Relationships

Analysis and Comment (11)

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Can science save floundering relationships? Participants in ABC TV’s Making Couples, airing tonight, find out. ABC TV

ABC TV’s Making Couples Happy tries to do it with science

By Jennifer Boldero, University of Melbourne

Can a floundering relationship be saved in eight weeks using “science”? Premiering tonight, the new ABC series Making Couples Happy sets out to answer this very question. The show follows four “ordinary…
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Cheating on a partner is always a choice, not a biologically determined effect. flickr/dhammza

Monogamy: cheating on what nature intended, or a simple choice?

By Lauren Rosewarne, University of Melbourne

Biologists and psychologists like to tussle with human characteristics: what’s inherent? What’s learnt? What’s genetically coded? What’s malleable? Every so often an “expert” will reignite the nature vs…
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Australians willingly helped their neighbours when it was needed during the Queensland floods of 2011. Flickr/RaeAllen

Do you know your neighbour? Lending a hand and the Queensland floods

By Lynda Cheshire

Neighbours are a source of growing aggravation in Australia and we are lodging more official complaints about each other than ever before. Excessive noise or odour, inadequate levels of property maintenance…
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Married people are less likely to commit crime. Flickr/Marcus Hansson

Marriage helps reduce crime

By Walter Forrest, Monash University

More than half of all murders in Australia involve family members. The majority of them are committed by men who kill their partners. Here, as in many other countries, violence in the home is a major social…
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ABC’s The Slap investigates the complex and very personal views of those at the heart of a smacking case. ABC

The legality of ‘The Slap’

By Bronwyn Naylor, Monash University and Bernadette Saunders, Monash University

In last night’s ABC program, The Slap, an impulsive slap changed everything. A man struck someone else’s child at a barbecue provoking a legal challenge. In real life, that would be an assault, though…
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Grindr is an app that allows gay men to meet up for … fun and friendship. flickr/nathaninsandiego

Grindr, Blendr and why gays get all the cool stuff first

By Lauren Rosewarne, University of Melbourne

The second Stephen Fry mentioned Grindr on Top Gear of course its popularity surged. Not only did the app – designed to help homosexual blokes hook up with those geographically convenient – surge in popularity…
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The cut-and-choose technique has been preventing tantrums since antiquity. free form by prudence

Cutting cake (and eating it too) – the sticky maths of fair division

By Toby Walsh, NICTA

I work on the mathematics of sharing resources, which has led me to consider emotions such as envy, behaviour such as risk-taking and the best way to cut a cake. Like, I suspect, many women, my wife enjoys…
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Women rushed to change their lives in the 60s and 70s, but their progress has stalled now. Flickr/Maciek Zygmunt

Why the rush for gender equality has stalled

By Paula England, New York University

No one is too surprised today if a young woman becomes a doctor, lawyer, or executive. But eyebrows are raised just about as much today as in decades past if a couple features a tall woman and short man…

Research and News (1)

Research Briefs (8)

Snubs hurt less when you’re boss

UC Berkeley

Bosses recover from rejection faster at work and home. Researchers from the University of California: Berkeley conducted…

A Platonic relationship? Not quite

Manchester University

Instead of advocating a form of love that does not involve physical intimacy as is widely believed, the ancient Greek thinker…

Friends with benefits: it’s complicated

Ithaca College

Young people who engage in informal sexual relationships, often known as “hooking up” or “friends with benefits”, may find…

Participants (35)