phenomenon of the
trigger-releaser type, where a sudden turn of the tap may release vast amounts of stored
emotions, derived from various, often unconscious, sources: repressed sadism, sexual
tumescence, unavowed fear, even boredom. The explosive laughter of a class of schoolboys at
some trivial incident is a measure of their pent-up resentment during a boring lecture. Not before
thinking became gradually detached from feeling could man perceive his own emotion as
redundant and make the smiling admission, “I have been fooled.”
Verbal humour
The foregoing discussion was intended to provide the tools for dissecting and analyzing any
specimen of humour. The procedure is to determine the nature of the two (or more) frames of
reference whose collision gives rise to the comic effect—to discover the type of logic or “rules of
the game” that govern each. In the more sophisticated type of joke, the logic is implied and
hidden, and the moment it is stated in explicit form, the joke is dead. Unavoidably, the section
that follows will be strewn with cadavers.
Max Eastman, in Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), remarked of a laboured pun by Ogden Nash: “It
is not a pun but a punitive expedition.” That applies to most puns, including Milton’s famous
lines about the Prophet Elijah’s ravens, which were “though ravenous taught to abstain from
what they brought,” or the character mentioned by Freud, who calls the Christmas season the
“alcoholidays.” Most puns strike one as atrocious, perhaps because they represent the most
primitive form of humour; two disparate strings of thought tied together by an acoustic knot. But
the very primitiveness of such association based on pure sound (“hol”) may account for the pun’s
immense popularity with children and its prevalence in certain types of mental disorder
(“punning mania”).
From the play on sounds—puns and Spoonerisms—an ascending series leads to the play on
words and so to the play on ideas. When Groucho Marx says of a safari in Africa, “We shot
two bucks, but that was all the money we had,” the joke hinges on the two meanings of the word
buck. It would be less funny without the reference to Groucho, which evokes a visual image
instantly arousing high expectations. The story about the marquis above may be considered of a
superior type of humour because it plays not on mere words but on ideas.
It would be quite easy—and equally boring—to draw up a list in which jokes and witticisms are
classified according to the nature of the frames of reference whose collision creates the comic
effect. A few have already been mentioned: metaphorical versus literal meaning (the daughter’s
“hand”); professional versus common sense logic (the doctor); incompatible codes of behaviour
(the marquis); confrontations of the trivial and the exalted (“eternal bliss”); trains of reasoning
travelling, happily joined together, in opposite directions (the sadist who is kind to the
masochist). The list could be extended indefinitely; in fact any two frames of reference can be
made to yield a comic effect of sorts by hooking them together and infusing a drop of malice into
the concoction. The frames may even be defined by such abstract concepts as “time” and
“weather”: the absent-minded professor who tries to read the temperature from his watch or to
tell the time from the thermometer is comic in the same way as a game of table tennis played
with a soccer ball or a game of rugby played with a table tennis ball. The variations are infinite,
the formula remains the same.
Jokes and anecdotes have a single point of culmination. The literary forms of sustained humour,
such as the picaresque novel, do not rely on a single effect but on a series of minor climaxes. The
narrative moves along the line of intersection of contrasted planes, such as the fantasy world of
Don Quixote and the cunning horse sense of Sancho Panza, or is made to oscillate between them.
As a result, tension is continuously generated and discharged in mild amusement.
Comic verse thrives on the melodious union of incongruities, such as the “cabbages and kings” in
Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” and particularly on the contrast between lofty
form and flat-footed content. Certain metric forms associated with heroic poetry, such as the
hexameter or Alexandrine, arouse expectations of pathos, of the exalted; to pour into these epic
molds some homely, trivial content—“beautiful soup, so rich and green/ waiting in a hot
tureen”—is an almost infallible comic device. The rolling rhythms of the first lines of a limerick
that carry, instead of a mythical hero such as Hector or Achilles, a young lady from Ohio for a
ride make her ridiculous even before the expected calamities befall her. Instead of a heroic mold,
a soft lyrical one may also pay off:
. . . And what could be moister
Than tears of an oyster?
Another type of incongruity between form and content yields the bogus proverb: “The rule is:
jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.” Two contradictory statements have
been telescoped into a line whose homely, admonitory sound conveys the impression of a
popular adage. In a similar way, nonsense verse achieves its effect by pretending to make sense,
by forcing the reader to project meaning into the phonetic pattern of the jabberwocky, as one
interprets the ink blots in a Rorschach test.
