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The Relationship between Abortion Liberalization and Sexual Behavior: International Evidence
Jonathan Klick, Sven Neelsen & Thomas Stratmann
American Law and Economics Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Economic theory predicts that abortion laws affect sexual behavior since they change the marginal cost of having risky sex. We estimate the impact of abortion laws on sexual behavior by reported gonorrhea incidence. Our data panel includes 41 countries for which consistent gonorrhea data are available for 1980-2000. Compared with laws permitting abortion only to save the pregnant woman's life or her physical health, the switch to more liberal abortion laws is associated with large increases in reported gonorrhea incidence. Our results help explain why birth rates do not decline at the same rate abortions increase when laws are liberalized.
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Marcel Zentner & Klaudia Mitura
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
An influential explanation for gender differences in mating strategies is that the sex-specific reproductive constraints faced by human ancestors shaped these differences. Other theorists have emphasized the role of societal factors, hypothesizing, for example, that gender differences in mate preferences should wane in gender-equal societies. However, findings have been ambiguous. Using recent data and a novel measure of gender equality, we revisited the role of gender parity in gender differentiation for mate preferences. In the first study, 3,177 participants from 10 nations with a gradually decreasing Global Gender Gap Index (GGI) provided online ratings of the desirability of mate attributes with reportedly evolutionary origins. In the second study, GGI scores were related to gender differences in mate preferences previously reported for 8,953 participants from 31 nations (Buss, 1989). Both studies show that gender differences in mate preferences with presumed evolutionary roots decline proportionally to increases in nations' gender parity.
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Cues to fertility: Perceived attractiveness and facial shape predict reproductive success
Lena Pflüger et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Attractive facial features in women are assumed to signal fertility, but whether facial attractiveness predicts reproductive success in women is still a matter of debate. We investigated the association between facial attractiveness at young adulthood and reproductive life history - number of children and pregnancies - in women of a rural community. For the analysis of reproductive success, we divided the sample into women who used contraceptives and women who did not. Introducing two-dimensional geometric morphometric methodology, we analysed which specific characteristics in facial shape drive the assessment of attractiveness and covary with lifetime reproductive success. A set of 93 (semi)landmarks was digitized as two-dimensional coordinates in postmenopausal faces. We calculated the degree of fluctuating asymmetry and regressed facial shape on facial attractiveness at youth and reproductive success. Among women who never used hormonal contraceptives, we found attractive women to have more biological offspring than less attractive women. These findings are not affected by sociodemographic variables. Postmenopausal faces corresponding to high reproductive success show more feminine features - facial characteristics previously assumed to be honest cues to fertility. Our findings support the notion that facial attractiveness at the age of mate choice predicts reproductive success and that facial attractiveness is based on facial characteristics, which seem to remain stable until postmenopausal age.
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Jane Mendle et al.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Adolescent dating and sexual activity are consistently associated with risk for depression, yet the pathways underlying this association remain uncertain. Using data on 1,551 sibling pairs (ages 13-18) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the current study utilized a sibling comparison design to assess whether adolescent dating, sexual intercourse with a romantic partner, and sexual intercourse with a nonromantic partner were associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms independent of familial factors. Results indicated that adolescent dating, in and of itself, was not associated with depressive symptoms. The association between depressive symptoms and sexual activity with a romantic partner was fully accounted for by between-family genetic and shared environmental confounds. In contrast, sexual activity with a nonromantic partner was significantly associated with both mean levels of depressive symptoms and clinically severe depression, even within sibling dyads. This relationship was greater for younger adolescents (<15 years). These results are consistent with a growing body of research demonstrating that relationship contexts may be critical moderators of the psychosocial aspects of adolescent sexual experiences.
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Sophia Hussen et al.
