Love, American Style
Tim Phillips, Eamonn Ferguson & Fruhling Rijsdijk
British Journal of Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Altruistic behaviour raises major questions for psychology and biology. One hypothesis proposes that human altruistic behaviour evolved as a result of sexual selection. Mechanisms that seek to explain how sexual selection works suggest genetic influence acting on both the mate preference for the trait and the preferred trait itself. We used a twin study to estimate whether genetic effects influenced responses to psychometric scales measuring mate preference towards altruistic traits (MPAT) and the preferred trait (i.e., ‘altruistic personality'). As predicted, we found significant genetic effects influencing variation in both. We also predicted that individuals expressing stronger MPAT and ‘altruistic personality' would have mated at a greater frequency in ancestral populations. We found evidence for this in that 67% of the covariance in the phenotypic correlation between the two scales was associated with significant genetic effects. Both sets of findings are thus consistent with the hypothesized link between sexual selection and human altruism towards non-kin. We discuss how this study contributes to our understanding of altruistic behaviour and how further work might extend this understanding.
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Meaning as Magnetic Force: Evidence That Meaning in Life Promotes Interpersonal Appeal
Tyler Stillman, Nathaniel Lambert, Frank Fincham & Roy Baumeister
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The authors report on data indicating that having a strong sense of meaning in life makes people more appealing social interactants. In Study 1, participants were videotaped while conversing with a friend, and the interactions were subsequently rated by independent evaluators. Participants who had reported a strong sense of meaning in life were rated as desirable friends. In Study 2, participants made 10-s videotaped introductions of themselves that were subsequently evaluated by independent raters. Those who reported a strong sense of meaning in life were rated as more likeable, better potential friends, and more desirable conversation partners. The effect of meaning in life was beyond that of several other variables, including self-esteem, happiness, extraversion, and agreeableness. Study 2 also found an interaction between physical attractiveness and meaning in life, with more meaning in life contributing to greater interpersonal appeal for those of low and average physical attractiveness.
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Economic Factors and Relationship Quality Among Young Couples: Comparing Cohabitation and Marriage
Jessica Halliday Hardie & Amy Lucas
Journal of Marriage and Family, October 2010, Pages 1141-1154
Abstract:
Are economic resources related to relationship quality among young couples, and to what extent does this vary by relationship type? To answer these questions, we estimated regression models predicting respondent reports of conflict and affection in cohabiting and married partner relationships using the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, 1997 (NLSY97, N = 2,841) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health, N = 1,702). We found that economic factors are an important predictor of conflict for both married and cohabiting couples. Affection was particularly responsive to human capital rather than short-term economic indicators. Economic hardship was associated with more conflict among married and cohabiting couples.
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Mary Louise Roberts
American Historical Review, October 2010, Pages 1002-1030
"In September 1944, while leading the 29th Infantry Division across Brittany to liberate France, the American general Charles Gerhardt decided that his boys needed sex. So he instructed his chief of staff to start a house of prostitution. The task went to the St. Renan office of Civil Affairs, the military section assigned to address the needs of the liberated civilian population. Asa Gardiner, the local civil affairs officer, called upon his contacts in the French police force, who produced a pimp named Morot. The pimp, in turn, recommended four prostitutes currently refugeed nearby. Gardiner and Morot rode an army jeep to interview them, and on the way back Gardiner asked Morot to manage the business. For the actual brothel, they billeted a house outside St. Renan that had recently been vacated by the Germans. A few days later, as Morot moved in with the prostitutes, Gerhardt approved the sign for the establishment, which read 'Blue and Gray Corral, Riding Lessons 100 Francs.' When the Corral opened for business on September 10, twenty-one GIs, transported by jeep from the bivouac area, waited patiently in line. After five hours of business, the brothel was shut down by the assistant provost marshal on the recommendation of the division chaplain...At every turn, military policy on sex vacillated between official regulation and unofficial disregard. Brothels were 'off limits' but segregated by race; sex was condemned, but condoms were made available; prostitution was banned but covertly organized; brothels were publicly denied but privately supported. Gerhardt's fundamental motivation was that his men wanted sex and were not going to wait to get it, even if it meant having sex with each other. Furthermore, he and his officers seemed to feel that such behavior was only to be expected 'in a place like France.' Trying to control the sexual behavior of a soldier who was 'operating in a place like France' was tantamount to making him eat raw carrots in a steakhouse."