The satire is a verbal caricature that shows a deliberately distorted image of a person, institution,
or society. The traditional method of the caricaturist is to exaggerate those features he considers
to be characteristic of his victim’s personality and to simplify by leaving out everything that is
not relevant for his purpose. The satirist uses the same technique, and the features of society he
selects for magnification are, of course, those of which he disapproves. The result is a
juxtaposition, in the reader’s mind, of his habitual image of the world in which he moves and its
absurd reflection in the satirist’s distorting mirror. He is made to recognize familiar features in
the absurd and absurdity in the familiar. Without this double vision the satire would be
humourless. If the human Yahoos were really such evil-smelling monsters as Gulliver’s
Houyhnhnm hosts claim, then Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) would not be a satire
but the statement of a deplorable truth. Straight invective is not satire; satire must deliberately
overshoot its mark.
A similar effect is achieved if, instead of exaggerating the objectionable features, the satirist
projects them by means of the allegory onto a different background, such as an animal society. A
succession of writers, from the ancient Greek dramatist Aristophanes through Swift to
such 20th-century satirists as Anatole France and George Orwell, have used this technique to
focus attention on deformities of society that, blunted by habit, are taken for granted.
Situational humour
The coarsest type of humour is the practical joke: pulling away the chair from under the
dignitary’s lowered bottom. The victim is perceived first as a person of consequence, then
suddenly as an inert body subject to the laws of physics: authority is debunked by gravity, mind
by matter; man is degraded to a mechanism. Goose-stepping soldiers acting like automatons, the
pedant behaving like a mechanical robot, the Sergeant Major attacked by diarrhea, or Hamlet
getting the hiccups—all show man’s lofty aspirations deflated by his all-too-solid flesh. A
similar effect is produced by artifacts that masquerade as humans: Punch and Judy, jack-in-the-
box, gadgets playing tricks on their masters as if with calculated malice.
In Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter, this dualism of subtle mind and inert matter—he calls it
“the mechanical encrusted on the living”—is made to serve as an explanation of all varieties of
the comic. In the light of what has been said, however, it would seem to apply only to one type
of comic situation among many others.
From the “disociation” of man and machine, there is only a step to the man–animal hybrid. Walt
Disney’s creations behave as if they were human without losing their animal appearance. The
caricaturist follows the reverse procedure by discovering horsey, mousy, or piggish features in
the human face.
This leads to the comic devices of imitation, impersonation, and disguise. The impersonator is
perceived as himself and somebody else at the same time. If the result is slightly degrading—but
only in that case—the spectator will laugh. The comedian impersonating a public personality,
two pairs of trousers serving as the legs of the pantomime horse, men disguised as women and
women as men—in each case the paired patterns reduce each other to absurdity.
The most aggressive form of impersonation is the parody, designed to deflate
hollow pretense, to destroy illusion, and to undermine pathos by harping on the
weaknesses of the victim. Wigs falling off, speakers forgetting their lines, gestures
remaining suspended in the air: the parodist’s favourite points of attack are again
situated on the line of intersection between the sublime and the trivial.
Playful behaviour in young animals and children is amusing because it is an unintentional parody
of adult behaviour, which it imitates or anticipates. Young puppies are droll because their
helplessness, affection, and puzzled expression make them appear more “human” than full-
grown dogs; because their growls strike one as impersonations of adult behaviour—like a child
in a bowler hat; because the puppy’s waddling, uncertain gait makes it a choice victim of
nature’s practical jokes; because its bodily disproportions—the huge padded paws,
Falstaffian belly, and wrinkled brow—give it the appearance of a caricature; and lastly because
the observer feels so superior to a puppy. A fleeting smirk can contain many logical ingredients
and emotional spices.
Both Cicero and Francis Bacon regarded deformity as the most frequent cause of
laughter. Renaissance princes collected dwarfs and hunchbacks for their merriment. It obviously
requires a certain amount of imagination and empathy to recognize in a midget a fellow human,
who, though different in appearance, thinks and feels much as oneself does. In children, this
projective faculty is still rudimentary: they tend to mock people with a stammer or a limp and
laugh at the foreigner with an odd pronunciation. Similar attitudes are shown by tribal or
parochial societies to any form of appearance or behaviour that deviates from their strict norms:
the stranger is not really human; he only pretends to be “like us.” The Greeks used the same
word, barbarous, for the foreigner and the stutterer: the uncouth barking sounds the stranger
uttered were considered a parody of human speech. Vestiges of this primitive attitude are still
found in the curious fact that civilized people accept a foreign accent with tolerance, whereas
imitation of a foreign accent strikes them as comic. The imitator’s mispronunciations are
recognized as mere pretense; this knowledge makes sympathy unnecessary and enables the
audience to be childishly cruel with a clean conscience.
