Does Adrenaline Make the Heart Grow Fonder?
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If you ever happen to find yourself crossing the Capilano River in North Vancouver, Canada, you’ll have two bridges to choose from:
The first is definitely not for the faint of heart: A mere five feet wide and 450 feet long, the Capilano Canyon Suspension Bridge is constructed solely of plank and cable and sways perilously in the wind some 250 feet above the turbulent rocky tides – right out of a scene from Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Your other choice? A solidly built anchored bridge that sits a mere 10 feet above sea level.
In 1974, two well-known psychologists, Arthur Aron and Donald Dutton, used these bridges as the focus of an ingenious experiment – one that sought to explore the mysterious nature of sexual attraction. It’s informally dubbed the Shaky Bridge Study – which is why I also like to call it the Shake Up Your Sex Life Study.
The two-part experiment went something like this:
On day one, whenever an unaccompanied man ventured across the shaky bridge, he would find himself stopped midway by an attractive young woman.
She would introduce herself as a psychology student and then proceed to ask if he would mind participating in a brief survey.
On day two, the identical routine would be conducted by the same woman on the sturdy bridge.
Sounds pretty straightforward, right? But there was a little twist: When each of the men completed the survey, the young woman would hand him her phone number and tell him that he was free to call her later that evening for the results.
Unbeknownst to the subjects, the real study was not the answers the men gave on the survey, but what happened afterward. Dutton and Aron set out to examine which of the men gave the attractive psychologist a call and, more importantly, why. In other words, they were interested in studying not just what happened on the bridge, but how that affected what happened later. Would the excitement and exhilaration of being on the shaky bridge, versus the more mundane experience of being on the solid bridge, promote romantic attraction?
Or, to put it simply: Does adrenaline makes the heart grow fonder?
The answer? Indeed, it does.
Not only did Aron and Dutton find that the men on the shaky bridge were more likely than their stable-bridge counterparts to call the woman later for results of the survey, but they were also far more likely to ask her for a date! When it comes to desire and attraction, a little unpredictability goes a long way: It spikes the brain’s natural amphetamines, dopamine and norepinephrine, which play a big role in sexual arousal.
July 16, 2009
Copyright © 2009 MSNBC News
