Why We Kiss: The Science of Sex

By: Brie Cadman

Pecking, smooching, Frenching, and playing tonsil-hockey—there
are as many names forkissing as there are ways to do it. Whether
we use it as an informal greeting or an
intenselyromantic gesture, kissing is one of those ingrained
human behaviors that seems to defy explanation. Its many
purposes—a blow and peck for good luck on dice, lips to ground
after a rocky boat ride, kisses in the air to an acquaintance, and
the long slow smooches of Hollywood—have different meanings
yet are similar in nature. So why is it that we love to pucker up?
 A Kiss Isn’t Just a Kiss
Philematologists, the scientists who study kissing, aren’t exactly
sure why humans started locking lips in the first place. The most
likely theory is that it stems from primate mothers passing along
chewed food to their toothless babies. The lip-to-lip contact may
have been passed on through evolution, not only as a necessary
means of survival, but also as a general way to promote social
bonding and as an expression of love.
But something’s obviously happened to kissing since the time of
the chewed-food pass. Now, it’s believed that kissing helps
transfer critical information, rather than just meat bits.
The kissing we associate with romantic courtship may help us to
choose a good mate, send chemical signals, and foster long-term
relationships. All of this is important in evolution’s ultimate goal—
successful procreation.
Kissing allows us to get close enough to a mate to assess
essential characteristics about them, none of which we’re
consciously processing. Part of this information exchange is most
likely facilitated by pheromones, chemical signals that are passed
between animals to help send messages. We know that animals
use pheromones to alert their peers of things like mating, food
sources, and danger, and researchers hypothesize that
pheromones can play a role in human behavior as well. Although
the vomeronasal organs, which are responsible for pheromone
detection and brain function in animals, are thought to be vestigial
and inactive in humans, research indicates we
do communicate with chemicals.
The first study to indicate that chemical signals play a role in
attraction was conducted by Claud Wedekind over a decade
ago. Women sniffed the worn t-shirts of men and indicated which
shirts smelled best to them. By comparing the DNA of the women
and the men, researchers found that women didn’t just chose
their favorite scent randomly. They preferred the scent of man
whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC)—a series of
genes involved in our immune system—was different from their
own. Having a different MHC means less immune overlap and a
better chance of healthy, robust offspring. Kissing may be a subtle
way for women to assess the immune compatibility of a mate,
before she invests too much time and energy in him. Perhaps a
bad first kiss means more than first date jitters—it could also
mean a real lack of chemistry.
 Men Sloppy, Women Choosy

Behavioral research supports this biological reasoning. In

2007, researchers at University of Albany studied 1,041 college
student and found significant differences in how males and
females perceived kissing. Although common in courtship,
females put more importance on kissing, and most would never
have sex without kissing first. Men, on the other hand, would have
sex without kissing beforehand; they would also have sex with
someone who wasn’t a good kisser. Since females across
species are often the choosier ones when it comes to
mate selection, these differences in kissing behavior make sense.
Men are also more likely to initiate
French kissing and researchers hypothesize that this is because
saliva contains testosterone, which can increase
libido. Researchers also think that men might be able to pick up
on a woman’s level of estrogen, which is a predictor of fertility.
 Crazy for Canoodling
But kissing isn’t all mating practicality; it also feels good. That’s
because kissing unleashes a host of feel-good chemicals, helping
to reduce stress and increase social bonding. Researcher Wendy
Hill and colleagues at Lafayette College looked at how oxytocin,
which is involved in pair bonding and attachment, and cortisol, a
stress hormone, changed after people kissed. Using a small
sample of college couples that were in long-term relationships,
they found cortisol levels decreased after kissing. The longer the
couples had been in a relationship, the farther their levels
dropped. Cortisol levels also decreased for the control group—
couples that just held hands—indicating that social attachment in
general can decrease stress levels, not just kissing.
Looking at oxytocin levels, the researchers found that they
increased only in the males, whereas the researchers thought it
would increase in both sexes. They hypothesized that it could be
that women need more than a kiss to stimulate attachment and
bonding, or that the sterile environment of the research lab wasn’t
conducive to creating a feeling of attachment.
Kissing, therefore, plays a role not only in mate selection, but also
in bonding. At an Association for the Advancement of Science
meeting on the science of kissing, Helen Fischer, an evolutionary
biologist, posits multiple reasons for lip locking. She believes
thatkissing is involved in the three main types of attraction
humans have: sex drive, which is ruled by
testosterone; romantic love, which is ruled by dopamine and other
feel-good hormones; and attachment, which involves
bonding chemicals like oxytocin. Kissing, she postulates, evolved
to help on all three fronts. Saliva, swapped
during romantic kisses, has testosterone in it; feel-
good chemicals are distributed when we kiss that help fuel
romance; and kissing also helps unleash chemicals that promote
bonding, which provides for long term attachment, necessary for
raising offspring.
Sniff, Snuggle, and Turn Right
Yet, not all cultures or mammals kiss. Some mammals have close
contact with each others’ faces via licking, grooming, and sniffing,
which may transmit the necessary information. And although
chimps may pass food from mother to child, the notoriously
promiscuous bonobos are apparently the only primates that truly
kiss. And while it’s thought that 90 percent of the human
population kisses, there’s still the 10 percent that doesn’t. So it
seems that as much as we use kissing to gather genetic and
compatibility information, our penchant for kissing also has to do
with our cultural beliefs surrounding it.
Whether we live in a place where kissing is reserved for close
acquaintances, or somewhere where a casual greeting means a
one, two, or three cheeker, one thing does remain highly
consistent: the side to which people turn while kissing. It’s almost
always to the right. A 2003 study published in Nature found that
twice as many adults turn their heads to the right rather than the
left when kissing. This behavioral asymmetry is thought to stem
from the same preference for head turning during the final weeks
of gestation and during infancy.
One of the best things about kissing, however, is that we don’t
have to think about any of this. Just close eyes, pucker up, and let
nature takes its course.