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Sexual Permissiveness: A Mozambique-France Comparison
Germano Vera Cruz, Geneviève Vinsonneau, Armelle Le Gall, Sheila Rivière & Etienne Mullet
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, October 2010, Pages 2488-2499
Abstract:
The present study compared sexual permissiveness between African adults and European adults. The 301 participants (154 males, 147 females) living in the area of Maputo, Mozambique, and the 309 participants (157 males, 152 females) living in the area of Toulouse, France, were presented with the Portuguese and French versions of 7 permissiveness items taken from the Sexual Attitudes Scale devised by Hendrick & Hendrick (1987). Permissiveness scores were shown to be lower among Mozambican participants than among French participants. A clear effect of religious involvement on permissiveness was also demonstrated, and this effect was of the same magnitude in both samples.
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Personal Characteristics, Sexual Behaviors, and Male Sex Work: A Quantitative Approach
Trevon Logan
American Sociological Review, October 2010, Pages 679-704
Abstract:
Male sex workers serve multiple groups (i.e., gay-identified men, heterosexually-identified men, and their own sexual partners), making them a unique source to test theories of gender, masculinity, and sexuality. To date, most scholarship on this topic has been qualitative. I assembled a dataset from the largest online male sex worker website to conduct the first quantitative analysis of male escorts in the United States. I find the geographic distribution of male sex workers is more strongly correlated with the general population than with the gay male population. In addition, I estimate the value of sexual behaviors and personal characteristics in this market to test sociological theories of gender and masculinity. Consistent with hegemonic masculinity, I find that male escorts who advertise masculine behavior charge higher prices for their services, whereas escorts who advertise less masculine behavior charge significantly less, a differential on the order of 17 percent. Results show that race and sexual behavior interactions exert a strong influence on prices charged by male sex workers, confirming aspects of intersectionality theory.
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Anthropometry of Love Height and Gender Asymmetries in Interethnic Marriages
Michèle Belot & Jan Fidrmuc
Economics & Human Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We argue that differences in height distributions, combined with a simple preference for the husband to be taller than the wife, can help explain these ethnic-specific gender asymmetries. Blacks are taller than Asians, and we argue that this significantly affects their marriage prospects with whites. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data from the Millennium Cohort Study. Specifically, we find that ethnic differences in propensity to intermarry with Whites shrink when we control for the proportion of suitable partners with respect to height.
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Aletha Akers, Melvin Muhammad & Giselle Corbie-Smith
Social Science & Medicine, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explores community members' perspectives regarding the relationship between neighborhood characteristics and adolescent sexual behaviors in two rural, African American communities. The data were collected as part of a community needs assessment to inform the development of HIV prevention interventions in two contiguous counties in northeastern North Carolina, USA. We conducted eleven focus groups with three population groups: adolescents and young adults aged 16-24 (N=38), adults over age 25 (N=42), and formerly incarcerated individuals (N=13). All focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed and analyzed using a grounded theory approach to content analysis and a constant comparison method. Six major themes emerged from the discussions linking neighborhood context and adolescents sexual behavior: the overwhelming absence of recreational options for community members; lack of diverse leisure-time activities for adolescents; lack of recreational options for adolescents who are dating; adolescent access to inappropriate leisure time activities that promote multiple risk behaviors; limited safe environments for socializing; and cost-barriers to recreational activities for adolescents. In addition, lack of adequate parental supervision of adolescents' time alone and with friends of the opposite sex, as well as ineffective community monitoring of adolescent social activities, were thought to create situations that promoted sexual and other risk behaviors. These findings allowed us to develop a conceptual model linking neighborhood structural and social organization factors to adolescent sexual behaviors and provided insights for developed interventions tailored to the local socioeconomic realities.