Other sources of innocent laughter are situations in which the part and the whole change roles,
and attention becomes focussed on a detail torn out of the functional context on which its
meaning depended. When the phonograph needle gets stuck, the soprano’s voice keeps repeating
the same word on the same quaver, which suddenly assumes a grotesquely independent life. The
same happens when faulty orthography displaces attention from meaning to spelling, or
whenever consciousness is directed at functions that otherwise are performed automatically. The
latter situation is well illustrated by the story of the centipede who, when asked in which order he
moved his hundred legs, became paralyzed and could walk no more. The self-conscious,
awkward youth, who does not know what to do with his hands, is a victim of the paradox of the
centipede.
Comedies have been classified according to their reliance on situations, manners, or characters.
The logic of the last two needs no further discussion; in the first, comic effects are contrived by
making a situation participate simultaneously in two independent chains of events with different
associative contexts, which intersect through coincidence, mistaken identity, or confusions of
time and occasion.
Why tickling should produce laughter remained an enigma in all earlier theories of the comic. As
Darwin was the first to point out, the innate response to tickling is squirming and straining to
withdraw the tickled part—a defense reaction designed to escape attacks on vulnerable areas
such as the soles of the feet, armpits, belly, and flank. If a fly settles on the belly of a horse, it
causes a ripple of muscle contractions across the skin—the equivalent of squirming in the tickled
child. But the horse does not laugh when tickled, and the child not always. The child will laugh
only—and this is the crux of the matter—when it perceives tickling as a mock attack, a caress in
mildly aggressive disguise. For the same reason, people laugh only when tickled by others, not
when they tickle themselves.
Experiments at Yale University on babies under one year revealed the not very surprising fact
that they laughed 15 times more often when tickled by their mothers than by strangers; and when
tickled by strangers, they mostly cried. For the mock attack must be recognized as being only
pretense, and with strangers one cannot be sure. Even with its own mother, there is an ever-so-
slight feeling of uncertainty and apprehension, the expression of which will alternate with
laughter in the baby’s behaviour. It is precisely this element of tension between the tickles that is
relieved in the laughter accompanying the squirm. The rule of the game is “let me be just a little
frightened so that I can enjoy the relief.”
Thus the tickler is impersonating an aggressor but is simultaneously known not to be one. This is
probably the first situation in life that makes the infant live on two planes at once, a delectable
foretaste of being tickled by the horror comic.
Humour in the visual arts reflects the same logical structures as discussed before. Its most
primitive form is the distorting mirror at the fun fair, which reflects the human frame elongated
into a column or compressed into the shape of a toad. It plays a practical joke on the victim, who
sees the image in the mirror both as his familiar self and as a lump of plasticine that can be
stretched and squeezed into any absurd form. The mirror distorts mechanically while the
caricaturist does so selectively, employing the same method as the satirist—exaggerating
characteristic features and simplifying the rest. Like the satirist, the caricaturist reveals the
absurd in the familiar; and, like the satirist, he must overshoot his mark. His malice is rendered
harmless by the knowledge that the monstrous potbellies and bowlegs he draws are not real; real
deformities are not comic but arouse pity.
The artist, painting a stylized portrait, also uses the technique of selection, exaggeration, and
simplification; but his attitude toward the model is usually dominated by positive empathy
instead of negative malice, and the features he selects for emphasis differ accordingly. In some
character studies by Leonardo da Vinci, Hogarth, or Honoré Daumier, the passions reflected are
so violent, the grimaces so ferocious, that it is impossible to tell whether the works were meant
as portraits or caricatures. If one feels that such distortions of the human face are not really
possible, that Daumier merely pretended that they exist, then one is absolved from horror and
pity and can laugh at his grotesques. But if one feels that this is indeed what Daumier saw in
those dehumanized faces, then they are not comic but tragic.
