Praise kink

What is a praise kink?

A praise kink is getting aroused and compliant from words of approval: “good”, “good girl”, “exactly how I wanted it”. The praise isn’t a side effect but the means itself. That makes a praise kink the mirror of degradation, where it’s the putting-down that drives things.

What a praise kink looks like in practice

Small. Two or three words at the right moment, from someone whose judgment counts.

An ordinary example. She does something she finds scary: taking a posture, staying down, saying something out loud. He says nothing during, and afterward one sentence. That’s where she drops. Not because the sentence was special, but because something was at stake the whole time and now it’s settled.

That’s how it usually works: a praise kink needs a task. Without something to do well, a compliment hangs in the air. That’s why the kink so often comes together with discipline and with commands, where there is a yardstick. And that’s why the silence before it is as important as the word after.

What praise does to a person

Praise is a reward to the brain, not a form of politeness.

Keise Izuma, Daisuke Saito, and Norihiro Sadato put nineteen people in Neuron in an MRI scanner and gave them money and a good reputation in turn. Getting a good name strongly activated the same reward regions, the striatum foremost, and those overlapped with the regions that responded to money. The researchers call that a common currency for reward.

It also does more than feel pleasant. Sho Sugawara and colleagues had 48 people in PLoS ONE practice a series of finger movements and then split them into three groups: praise for your own performance, praise for someone else’s, or no praise. Only the first group improved measurably more on that series the next day. So praise didn’t work as encouragement to practice harder, but reached straight into what the brain does with the learned material overnight.

Neither study is about sex or BDSM. That praise within a scene hits the same reward system is my inference, not a finding of Izuma’s or Sugawara’s.

Why people have a praise kink

Because being approved of by someone whose judgment counts is rarer than it sounds.

What pulls at it is that the doubt falls away. In a scene you know what’s being asked of you and hear straight away whether it’s right, and that clarity you get nowhere in an ordinary week. What’s left after that differs per person:

• For you, a praise kink takes the guard off. You no longer have to gauge whether it’s good enough, because that’s said out loud.
• For the other, it gives a steering tool that costs nothing and damages nothing. A word at the right moment does more than half an hour of instructions.
• For the two of you together, it gives a second language: after a while you know from one word where you stand.

A praise kink doesn’t turn an uncertain evening into a sure one. If anything, inflated praise can work against you. Eddie Brummelman and colleagues showed in Psychological Science that adults tend to give exaggerated praise precisely to people with low self-esteem, and that this exaggerated praise there does the opposite: they avoid challenges instead of taking them on. That study was about children, so the translation across is again my inference. Too much is no longer more.

How people fill in a praise kink

Almost always with few words and a lot of timing.

There are roughly three forms. The first is affirming: short words during play, by which someone hears she’s on course. The second is judging: a verdict afterward, over the whole evening, where the waiting does the work. The third works with commands, where praise is the reward for something that succeeded; there a praise kink touches discipline.

What the three have in common is that the praise has to come across as meant. Jennifer Henderlong and Mark Lepper laid out the research on praise in Psychological Bulletin: praise works only when it’s experienced as sincere, and helps most when it gives a sense of one’s own ability without comparison to others and without unreachable expectations. That study was about children too.

Misconceptions about a praise kink

“A praise kink is the soft variant, so harmless.” Anyone who runs on praise feels its absence just as hard. So it belongs in the conversation beforehand just as much as a blow.

“More compliments is better.” The opposite: with Brummelman, exaggerated praise actually scared off people with low self-esteem.

“A praise kink and degradation rule each other out.” Not necessarily: many people want both, sometimes within one evening. What mustn’t run together is which of the two applies when.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years active in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. A praise kink is the kink people find hardest to bring up. Women ask for a blow sooner than for a compliment, because asking for praise means admitting you need it.

The word matters less than who says it and when. The same sentence from the mouth of someone who’s approved of everything all evening does nothing. From the mouth of someone who’s been sparing, it lands.

Taking it in is the hard part, by the way. Many women talk right over it, laugh it off, or look away. I then ask them to say nothing and just let it stand. That lasts three seconds and is, for many people, the most uncomfortable moment of the evening.