Culture, Health & Sexuality, July 2012, Pages 863-877
Abstract:
Black men in the USA experience disproportionately high rates of HIV infection, particularly in the Southeastern part of the country. We conducted 90 qualitative in-depth interviews with Black men living in the state of Georgia and analysed the transcripts using Sexual Script Theory to: (1) characterise the sources and content of sexual scripts that Black men were exposed to during their childhood and adolescence and (2) describe the potential influence of formative scripts on adult HIV sexual risk behaviour. Our analyses highlighted salient sources of cultural scenarios (parents, peers, pornography, sexual education and television), interpersonal scripts (early sex- play, older female partners, experiences of child abuse) and intrapsychic scripts that participants described. Stratification of participant responses based on sexual-risk behaviour revealed that lower- and higher-risk men described exposure to similar scripts during their formative years; however, lower-risk men reported an ability to cognitively process and challenge the validity of risk-promoting scripts that they encountered. Implications for future research are discussed.
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Jochen Gebauer, Mark Leary & Wiebke Neberich
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
People differ regarding their "Big Three" mate preferences of attractiveness, status, and interpersonal warmth. We explain these differences by linking them to the "Big Two" personality dimensions of agency/competence and communion/warmth. The similarity-attracts hypothesis predicts that people high in agency prefer attractiveness and status in mates, whereas those high in communion prefer warmth. However, these effects may be moderated by agentics' tendency to contrast from ambient culture, and communals' tendency to assimilate to ambient culture. Attending to such agentic-cultural-contrast and communal-cultural-assimilation crucially qualifies the similarity-attracts hypothesis. Data from 187,957 online-daters across 11 countries supported this model for each of the Big Three. For example, agentics - more so than communals - preferred attractiveness, but this similarity-attracts effect virtually vanished in attractiveness-valuing countries. This research may reconcile inconsistencies in the literature while utilizing nonhypothetical and consequential mate preference reports that, for the first time, were directly linked to mate choice.
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Romantic motives and risk-taking: An evolutionary approach
Tobias Greitemeyer, Andreas Kastenmüller & Peter Fischer
Journal of Risk Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Risk-taking behavior is puzzling insofar as it may involve considerable losses (such as increased mortality rates). The present research advances an evolutionary account of risk-taking behavior in that one of its main functions is to get access to potential mating partners. Inasmuch as reproductive competition among men is more pronounced than among women, men in particular are expected to take risks in order to gain sexual access to women. In fact, four studies revealed that activating a mating goal was associated with men's propensity to risk-taking. Across a wide range of different risk-taking domains, a romantic motive increased men's reported willingness to take risks. In contrast, women's risk-taking was not affected by activating a mating motive. These findings suggest that risk-taking behavior has (in part) been evolved to enhance an individual's ability to attract a mate.
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Jeanne Lafortune
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper explores how a rise in a gender's scarcity may impact educational investments using exogenous variation in the marriage market of second generation Americans in early 20th century. Theoretically, one may expect this to occur through two potential channels: a change in matching possibilities or in post-match bargaining. Empirically, I find that worse marriage market conditions spurs higher pre-marital investments: the effect for males is significant (0.2 years of education for one standard deviation in the sex ratio) while for females, it is only observed in highly endogamous groups. When faced with an exogenously larger number of males per females, males' marriages appear to be less stable and more likely to involve natives and more educated spouses while women are less likely to work and, for those in high endogamous groups, marry more immigrants.
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Cash, Cars, and Condoms: Economic Factors in Disadvantaged Adolescent Women's Condom Use
Janet Rosenbaum et al.
Journal of Adolescent Health, September 2012, Pages 233-241
Purpose: Evaluate whether adolescent women who received economic benefits from their boyfriends were more likely never to use condoms.
Methods: Data are obtained from a longitudinal HIV prevention intervention study with 715 African American adolescent women in urban Atlanta surveyed at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months. The primary outcome was never using condoms in the past 14 and 60 days at 6 and 12 months. The primary predictor was having a boyfriend as primary spending money source at baseline. Analysis minimized confounding using propensity weighting to balance respondents on 81 variables.