Humour in music is a subject to be approached with diffidence because the language of music
ultimately eludes translation into verbal concepts. All one can do is to point out some analogies:
a “rude” noise, such as the blast of a trumpet inserted into a passage where it does not belong,
has the effect of a practical joke; a singer or an instrument out of tune produces a similar
reaction; the imitation of animal sounds, vocally or instrumentally, exploits the technique of
impersonation; a nocturne by Chopin transposed into hot jazz or a simple street song performed
with Wagnerian pathos is a marriage of incompatibles. These are primitive devices
corresponding to the lowest levels of humour; more sophisticated are the techniques employed
by Maurice Ravel in La Valse, a parody of the sentimental Viennese waltz, or by Zoltán Kodály
in the mock-heroics of his Hungarian folk opera, Háry János. But in comic operas it is almost
impossible to sort out how much of the comic effect is derived from the book and how much
from the music; and the highest forms of musical humour, the unexpected delights of a
lighthearted scherzo by Mozart, defy verbal analysis, unless it is so specialized and technical as
to defeat its purpose. Although a “witty” musical passage that springs a surprise on the audience
and cheats it of its expectations certainly has the emotion-relieving effect that tends to produce
laughter, a concert audience may occasionally smirk but will hardly ever laugh: the emotions
evoked by musical humour are of a subtler kind than those of the verbal and visual variety.
Styles and techniques in humour
The criteria that determine whether a humorous offering will be judged good, bad, or indifferent
are partly a matter of period taste and personal preference and partly dependent on the style and
technique of the humorist. It would seem that these criteria can be summed up under three main
headings: originality, emphasis, and economy.
The merits of originality are self-evident; it provides the essential element of surprise, which cuts
across our expectations. But true originality is not very often met either in humour or in other
forms of art. One common substitute for it is to increase the tension of the audience by various
techniques of suggestive emphasis. The clown’s domain is the rich, coarse type of humour: he
piles it on; he appeals to sadistic, sexual, scatological impulses. One of his favourite tricks is
repetition of the same situation, the same key phrase. This diminishes the effect of surprise, but it
has a tension-accumulating effect: emotion is easily drawn into the familiar channel—more and
more liquid is being pumped into the punctured pipeline.
Emphasis on local colour and ethnic peculiararities, such as Scottish or Cockney stories, for
example, is a further means to channel emotion into familiar tracks. The Scotsman or Cockney
stories must, of course, be a caricature if the comic purpose is to be achieved. In other words,
exaggeration and simplification once more appear as indispensible tools to provide emphasis.
In the higher forms of humour, however, emphasis tends to yield to the opposite kind of virtue—
economy. Economy, in humour and art, does not mean mechanical brevity but implicit hints
instead of explicit statements—the oblique allusion in lieu of the frontal attack. Old-fashioned
cartoons, such as those featuring the British lion and the Russian bear, hammered their message
in; the modern cartoon usually poses a riddle that the reader must solve by an imaginative effort
in order to see the joke.
In humour, as in other forms of art, emphasis and economy are complementary techniques. The
first forces the offering down the consumer’s throat; the second tantalizes to whet his appetite.
Relations to art and science
Earlier theories of humour, including even those of Bergson and Freud, treated it as an isolated
phenomenon, without attempting to throw light on the intimate connections between the comic
and the tragic, between laughter and crying, between artistic inspiration, comic inventiveness,
and scientific discovery. Yet these three domains of creative activity form a continuum with no
sharp boundaries between wit and ingenuity, nor between discovery and art.
It has been said that scientific discovery consists in seeing an analogy where nobody has seen
one before. When, in the Song of Bernadette, Bernadette compared the Shulamite’s neck to a
tower of ivory, he saw an analogy that nobody had seen before; when William Harvey compared
the heart of a fish to a mechanical pump, he did the same; and when the caricaturist draws a nose
like a cucumber, he again does just that. In fact, all the logical patterns discussed above, which
constitute a “grammar” of humour, can also enter the service of art or discovery, as the case may
be. The pun has structural equivalents in the rhyme and in word games, which range from
crossword puzzles to the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone, the key to Egyptian hieroglyphic. The
confrontation between diverse codes of behaviour may yield comedy, tragedy, or new
psychological insights. The dualism of mind and inert matter is exploited by the practical joker
but also provides one of the eternal themes of literature: man as a marionette on strings,
manipulated by gods or chromosomes. The man–beast dichotomy is reflected by Walt Disney’s
cartoon character Donald Duck but also in Franz Kafka’s macabre tale The Metamorphosis
(1915) and in the psychologist’s experiments with rats. The caricature corresponds not only to
the artist’s character portrait but also to the scientist’s diagrams and charts, which emphasize the
relevant features and leave out the rest.