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David Puts, Julia Barndt, Lisa Welling, Khytam Dawood & Robert Burriss
Personality and Individual Differences, January 2011, Pages 111-115
Abstract:
Cognitive mechanisms for recognizing high quality sexual rivals should facilitate the economical allocation of mating effort. Women compete to attract male investment, and previous studies have shown that feminine voices are attractive to men. Here, we manipulated two sexually dimorphic acoustic parameters in women's voices, fundamental frequency and formant dispersion, by the same perceptual amounts and explored the effects on attractiveness to heterosexual men in short- and long-term mating contexts. Femininity in both acoustic parameters was more attractive to men, especially in short-term mating contexts, and formant dispersion had a larger effect than did fundamental frequency. We then explored the effects of these manipulations on women's perceptions of other women's flirtatiousness and attractiveness to men. Feminine voices were perceived as more flirtatious and more attractive to men, and women were most sensitive to formant dispersion, the acoustic parameter that had the stronger effect on men's preferences. These results support the interpretation that women use vocal femininity to track the threat potential of competitors.
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The Economics of Female Genital Cutting
Tatyana Chesnokova & Rhema Vaithianathan
B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2010
Abstract:
The practice of female genital cutting (FGC) has a long history in Africa and it is thought that over 130 million females alive today have undergone the practice. In this paper, we model FGC as a pre-marital investment. We show how the rat-race nature of the marriage market may result in inefficiently high equilibrium levels of FGC. We argue that in this case, regulation results in a (potential) Pareto improvement and that even weak regulation can be effective in eradicating FGC.
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Receptivity to sexual invitations from strangers of the opposite gender
Gert Martin Hald & Henrik Høgh-Olesen
Evolution and Human Behavior, November 2010, Pages 453-458
Abstract:
This study investigated the primary conclusion from Clark and Hatfield's often cited field experiment "Consent to Sex with a Stranger" that men agree to sexual invitations from moderately attractive strangers of the opposite gender more readily than women do. In addition, this study investigated whether rates of consent are influenced by a subject's age, relationship status, rating of confederate attractiveness, and type of sexual invitation. A number of moderately attractive confederates of the opposite gender individually approached 173 men and 216 women. After a standard introduction, the confederates asked each participant one of the following three questions: "Would you go on a date with me tonight or during the week/weekend?", "Would you come to my place tonight or during the week/weekend?", or "Would you go to bed with me tonight or during the week/weekend?" Significantly more men than women consented to a sexual invitation. Specifically, significantly more men than women consented to the "come to my place" and "go to bed with me" conditions. For female subjects, higher ratings of confederate attractiveness were found to significantly increase the odds of consenting to a sexual invitation, whereas for men, confederate attractiveness was found not to significantly influence consent rates. Finally, relationship status was found to be a significant and strong moderating variable of consent for both men and women. Thus, men and women who are not in a relationship are significantly more likely to agree to a sexual invitation than those who are in a relationship.