Results: A boyfriend was the primary spending money source for 24% of respondents, who did not differ in neighborhood or family context but had lower education, more abuse history, riskier sex, and more sexually transmitted infections. After propensity score weighting, no statistically significant differences for 81 evaluated covariates remained, including age distributions. Women whose boyfriend was their primary spending money source were 50% more likely never to use condoms at 6 and 12 months and less likely to respond to the intervention at 12 months. Women whose boyfriend had been their primary spending money source but found another spending money source were more likely to start using condoms than women who continued. Women whose boyfriends owned cars were more likely never to use condoms.
Conclusions: Receiving spending money from a boyfriend is common among adolescent women in populations targeted by pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection prevention interventions, and may undermine interventions' effectiveness. Clinicians and reproductive health interventions need to address females' economic circumstances.
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Corinne Rocca & Cynthia Harper
Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, September 2012, Pages 150-158
Context: Sustained efforts have not attenuated racial and ethnic disparities in unintended pregnancy and effective contraceptive use in the United States. The roles of attitudes toward contraception, pregnancy and fertility remain relatively unexplored.
Methods: Knowledge of contraceptive methods and attitudes about contraception, pregnancy, childbearing and fertility were assessed among 602 unmarried women aged 18-29 at risk for unintended pregnancy who participated in the 2009 National Survey of Reproductive and Contraceptive Knowledge. The contribution of attitudes to racial and ethnic disparities in effective method use was assessed via mediation analysis, using a series of regression models.
Results: Blacks and Latinas were more likely than whites to believe that the government encourages contraceptive use to limit minority populations (odds ratio, 2.5 for each). Compared with white women, Latinas held more favorable attitudes toward pregnancy (2.5) and childbearing (coefficient, 0.3) and were more fatalistic about the timing of pregnancy (odds ratio, 2.3); blacks were more fatalistic about life in general (2.0). Only one attitude, skepticism that the government ensures contraceptive safety, was associated with contraceptive use (0.7), but this belief did not differ by race or ethnicity. Although blacks and Latinas used less effective methods than whites (0.3 and 0.4, respectively), attitudes did not explain disparities. Lower contraceptive knowledge partially explained Latinas' use of less effective methods.
Conclusions: Providing basic information about effective methods might help to decrease ethnic disparities in use. Research should examine other variables that might account for these disparities, including health system characteristics and provider behavior.
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A Theater-Based Approach to Primary Prevention of Sexual Behavior for Early Adolescents
Lisa Lieberman et al.
Journal of Early Adolescence, October 2012, Pages 730-753
Abstract:
Early adolescence is a crucial period for preventing teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. This study evaluated STAR LO, a theater-based intervention designed to affect antecedents of sexual activity among urban early adolescents (N = 1,143). Public elementary/middle schools received the intervention or served as a wait-listed comparison group in a quasi-experimental study. Students completed pretest and posttest questionnaires. Multivariate regression models were used to examine treatment effects. Comparison students showed significantly greater increases in sexual intentions and decreases in pro-abstinence attitudes and intended age of first sex than treatment group adolescents. Comparison girls showed significantly greater increases in desire to be a teen parent than STAR LO girls. Treatment group adolescents exhibited greater increases in sexual knowledge than comparison group adolescents, with stronger effects for boys than girls. The results suggest that this theater-based prevention program can help early adolescents develop knowledge, attitudes, and intentions that may prevent future sexual risk behavior.
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Costs and Effectiveness of Neonatal Male Circumcision
Seema Kacker et al.
Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, forthcoming
Objective: To evaluate the expected change in the prevalence of male circumcision (MC)-reduced infections and resulting health care costs associated with continued decreases in MC rates. During the past 20 years, MC rates have declined from 79% to 55%, alongside reduced insurance coverage.
Design: We used Markov-based Monte Carlo simulations to track men and women throughout their lifetimes as they experienced MC procedure-related events and MC-reduced infections and accumulated associated costs. One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were used to evaluate the impact of uncertainty.
Setting: United States.
Participants: Birth cohort of men and women.
Intervention: Decreased MC rates (10% reflects the MC rate in Europe, where insurance coverage is limited).
Outcomes Measured: Lifetime direct medical cost (2011 US$) and prevalence of MC-reduced infections.
