There are quite a few fears with which we civilized people have to struggle.

Those in front of spiders or in front of deep abysses are the more harmless among them.

More worrying from an evolutionary point of view is a problem that has apparently spread so much among young people that psychologists are already dealing with it: the “dating fear”.

In other words, troubled feelings associated with interacting with potential romantic partners before developing a real relationship.

Three psychologists from the UK and Norway recently investigated where this panic could be coming from.

Her assumption that there could be a negative image of one's own body behind it was only indirectly confirmed in surveys of around 500 young British adults.

Rather, they identified the fear of dating as part of a larger problem: the fear of being judged in public about the nature of one's own body.

The romantic context obviously offers a particularly uncomfortable framework for this idea - which is then often avoided by those affected.

The harmony of pulse and skin conductivity

For young adults this is a real problem, the researchers write in the journal Body Image and appeal to find ways to counteract the body fixation of young people. Perhaps another study in the journal Nature Human Behavior may help, in which Dutch and British psychologists have empirically investigated the question of what determines whether two people find each other attractive on a blind date.

While allowing randomly selected couples to meet for the first time in a controlled environment, the scientists measured a wide variety of body signals: gestures, laughter and looks, for example.

However, all of this turned out to be of little telling about the developing force of attraction between the two.

Instead, it was the harmony of pulse and skin conductivity that could be used to predict the perceived attractiveness.

In other words, unconscious, imperceptible and hardly controllable body reactions.

And thus perhaps good news for everyone with a dating fear: How you are physically consciously judged on the first date may be relatively irrelevant, as long as your pulse and skin tension are correct.