A kiss predicts potential partner

Chicago, February 18: Your first kiss reveals the potential of your mate in bed and overall compatibility you are likely to have with him or her. A new study claims that kissing is a subconscious ‘biological strategy’ to make ‘mate assessment’.

Helen Fisher, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, New Jersey, says that men unintentionally gauge through a kiss the levels of oestrogen and fertility in women.

Women, on the other side, assess a man’s immunity, strength and his reliability, using a kiss. However, the entire experience takes place only at subconscious level, and decisions that follow on whether to have sex with their respective partners come out naturally.

Men prefer wet kisses as they check fertility of the woman they are kissing by testing salivadefine. Fisher explains, “The hypothesis is they’re trying to get small traces of oestrogen to see where the woman is in her menstrual cycle to indicate the state of her fertility.”

And, the smell, as a woman kisses, makes her deduce her mate’s immunity system.

Fisher elaborates saying, "There’s some who suggest by kissing a man a woman is unconsciously able to detect aspects of a particular complex of genesdefine in the immune systemdefine... and that what they’re doing is being turned on by someone with different variations in the system. They’re more attracted to a different immune system."

She believes that kissing helps in making “mate choice, for sizing someone up, not only socially but chemically.”

Citing researches by Gordon Gallup, of Albany University and others, Fisher says that kissing as a mate assessing mechanism has evolved over millions of years, and previous researches have also concluded that mates have always unconsciously checked fertility of each other through kissing.

Kissing is also known to have stress bursting qualities, as it triggers certain hormonesdefine that reduce stress and instill attachment between a couple.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science 2009 meeting highlighted the study findings.