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Timothy Smith et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Maintenance of relationship quality requires self-regulation of emotion and social behavior, and women often display greater effort in this regard than do men. Furthermore, such efforts can deplete the limited capacity for self-regulation. In recent models of self-regulation, resting level of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, quantified as high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), is an indicator of self-regulatory capacity, whereas transient increases in HF-HRV reflect self-regulatory effort. To test these hypotheses in marriage, 114 young couples completed measures of marital quality and a positive, neutral, or negative initial marital task, preceded and followed by resting baseline assessments of HF-HRV. Couples then discussed a current marital disagreement. Resting HF-HRV was correlated with marital quality, suggesting that capacity for self-regulation is associated with adaptive functioning in close relationships. For women but not men, the negative initial task produced a decrease in resting HF-HRV. This effect was mediated by the husbands' negative affect response to the task and their ratings of wives as controlling and directive. When the subsequent disagreement discussion followed the negative initial task, women displayed increased HF-HRV during the discussion but a decrease when it followed the neutral or positive task. The valence of the initial task had no effect on men's HF-HRV during disagreement. Negative marital interactions can reduce women's resting HF-HRV, with potentially adverse health consequences. Women's reduced health benefit from marriage might reflect the depleting effects on self-regulatory capacity of their greater efforts to manage relationship quality.
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Hormonal birth control use and relationship jealousy: Evidence for estrogen dosage effects
Kelly Cobey, Thomas Pollet, Craig Roberts & Abraham Buunk
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women who use hormonal contraceptives have been shown to report higher levels of jealousy than women who are regularly cycling. Here, we extend these findings by examining if self reported levels of jealousy vary with the dose of synthetic estrogen and progestin found in combined oral contraceptives in a sample of 275 women. A univariate ANOVA analysis revealed that higher levels of ethinyl estradiol were associated with significantly higher levels of self-reported jealousy. There was, however, no relationship between combined oral contraceptive progestin dose and reported jealousy levels. When controlling for age, relationship status, mood, and combined oral contraceptive progestin dose the results for ethinyl estradiol were maintained. A test for the interaction between the jealousy sub-scale items (reactive, possessive, and anxious jealousy) was however non-significant: ethinyl estradiol dose thus does not affect one type of jealousy more than another but rather affects overall jealousy. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of their evolutionary consequences on mate choice and relationship dynamics.
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Keeping it real: Young adult women's authenticity in relationships and daily condom use
Emily Impett, Juliana Breines & Amy Strachman
Personal Relationships, forthcoming
Abstract:
The role of relationship authenticity in shaping women's daily condom use was investigated. Forty-seven sexually active women in dating relationships completed a measure of relationship authenticity and then reported on their daily condom use and relationship events for 14 consecutive days. Inauthentic women were less likely than more authentic women to use condoms, particularly on days with frequent negative events such as major disagreements with a romantic partner. These critical Person × Situation interactions remained significant after controlling for the use of another form of birth control, sexual frequency, knowledge of a partner's sexual history, and relationship satisfaction. Implications for sexual risk-taking behaviors and future research using daily experience methods to study sexuality in dating relationships are discussed.
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Men's memory for women's sexual-interest and rejection cues
Teresa Treat, Richard Viken, John Kruschke & Richard McFall
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current work characterizes young men's memory for young women's heterosocially relevant affective cues (e.g. sexual interest and rejection) and examines characteristics of both the woman being perceived and the male perceiver as predictors of memory. Undergraduate men (n = 232) completed similarity-ratings and recognition-memory tasks with photos of undergraduate women who varied in attractiveness, provocativeness of clothing and expression of sexual interest. Participants also completed a control memory task and a measure relevant to the risk of exhibiting sexually aggressive behaviour, as well as indicating how many serious relationships they had experienced. Multilevel regression techniques revealed that (a) men's memory for women's sexual interest improved when women were sexually interested at encoding, attractive and dressed provocatively; (b) men who reported more frequent serious relationships showed better memory for women's sexual interest and (c) men at risk of exhibiting sexually aggressive behaviour showed worse memory for women's sexual interest.
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Michael Tagler
Social Psychological and Personality Science, October 2010, Pages 353-360
Abstract:
Many studies have found that traditionally aged college students differ in their relative distress when asked to imagine a partner's sexual versus emotional infidelity. This study examined how real partner infidelity experiences among college students and older adults influence these responses, using both forced choice and continuous scales. Consistent with evolutionary theory, and regardless of previous real infidelity experiences, male college students were more likely to be distressed by hypothetical partner sexual infidelity, whereas female college students were more distressed by emotional infidelity. In contrast, infidelity experience moderated adult responses. As hypothesized, sex differences were found only among adults who had not previously experienced real partner infidelity.