Results: Reducing the MC rate to 10% will increase lifetime health care costs by $407 per male and $43 per female. Net expenditure per annual birth cohort (including procedure and complication costs) is expected to increase by $505 million, reflecting an increase of $313 per forgone MC. Over 10 annual cohorts, net present value of additional costs would exceed $4.4 billion. Lifetime prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus infection among males is expected to increase by 12.2% (4843 cases), high- and low-risk human papillomavirus by 29.1% (57 124 cases), herpes simplex virus type 2 by 19.8% (124 767 cases), and infant urinary tract infections by 211.8% (26 876 cases). Among females, lifetime prevalence of bacterial vaginosis is expected to increase by 51.2% (538 865 cases), trichomoniasis by 51.2% (64 585 cases), high-risk human papillomavirus by 18.3% (33 148 cases), and low-risk human papillomavirus by 12.9% (25 837 cases). Increased prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus infection among males represents 78.9% of increased expenses.
Conclusion: Continued decreases in MC rates are associated with increased infection prevalence, thereby increasing medical expenditures for men and women.
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Human Homogamy in Facial Characteristics: Does a Sexual-Imprinting-Like Mechanism Play a Role?
Saori Nojo, Satoshi Tamura & Yasuo Ihara
Human Nature, September 2012, Pages 323-340
Abstract:
Human homogamy may be caused in part by individuals' preference for phenotypic similarities. Two types of preference can result in homogamy: individuals may prefer someone who is similar to themselves (self-referent phenotype matching) or to their parents (a sexual-imprinting-like mechanism). In order to examine these possibilities, we compare faces of couples and their family members in two ways. First, "perceived" similarity between a pair of faces is quantified as similarity ratings given to the pair. Second, "physical" similarity between two groups of faces is evaluated on the basis of correlations in principal component scores generated from facial measurements. Our results demonstrate a tendency to homogamy in facial characteristics and suggest that the tendency is due primarily to self-referent phenotype matching. Nevertheless, the presence of a sexual-imprinting-like effect is also partially indicated: whether individuals are involved in facial homogamy may be affected by their relationship with their parents during childhood.
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Devalued, deskilled and diversified: Explaining the proliferation of the strip industry in the UK
Teela Sanders & Kate Hardy
British Journal of Sociology, September 2012, Pages 513-532
Abstract:
This paper looks beyond the debates that focus on the objectification of the female body to examine the question as to why strip clubs have proliferated and found a permanent place in the night-time economy in the UK. Using empirical qualitative and quantitative data from the largest study into the strip industry in the UK to date, we challenge the common assumption that ‘demand' is responsible for the rise in erotic dance. Instead, we argue that the proliferation of strip clubs is largely due to the internal economic structures of the industry which have developed partly in response to the financial crisis beginning in 2008. First, we argue that clubs profit from individual dancers through an exploitative system of fees and fines, rendering a strip club business a low cost investment with high returns and little risk to club owners. Second, we note that the last decade has seen diversification of the industry accompanied by deskilling and devaluing of dancing and dancers' labour. Third, we demonstrate that despite the negative effects of these changes on workers, there has been an expansion of the industry as the ability to make profit, even during a financial crisis was ensured through the transferral of risk to workers. Overall, we suggest that far from proliferating as a response to demand, the industry has maintained its market presence due to its ability to establish highly financially exploitation employment relationships with dancers at a time of economic fragility.
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Donald Sacco et al.
Evolutionary Psychology, August 2012, Pages 573-587
Abstract:
Because cost asymmetries in sexual reproduction have historically enabled women to exchange sexual access for other resources, including social resources, we tested the possibility that social exclusion would lead women to display an elevated preference for short-term mating strategies in the service of reaffiliation. In Study 1, women were given false feedback to manipulate social inclusion or exclusion prior to indicating their endorsement of short and long-term mating behaviors. Socially excluded women indicated greater interest in short-term mating and reduced interest in long-term mating. In Study 2, women wrote about a social inclusion, social exclusion, or control experience and then indicated their preference for different male body types. Women in the social exclusion condition preferred more muscular male partners - a pattern of preference typical of short-term mating - than women in the other conditions. Collectively, these results are consistent with a social exchange theory of women's sexual behavior following social exclusion.