Contemporary psychology regards the conscious and unconscious processes underlying
creativity in all domains as an essentially combinative activity—the bringing together of
previously separate areas of knowledge and experience. The scientist’s purpose is to achieve
synthesis; the artist aims at a juxtapositionof the familiar and the eternal; the humorist’s game is
to contrive a collision. And as their motivations differ, so do the emotional responses evoked by
each type of creativity: discovery satisfies the exploratory drive; art induces emotional catharsis;
humour arouses malice and provides a harmless outlet for it. Laughter has been described as the
“Haha reaction”; the discoverer’s Eureka cry as the “Aha! reaction”; and the delight of the
aesthetic experience as the “Ah . . . reaction.” But the transitions from one to the other are
continuous: witticism blends into epigram, caricature into portrait; and whether one considers
architecture, medicine, chess, or cookery, there is no clear frontier where the realm of science
ends and that of art begins: the creative person is a citizen of both. Comedy and
tragedy, laughter and weeping, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum, and a
comparison of the physiology of laughter and weeping yields further clues to this challenging
problem. Such considerations, however, lie beyond the terms of reference of the
present article.
The humanization of humour
The San (Bushmen) of the Kalahari desert of South West Africa/Namibia are among the oldest
and most primitive inhabitants of the Earth. An anthropologist who made an exhaustive study of
them provided a rare glimpse of prehistoric humour:
On the way home we saw and shot a springbok, as there was no meat left in camp.
The bullet hit the springbok in the stomach and partly eviscerated him, causing him to jump and
kick before he finally died. The Bushmen thought that this was terribly funny and they laughed,
slapping their thighs and kicking their heels to imitate the springbok, showing no pity at all, but
then they regard animals with great detachment.
But the San remained “in good spirits, pleased with the amusement the springbok had given
them.” (From Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Harmless People; Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
1959.)
Obviously the San, like most primitive people, do not regard animals as sentient beings; the
springbok’s kicking in his agony appears to them funny because in their view the animal
pretends to suffer pain like a human being, though it is incapable of such feelings. The ancient
Greeks’ attitude toward the stammering barbarian was similarly inspired by the conviction that
he is not really human but only pretends to be. The ancient Hebrews’ sense of humour seems to
have been no less harsh: it has been pointed out that in the Old Testament there are 29 references
to laughter, out of which 13 instances are linked with scorn, derision, mocking, and contempt
and only two are born of joy.
As laughter emerged from antiquity, it was so aggressive that it has been likened to a dagger. It
was in ancient Greece that the dagger was transformed into a quill, dripping with poison at first,
then diluted and infused with delightfully lyrical and fanciful ingredients. The 5th century bc saw
the first rise of humour into art, starting with parodies of Olympian heroics and soon reaching a
peak, in some respects unsurpassed to this day, in the comedies of Aristophanes. From here
onward, the evolution of humour in the Western world merges with the history of literature and
art.
If the overall trend was toward the humanization of humour from primitive to sophisticated
forms, there also have been ups and downs reflecting changes in political and cultural climate.
George Orwell’s satire of the 20th century, for example, is much more savage than that of
Jonathan Swift in 18th-century England or of Voltaire in 18th-century France. If the Dark Ages
produced works of humorous art, little of it has survived. And under the tyrannies of Hitler in
Germany and of Stalin in the Soviet Union, humour was driven underground. Dictators fear
laughter more than bombs.
The humanization of humour » Non-Western styles
About non-Western varieties of humour, the Westerner is tempted to repeat the middle-aged
British matron’s remark on watching Cleopatra rave and die on the stage: “How different, how
very different from the home life of our dear Queen.” Humour thrives only in its native climate,
embedded in its native logic; when one does not know what to expect, one cannot be cheated of
one’s expectations. Hindu humour, for instance, as exemplified by the savage pranks played on
humans by the monkey-god Hanuman, strikes the Westerner as particularly cruel, perhaps
because the Hindu’s approach to mythology is fundamentally alien to the Western mind. The
humour of the Japanese, on the other hand, is, from the Western point of view,
astonishingly mild and poetical, like weak, mint-flavoured tea:
The boss of the monkeys ordered his thousands of henchmen to get the moon reflected in the
water. They all tried various means but failed and were much troubled. One of the monkeys at
last got the moon in the water and respectfully offered it to the boss, saying “This
is what you asked for.” The boss was delighted and praised him, saying, “What an exploit! You
have distinguished yourself!” The monkey then asked, “By the way, master, what are you going
to do with this?” “Well, yes . . . I didn’t think of that.” (From Karukuchi Ukibyotan, 1751; in
R.H. Blyth, Japanese Humour, 1957.)