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Sex differences in response to imagining a partner's heterosexual or homosexual affair
Jaime Confer & Mark Cloud
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Based on sexual strategies theory, we predicted that men would be less likely to continue an imagined long-term relationship following a partner's heterosexual affair compared to homosexual affair. For women, it was expected that both affair types would result in a low willingness to continue the relationship, but especially so for homosexual affairs. We further predicted that the interaction would remain independent of the following moderator variables: number of affair partners, number of instances of infidelity, and real infidelity experience. Participants (N = 718) were randomly assigned to read one of eight infidelity scenarios and estimate the likelihood that they would continue the relationship. Results confirmed all three predictions. A separate analysis of relationship outcomes following real infidelity experiences provided additional corroboration. These results support the conclusion that threats to paternity and threats of abandonment differentially motivate men and women to terminate relationships in response to a partner's infidelity.
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Steven Gangestad, Randy Thornhill & Christine Garver-Apgar
Evolution and Human Behavior, November 2010, Pages 412-424
Abstract:
A substantial body of work demonstrates that women's mate preferences change across the ovulatory cycle. When fertile in their cycles, women are especially attracted to masculine features (e.g., faces, voices, bodies), socially dominant behavior, and male scents associated with body symmetry and social dominance. Women may also find intelligent men particularly attractive when fertile, though findings are mixed. Related research shows that, on average, romantically-involved women report stronger sexual attraction to men other than their pair-bond partners, but not partners, when fertile, and especially when their partners lack features fertile women prefer (e.g., symmetry). In the current study, we examined whether women's patterns of sexual interests across the cycle are similarly moderated by partners' facial masculinity, facial attractiveness, and intelligence. Results revealed predicted effects of male partners' facial masculinity but none for partners' intelligence. Facial attractiveness may have effects, but we find no evidence that it does so independently of facial masculinity.
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Amie Gordon & Serena Chen
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research suggests that not all affirmations of self-worth are created equal-affirming intrinsic aspects of the self (i.e., a person's stable, intrinsic qualities) leads to better outcomes for the individual compared to affirming extrinsic aspects (i.e., a person's deeds and accomplishments). Extending this research to the domain of romantic relationships, the current research compared the relational benefits of recalling intrinsic versus extrinsic affirmations from a romantic partner among people high versus low in baseline relationship satisfaction. Across three experiments, as predicted, people low but not high in baseline satisfaction reported higher relationship quality and more pro-relationship responses after recalling a time of intrinsic compared to extrinsic affirmation from a romantic partner. Together, these experiments suggest that affirmations from relationship partners may be important for enhancing relationships, but only if they emphasize intrinsic qualities of the self.
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The first sight of love: Relationship-defining memories and marital satisfaction across adulthood
Nicole Alea & Stephanie Vick
Memory, October 2010, Pages 730-742
Abstract:
The current study begins the exploration of relationship-defining memories (i.e., the first time someone met their spouse) across adulthood. Men and women ranging from 20 to 85 years old (N=267; M age=47.19) completed a measure of marital satisfaction, wrote a relationship-defining memory, and answered questions about the quality of their memory (i.e., vividness, valence, emotional intensity, and rehearsal). Data were collected online. Results indicate that individuals over 70 and those younger than 30 rehearsed relationship-defining memories most often. Women in midlife also reported more vivid memories. The quality of relationship-defining memories also predicted marital satisfaction. Relationship-defining memories that were more vivid, positive, emotionally intense, and rehearsed related to higher marital satisfaction. Age and gender differences were minimal. Results are discussed in the context of the adaptive social function of autobiographical memories, such that these memories might have a role in influencing marital satisfaction across adulthood.