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- Teenagers at schools, colleges and universities who achieve
the highest grades are more likely to wait longer before having sexual
relationships, new research showed today.
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- A study found that adolescents of average intelligence
started experimenting with sex the earliest.
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- Bright teenagers not only delayed losing their virginity,
but also postponed other forms of sexual activity such as holding hands,
kissing and heavy petting.
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- The American researchers were surprised to find that
the least intelligent adolescents also avoided having sex at a young age.
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- A possible reason for this was that less intelligent,
and therefore vulnerable, teenagers were more shielded from sexual contact
by their parents.
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- Professor Carolyn Halpern, from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, US who helped carry out the research, said: "An
adolescent who scored 100, which was the average on the test we used to
measure intelligence, was one and a half to almost five times as likely
to have had sexual relations compared with teenagers who scored 120 or
130, depending on which age and sex group was considered."
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- The association was the same for black and white teenagers,
but stronger for boys than for girls and also for older teenagers.
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- The researchers analysed information from two separate
studies of adolescent health and development in the US.
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- One included data on about 12,000 teenagers enrolled
in the seventh to 12th grades. The other, which contained more specific
information on different levels of sexual contact, followed the progress
of about 100 boys and 200 girls in a single North Carolina county.
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- Both involved detailed confidential surveys of teenagers
and their experiences and attitudes. The researchers controlled factors
such as teenagers' self-described physical attractiveness, grooming, personality
and whether the subject had a romantic relationship in the previous 18
months.
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- They found that the association between high intelligence
and postponing sex existed even for behaviours with no obvious negative
consequences, such as kissing or light petting.
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- Previously it had been assumed that the link between
good grades and delaying sex may be due to a teenager's desire to safeguard
future goals, such as going to college.
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- Prof Halpern said: "Our results suggest that this
is not the whole story. It is hard to believe that teenagers avoid kissing
because they see it as the start of a slippery slope to sexual intercourse
and possible pregnancy."
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- The other surprise was that teenagers of low intelligence
were also likely to postpone having sex. "We thought the relationship
would be linear that teenagers on the high end would be least likely to
have sex, and teenagers on the low end would be most likely," said
Prof Halpern.
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