Mutual Grooming in Human Relationships
In human kind, mutual grooming is quite related to social grooming, which is defined as the process by which human beings fulfill one of their basic instincts, such as socializing, cooperating and learning from each other. Research conducted by Holly Nelson (from the University of New Hampshire) and Glenn Geher (State University of New York at Platz), individuals who chose their romantic partner reported more mutual grooming than others who focused in other types of relationships. Hence, this study hypothesized that mutual grooming was related to relationship satisfaction, trust and previous experience of affection within the family. They claim that even though humans do not groom each other with the same fervor that other species do, they are groomers par excellence. Therefore, human mutual grooming plays an important role in pair bonding. In the same investigation, researchers found that individuals with more promiscuous attitudes and those who scored high on the anxiety sub-scale on an adult attachment style measure, tend to groom their partners more frequently. These findings were also consistent with some of the functions of grooming: potential parental indicator, developing trust and courtship or flirtation.
Read more about this topic: Personal Grooming
Famous quotes containing the words mutual, grooming and/or human:
“We call it a Society; and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named “fair competition” and so forth, it is a mutual hostility.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Cats are the ultimate narcissists. You can tell this because of all the time they spend on personal grooming. Dogs aren’t like this. A dog’s idea of personal grooming is to roll in a dead fish. Dogs spend their time thinking about doing good deeds for their masters, or sleeping.”
—James Gorman (b. 1949)
“In the very midst of the crowd about this wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast up, and conveying it beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and they might at any moment have found a human body under it. Drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure. This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the fabric of society.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)