Interesting paper about ticklishness, gender, body type and personality

[Grolsch]

Greetings,

Here's a link to a paper I found. I can't really comment on its scientific merits, but it's interesting to read. Feel free to read (or not) and come to your conclusions. I found this excerpt fascinating:

" Ticklishness
correlate positively with the secondary sexual characteristics (breast size or WHR) and the secondary sexual
characteristics correlate positively with self-esteem and
empathy. Female ticklishness is above all related to sexism, high empathy, low schizotypy and external locus of
control. Self-esteem doesn’t seem to play a direct role in
tickling."

Here's the link:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e602/4c5a31dc00d0697e14db284151330ceca397.pdf

 

[Cyberknismo94]

Lol I meet all the characteristics of ticklish men and I was very ticklish as a kid. Maybe no longer ticklish now dunno why. Also I noticed all big tiddies women I met were very ticklish so another point is confirmed.

Ps: I like that it puts the "macho" and the feminist label together as "sexist"

 

[TickleYeti]

Always interesting to see new scholarly work around tickling, but it was a super small study, only done via questionnaire which is already subjective.

It worried me that many of the traits in men seemed purely correlative, but I didn't see much mention not correlation vs causation and while the article delved a great deal into typology of ticklish men and women, in the conclusion it seemed like all they were testing for was whether laughing at an unintentional stumble and laughing when tickled were the same.

From an academic point, I'd suggest that
1 they ought to have verified claimed levels of ticklishness.
2 they ought not to have used leading questions such as "i like dominating"
3 I noticed a few typos in the paper that should have been caught and corrected before publishing.

All in all, it's interesting and considering that correlation between erotic sexuality and tickling enjoyment was low in women, might explain why there are more men than women on the site.

Sent from my Z982 using Tapatalk

 

[Studious_Hustler]

Interesting study -- thank you OP for posting! The central finding, that ticklishness and laughing "at a stumble" (what they call the "false alarm") are not the same, is significant in that it seems to undermine the common belief that ticklishness evolved as a self-defense training mechanism. Apart from that, though, the findings mostly just seem to agree with my own preconceptions (ticklishness is associated in women with submissiveness and sensitivity and in men with confidence and easygoing-ness). The more I think about it, though, this all seems to push in the direction of the "tickling is primarily a social mechanism" camp??

it puts the "macho" and the feminist label together as "sexist"

That was only with regard to sexist jokes. I.e., it refers to sexist jokes at the expense of men as "feminist," but nowhere does it claim that feminism is sexist.

they ought to have verified claimed levels of ticklishness

I had the same thought, but, if I understood correctly, they did a microscopic test (sample size of ten) with an external judge of ticklishness, and the test suggested that subjective self-assessments of ticklishness were reliable. On the whole, I found the methodology (just barely) convincing enough. Of course, I have no background in statistics or social science, so I'm just going off of my best use of common sense.

 

[maniactickler]

I don't believe in the 0 to 10 ranking when it comes to people who aren't into tickling. most of them are clueless when it comes to ranking themselves.

 

[Grolsch]

TickleYeti, you couldn't really do much other than a correlational study. One needs a large sample size to get into causation, but aside from that, it isn't like you can modify people at conception and decide "let this woman have an ideal HWR and this on not" and see what happens.

It is hard to read the paper and look at the correlation results without seeing the entire correlation table, but that's ok. They gave it a noble effort!

I personally go with the tickle response as a mainly social (rather than defensive) response, but I don't think we'll ever really know. And, tickle is kind of a hard thing to study I think for a lot of reasons.

I do wonder a lot in general and with this paper about characteristics like self-confidence/esteem, body type and ticklishness. For one, it's possible that with breast size and esteem, it's positively correlated but there's a point where it reverses - a woman with extremely large breasts might lose some self-esteem due to teasing, awkwardness and so on. I don't know, just speculating.

And, say you're a very ticklish woman with the ideal HWR. Maybe you're confident, and know you can get someone to stop tickling anytime so it's ok. Or, could it go the other way, where such a person gets tickled a lot and learns to suppress it?

There are only 13 references, so I kind of suspect it was a student thesis of some sort. Who knows, the original data set might be available from the authors 🙂

 

[milagros317]

Very interesting article. Thanks for the link. 😀

 

[RevyBL]

Fun to read but that's all it is since you can determine and person ticklishness base on appearance or personality.

 

[Cyberknismo94]

That was only with regard to sexist jokes. I.e., it refers to sexist jokes at the expense of men as "feminist," but nowhere does it claim that feminism is sexist.

I still appreciate that ad a turbo autistic incel guy who got treated as shit by many girls and women in power over me (and feminist jokes are irritating as fck)

 

[omnifeller]

I find the most interesting part to be where they "took ten people and tickled them with a feather and fingers", and concluded that women were more ticklish than men. Of course, it's a small sample size, and was based on a subjective rating by an observer.

 

[chicago]

Reminds me of all the posts and pms by dudes saying they were doing "spr srs research" but just wanted to ask a bunch of tickle questions.

 

[OmahaTickler]

As others noted, it's a questionnaire study, so the researcher had to rely on participants' assessments of themselves, and few people can see themselves through a clear, accurate lens. Qualitative data through one-on-one interviews would be more reliable.

 

[omnifeller]

The bulk of the study was a questionnaire, but they did a small "verification" study with actual tickling.