Incest theories

New studies on incest have been made

Sigmund Freud once said that we all have feelings of incest, only that we repress them. The scientists say that he might be partially true. A new study has been conducted, and it has been revealed that the people are more attracted towards the people who have facial traits similar to their own.

It was also discovered that the people felt a stronger attraction towards the people who were preceded by a subliminal image of their opposite sex parent. The study did not want to suggest that we secretly want to have sex with out family members, but it was a mean of proving the laws of attraction. Simply put it, they wanted to see what creates attraction, and to prove who we find attractive. The study also wanted to prove that we do not have an innate repulsion towards incest as it was previously believed.

There are many scientists who have stated that the study is not as conclusive as the people who have conducted it, say. One thing is for certain and that it that all over the world, incest is a taboo subject. Almost all the cultures from the world have prohibited it, and they had a good reason for it. Besides the immorality of the act, it is also the concern of the health of the offspring, as it has been proven that a baby resulted from blood relatives, has very high chances of being born with a deformity. Charles II of Spain, who was the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, was the result of an incestuous act, and he paid for it. He was infertile, and he had a congenital overbite that did not allow him to chew the food in the proper manner.

For more than a century, the scientists have been split when it comes to the taboo subjects. For example Sigmund Freud has stated that the incest is a taboo subject because we as humans have incestuous urges, which we often try to hide and to control. Edward Westermarck, the Finnish sociologist stated something completely different. He said in 1891 that the people have an internal mechanism that makes them avoid the incest. Westermarck stated that two people, who have grown up in the same house, will not find each other attractive, mainly because of the reason that they lived together for so long.

It seems that for the past few decades, the psychologists and the other experts in the domain have started to agree with what Westermarck said. Some psychologists have stated that we calculate the relatedness to a different person based on the amount of time we have spent playing together. They said that when we have spent much time with the other person in childhood, meaning that if the relatedness is too high, then we automatically develop an “incest avoidance” mechanism. The mechanism is also known as disgust. The idea has been backed up by numerous studied, as most of the people are disgusted by the thought of having sex with a family member.

A study has been made in Taiwan, and it has been discovered that the people who belonged to the same family and married, had way fewer children than the married couples that were not related. Other studies seem to prove otherwise, as it has been discovered that the people are more attracted by the people who look like their parents. In a study performed in 2004, some people were shown the adoptive fathers of a certain number of women. The people were able to identify the spouses of those women, by looking at the pictures of their adopted fathers. This means that all of those women married men who looked like their fathers.

R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was the main researcher in the study, said that the ideas which Westermarck stated were partially wrong. He believes that some people might be disgusted and repulsed by the thought of having sex with a close relative, but in the same time he believes that the people are attracted towards other people who look like one of their relatives. He said that he would like to find out why those two thoughts were opposite to each other.

In order to examine the issue, they conducted a series of experiments on college students. They asked the students to rate the attractiveness of various strangers. The researchers included subliminal snapshots of either someone unrelated to them or of a relative. It has been discovered that in all of the cases the students rated those images higher which were preceded by the snapshot of the relative. On the second experiment the scientists morphed the faces of the people they presented. They also used the faces of the people who participated in the experiment and in all the cases the persons who resembled the faces of the people who participated at the experiments were considered more attractive.

In the third experiment the researchers told the participants that some of the pictures they will see were morphed with their own faces. That was not true. They told them which pictures were morphed, and in that case all of those pictures were rated very low. Based on these experiments, it seems that the theories offered by Westermarck were not true, as the people were not disgusted by familiar faces, but on the contrary, they were attracted by them. They only considered the faces to be disgusted when they were announced about the morphing which means that the process takes places at a subconscious level and that the social pressure must also play a very huge role.

Fraley stated that the reason why the Taiwanese couples was not very attracted towards each other because attraction occurs at a subconscious level. This means that we are attracted by something familiar, and in most of the cases we do not know where the familiarity comes from. It is likely that if we would know that that girl resembles our mother we would be turned-off.