Study gauges sex time

Penn State researcher Eric Corty recently concluded that "desirable" sex usually lasts between seven and 13 minutes on average, contrary to popular belief.

Through surveys of 50 sex therapists from the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, Corty, associate professor of psychology and Jenay Guardiani, fellow Penn State Erie researcher, found ranges of time to classify sexual intercourse as too short, adequate, desirable or too long.

"I was curious as to how long was most pleasurable ... and I wanted to relieve some anxiety that some Americans have about the duration of intercourse," Corty said. "I found that some people have unrealistic expectations about how long sexual intercourse should last."

According to the surveys, three to seven minutes is considered "adequate," seven to 13 minutes is considered "desirable," one to two minutes is considered "too short" and 10 to 30 minutes is considered "too long."

"I think people who have really long sex don't have much substance to their relationships," Brittney Barbieri (freshman-biobehavioral health) said. "But seven to 13 minutes sounds about right -- get in, get off, get out."

While this study may show the duration of sexual intercourse has specific pleasurable ranges, biobehavioral health instructor Spring Cooper says the range of time for an entire pleasurable sexual experience could be significant.

"Intercourse is lasting that long -- not the whole sexual interaction. That seven to 13 minute range is excluding kissing, touching, fondling, etc.," she said.

Cooper said one thing to keep in mind is that the duration of intercourse should not be more important than pleasure.

"People do have to understand that it's just the intercourse that he's talking about," Cooper said. "If people have a shorter sexual interaction, they might think the sex is shorter, but it's more likely that the entire interaction that was shorter."

Numerical values for the time ranges were judged by sex therapists in a variety of ways, and it should be considered that the values are averages, Corty said.

"These are people who've been in practice for years, so they've talked to a lot of people, but they also keep up on research and current studies," he said. "It's a combination of clinical experience, contemporary research and education."

Corty hopes his research will relieve stress some may have about how long their sex lasts, but Cooper feels such high expectations are because of overestimating the time spent having intercourse by including foreplay.

"People sometimes spend a lot of time on foreplay and then notice that an hour's gone, but that doesn't mean the entire hour was specifically intercourse," Cooper said. "If people knew how long they were actually having sex, I don't think they'd be as stressed about the pressure for intercourse to last."

Although encouraged by the publicity his findings have attracted, Corty does not want his research to cause people to judge their sex lives as abnormal.

"I'm pleased with how much publicity this is getting, but I do want to be real careful when people discuss this because these are averages," Corty said. "If the average shoe size in the United States is a seven and your foot is a size eight, there's nothing wrong. It's just different than average."

Study :Sex and Financial Risk Linked in Brain

Northwestern University shows Northwestern University finance professor Camelia M. Kuhnen, co-author of a study that looks at what's going on inside a man's mind when he is about to take a financial risk
A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles — sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported.

The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

"You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area," said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

Their research appears in the current edition of the peer-reviewed journal NeuroReport.

The study only involved 15 heterosexual young men at Stanford University. It focused on the sex and money hub, the V-shaped nucleus accumbens, which sits near the base of the brain and plays a central role in what you experience as pleasure.

When that hub was activated by the erotic images, the men were far more likely to bet high on a random chance game that would earn them either a dollar or a dime. Each man made more than 50 gambles under brain scans.

Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson, a lead author of the study, says it's all about the power of emotion and arousal and our financial decisions. The trigger doesn't have to be sex — it could be chocolate or a winning lottery ticket.

"It didn't matter if the sexy woman didn't tell you anything about the odds of winning a roulette game," Knutson said. "What really matters is that the sexy woman is having an emotional impact. That bleeds over into your financial decisions."

Kuhnen said the same link could hold true for women, but they didn't test it because it is more difficult to find an erotic image that would appeal to many different heterosexual women compared to heterosexual men.

The link between sex and greed goes back hundreds of thousands of years, to men's evolutionary role as provider or resource gatherer to attract women, said Kevin McCabe, professor of economics, law and neuroscience at George Mason University, who wasn't part of the study.

"Risk-taking is a natural way of increasing your relative success, but, of course, there's a downside to it, what we're seeing right now in the economy," McCabe said.

The results of the study jibe with the real life on the trading floor, said Phil Flynn, a former Chicago commodities floor trader and current analyst at Alaron Trading Corp.

"I'm not shocked that it may be part of the deal," Flynn said Friday. "When you talk about all the euphemisms for trading (on the floor), they can be used for sex as well."

("Massaging the market" and "hardcore" were about the cleanest that he and his colleagues could come up with.)

The study conforms with recent research that indicates men shown a pornographic movie were more likely to make riskier sexual decisions. Another suggests straight men think less about their financial future after being shown pictures of pretty women.

One still-to-be-published study at Harvard University found a link between higher testosterone levels and financial risk-taking.

But the study conducted at Stanford, funded by the National Institutes of Health, went deeper, using functional magnetic resonance imaging machines. It's part of a new but growing field called neuroeconomics that attempts to take the hard-wired science of brain biology and mix it with the softer sciences of psychology and economics to figure out why we make the financial decisions we do.

An earlier study by the same team found that the brain's reward area lit up at about the same time as risky decision-making.

The erotic pictures experiment was designed to find which was the cause and which was the effect. The answer: Lighting up the reward area, in this case with soft-core pictures, caused the risk-taking, Kuhnen said.

"The more activation there you have, the more prone you are to taking more risk," Kuhnen said. "It could be a feedback loop."

The flip side was that the photos of snakes and spiders activated the portion of the brain often associated with pain, fear and anger. And those people were more likely to bet low.

This all makes sense to Harvard economist Terry Burnham, author of the book "Mean Genes." Burnham said it could be all summed up in a famous line from the movie "Scarface."

"In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.