The following dates from about a century later:
There was once a man who was always bewailing his lack of money to buy saké (rice wine)
with. His wife, feeling sorry for him, dutifully cut off some of her hair and sold it to the
hairdresser’s for twenty-four mon, and bought her husband some saké. “Where on earth did you
get this from?” “I sold my hair and bought it.” “You did such a thing for me?” The wretched man
shed tears, and fondling his wife’s remaining hair said, “Yes, and there’s another good half-
bottle of saké here!” (From Chanoko-mochi, 1856; in Blyth.)
The combination of maudlin tears and brazen selfishness, and the crazy logic of equating the
wife’s coiffure with a liquid measure of saké, show the familiar Western pattern of the clash of
incompatibles, even though transplanted into another culture.

pride
human behaviour

Main

Aspects of the topic pride are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
Assorted References
• ethics ( in ethics (philosophy): Aristotle;
...and liberality are recognized as virtues in both periods, Aristotle also includes a virtue
whose Greek name, megalopsyche, is sometimes translated as “pride,” though it literally
means “greatness of soul.” This is the characteristic of holding a justified high opinion of
oneself. For Christians the corresponding excess, vanity,...
in ethics (philosophy): Nietzsche )

...his most widely repeated aphorism.) Yet, what was to take religion’s place? Nietzsche
adopted Aristotle’s concept of greatness of soul, the unchristian virtue that included
 nobility and a justified pride in one’s achievements. He suggested a “reevaluation of all
values” that would lead to a new ideal: the Übermensch, a term usually...

Cannibalism
human behaviouralso called Anthropophagy,

Main
eating of human flesh by humans. The term is derived from the Spanish name (Caríbales, or
Caníbales) for the Carib, a West Indies tribe well known for their practice of cannibalism. A
widespread custom going back into early human history, cannibalism has been found among
peoples on most continents.
Though many early accounts of cannibalism probably were exaggerated or in error, the practice
prevailed until modern times in parts of West and Central Africa, Melanesia (especially Fiji),
New Guinea, Australia, among the Maoris of New Zealand, in some of the islands of Polynesia,
among tribes of Sumatra, and in various tribes of North and South America.
In some regions human flesh was looked upon as a form of food, sometimes equated with animal
food, as is indicated in the Melanesian pidgin term “long pig.” Victorious Maoris often cut up the
bodies of the dead after a battle and feasted on the flesh, and the Batak of Sumatra were reported
to have sold human flesh in the markets before they came under full control by the Dutch.
In other cases the consumption of particular portions or organs was a ritual means by which
certain qualities of the person eaten might be obtained or by which powers of witchcraft or
sorcery might be employed. Ritual murder and cannibalism in Africa were often related to
sorcery. Headhunters and others often consumed bits of the bodies or heads of deceased enemies
as a means of absorbing their vitality or other qualities and reducing their powers of revenge (see
also headhunting). The Aztecs apparently practiced cannibalism on a large scale as part of the
ritual religious sacrifice of war captives and other victims.
In some cases, the body of a dead person was ritually eaten by his relatives, a form called
endocannibalism. Some Aboriginal Australians performed such practices as acts of respect. In
other cases, ritual cannibalism occurred as a part of the drama of secret societies.
There is no one satisfactory and all-inclusive explanation for cannibalism. Different peoples have
practiced it for different reasons, and a group may practice cannibalism in one context and view
it with horror in another. In any case, the spread of modernization usually results in the
prohibition of such practices. In modern society cannibalism does occasionally occur as the
result of extreme physical necessity in isolated surroundings; the case of the Donner party
crossing into California in 1846–47 is such an instance.

cannibalism - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

The eating of human flesh by humans is called cannibalism. The word cannibalism comes
from the Arawakan language name for the Carib Indians of the West Indies. (Arawakan
was a major South American Indian language group.) The Caribs were well known for
their practice of cannibalism. The word is also used in a zoological sense to refer to the
 eating of any animal species by another member of the same species. Wolves, for
instance, will devour each other when desperately hungry.
The topic cannibalism is discussed at the following external Web sites.

free love
human behaviour

Main
Aspects of the topic free-love are discussed in the following places at Britannica.
Assorted References
• advocacy by Woodhull ( in Victoria Woodhull (American social reformer) )
...issue was written by Stephen Pearl Andrews, promoter of the utopian social system he
called “Pantarchy”—a theory rejecting conventional marriage and advocating a perfect
state of free love combined with communal management of children and property.
Woodhull expounded her version of these ideas in a series of articles in the New...