What you can arrange with a praise kink

• Say beforehand which words you want to hear and which you don’t. “Good girl” lands warm for one person and humiliating for another, and that difference you don’t guess.
• Agree what happens when praise is withheld, because with a praise kink silence isn’t a neutral setting but a signal.
• Ask for little and meant, not for a lot. The moment praise becomes automatic, it stops working.
• Practice taking it in. Say nothing back, don’t laugh it off, let it stand for three counts; that’s the actual work.
• Set a limit on comparison with others. Praise that measures you against someone else works, according to Henderlong and Lepper’s research, the wrong way.

More reading on a praise kink

On this site, degradation describes the opposite move, humiliation explains the wider play with shame, and the article on the power of discipline and positions is about the frame within which a reward gets meaning.

Beyond this site, the review by Henderlong and Lepper is the best way into when praise works and when it doesn’t, and the scan study by Izuma and colleagues shows why a good word looks like money in the brain.

Where this fits on this site

If you want to know how this lands for you without building a whole scene around it, that fits inside an ordinary date. The page on the BDSM date sets out what we go over beforehand, including which words may and may not be said.

Sources

• The effects of praise on children’s intrinsic motivation: A review and synthesis. Jennifer Henderlong & Mark R. Lepper, Psychological Bulletin 128(5), 774–795, 2002 (DOI 10.1037/0033-2909.128.5.774; authors, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref, abstract read via Europe PMC because the publisher blocks automated access). Review article summarizing the existing research on praise. Provides that praise can undermine, strengthen, or leave motivation untouched depending on a set of conditions, that praise only works out well as long as it’s experienced as sincere, and that it delivers the most when it strengthens the sense of one’s own ability without excessive comparison to others and without raising unreachable expectations. The research concerns children; the translation to adults is marked on this page as my own inference.
• Processing of Social and Monetary Rewards in the Human Striatum. Keise Izuma, Daisuke N. Saito & Norihiro Sadato, Neuron 58(2), 284–294, 2008 (DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.03.020). Functional MRI study of nineteen participants who received both monetary and social rewards. Provides that acquiring a good reputation strongly activated the brain’s reward regions, the striatum foremost, that those regions overlapped with the regions responding to money, and the conclusion that a common currency for rewards exists.
• Social Rewards Enhance Offline Improvements in Motor Skill. Sho K. Sugawara, Satoshi Tanaka, Shuntaro Okazaki, Katsumi Watanabe & Norihiro Sadato, PLoS ONE 7(11), e48174, 2012 (open access). Experiment with 48 healthy participants who practiced a series of finger movements and were then split into praise for their own performance, praise for someone else’s, or no praise. Provides that only the group with praise for their own performance improved significantly more on the learned series the next day, and the conclusion that praise works not through encouragement but directly on the consolidation of what was learned.
• “That’s Not Just Beautiful. That’s Incredibly Beautiful!”: The Adverse Impact of Inflated Praise on Children With Low Self-Esteem. Eddie Brummelman, Sander Thomaes, Bram Orobio de Castro, Geertjan Overbeek & Brad J. Bushman, Psychological Science 25(3), 728–735, 2014 (DOI 10.1177/0956797613514251). Three studies, two experiments and one field study. Provides that adults tend to give exaggerated praise precisely to those with low self-esteem, and that this exaggerated praise reduces challenge-seeking in that group while doing the opposite in those with high self-esteem. This research concerns children too.

Related terms

• Degradation. The opposite move, with the same requirement that the words are agreed beforehand.
• Humiliation. The wider play with shame that a praise kink mirrors, with the word research and the legal limit alongside it.
• Discipline. The frame of rules and consequences, within which praise can be a reward at all.
• Position training. The part where there’s most often something to do well, and so most often something to confirm.
• D/s. The dynamic in which the other’s judgment carries weight.
• Aftercare. Where a meant word afterward most often falls.
• Boundary. Where you set down which words may and may not be said.
• Negotiation. The conversation in which that word-list is made.
• Brat. The role that provokes the opposite, and where praise as a reward works badly.
• Verbal humiliation. The same axis with words, but the move downward.
• Worship fantasy. The same effect, but with hands and time instead of words.