What Is a Kiss?

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What comes to mind when you think about kissing?

"I think of butterflies and someone I love," student Jenni Pelletier said.
"It can be a friendly thing, it can be a level of commitment sometimes."
"Love, just really feeling loved and cared about," Linda Collins said.

On Valentines day we decided to get to the bottom of a question, you may have never thought about, what is the history behind a kiss? For that we turned to to a man who's been studying the history of kissing for years.

"it was a question asked in class whether or not kissing was universal and I didn't know so I went to the library to find out and I couldn't find it so I spent 35 years looking for it," Texas A&M Professor Vaughn Bryant said.

In those years of research, Professor Vaughn Bryant found the act of kissing is not innate He believes it's cultural, dating back to 1500 BC in India. He says the kiss started by people simply smelling each other.

"From India it was Alexander the Great that learned about kissing when he was invading India although Alexander died the Greeks that were with him brought kissing back to Europe and that's how it got spread all the way back to Europe," Bryant said.

And it's definitely still going on, but it's not always good.

"I think the first one is awkward, just because there is so much anticipation and you don't know what to do," Mason King said.

"My first kiss was horrible but that's because it was my first kiss and everyone has jitters it wasn't a good experience," Jenni Pelletier said.

Bryant agrees, he says there are bad kissers.

"It's just like there's good and bad people there are some people who don't know what they're doing, there are some people who are shy and there are other people who are very romantic and great at it, " Bryant said. "I love to tell people you have to go out and test a lot of these to find out who's good and who's not. Maybe that's what you should do this Valentines Day, go out and do some research."