AARON GOODMAN
Key Concepts
- A kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.
- Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. At the extreme, a bad first kiss can abruptly curtail a couple’s future.
- Kissing may have evolved from primate mothers’ practice of chewing food for their young and then feeding them mouth-to-mouth. Some scientists theorize that kissing is crucial to the evolutionary process of mate selection.
More from this issue of Mind
February
2008 Issue- Head Lines A Virtual Laboratory
- Head Lines Heart Attack Panic
- Letter from the Editor Kiss and Tell
- Buy the Digital Edition
More from this In-Depth Report
- Slideshow Optical Illusions and the Illusion of Love
- News Putting the "Green" into Greenhouses
- News Blooms Away: The Real Price of Flowers
- From the In-Depth Report The Science of Love
When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses.
Lips may have evolved first for food and later applied themselves to speech, but in kissing they satisfy different kinds of hungers. In the body, a kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.
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