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Soledad de Lemus, Russell Spears & Miguel Moya
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Extending evidence that nonverbal complementary behavior can occur in dyads to the intergroup domain, the authors predicted that women assume a relatively submissive (narrow) posture when confronted with a male instructor adopting a dominant (broad) posture, but only when he smiles (affiliation motive) and when gender is salient. Male affiliation (smiling vs. not smiling) and gender salience were manipulated in Study 1 by focusing on sex differences (vs. individual differences) in presentation style, strengthened by the instructor making a sexist remark. As predicted, women adopted a more submissive posture when gender was salient and the male instructor smiled. In Study 2, male posture was manipulated (dominant vs. submissive) to examine postural complementarity in women. Study 3 replicated the postural effect, especially when the sexist remark is present. This effect was mediated by the instructor's perceived warmth. Implications for gender, benevolent sexism, and intergroup power relations are discussed.
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Perceived threat of infectious disease and its implications for sexual attitudes
Damian Murray, Daniel Jones & Mark Schaller
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
A study (n = 411) investigated the relationship between chronic individual differences in germ aversion and sociosexual attitudes (short-term mating orientation, long-term mating orientation, and anticipated future sexual promiscuity), and also tested whether the magnitudes of these relations differ depending on the temporary perceptual salience of disease threat. Results revealed person-by-situation interactions. When the threat of disease was temporarily salient, germ aversion correlated negatively with short-term mating orientation and with future sexual promiscuity, and correlated positively with long-term mating orientation; these effects were either weaker or nonexistent under control conditions. These effects emerged most clearly among women.
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Romantic red revisited: Red enhances men's attraction to young, but not menopausal women
Sascha Schwarz & Marie Singer
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies have shown that the color red enhances men's sexual attraction to women. In this study, a sample of 60 young (M = 24.67 years) and 60 old male participants (M = 53.47 years) were presented either a young female target (perceived age: M = 23.67 years), or an old female target (perceived age: M = 48.18 years), either on a red or white background. The results show that only the young target was perceived as more sexually attractive against the red compared to the white background. Background color had no effect on the sexual attractiveness of the older target. Further implications of these findings are discussed.
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Redness enhances perceived aggression, dominance and attractiveness in men's faces
Ian Stephen et al.
Evolutionary Psychology, August 2012, Pages 562-572
Abstract:
In a range of non-human primate, bird and fish species, the intensity of red coloration in males is associated with social dominance, testosterone levels and mate selection. In humans too, skin redness is associated with health, but it is not known whether - as in non-human species - it is also associated with dominance and links to attractiveness have not been thoroughly investigated. Here we allow female participants to manipulate the CIELab a* value (red-green axis) of skin to maximize the perceived aggression, dominance and attractiveness of photographs of men's faces, and make two findings. First, participants increased a* (increasing redness) to enhance each attribute, suggesting that facial redness is perceived as conveying similar information about a male's qualities in humans as it does in non-human species. Second, there were significant differences between trial types: the highest levels of red were associated with aggression, an intermediate level with dominance, and the least with attractiveness. These differences may reflect a trade-off between the benefits of selecting a healthy, dominant partner and the negative consequences of aggression.
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The Sweet Color of an Implicit Request: Women's Hair Color and Spontaneous Helping Behavior
Nicolas Guéguen
Social Behavior and Personality, August 2012, Pages 1099-1102
Abstract:
Results of previous researchers' studies on the effect of blond hair color on helping behavior have been inconsistent. In addition, spontaneous helping behavior has not been examined. In this study, female confederates wearing blond, brown, or dark wigs accidentally dropped a glove while walking in pedestrian streets and then walked away, apparently not aware of their loss. It was found that male and not female pedestrians helped the confederates wearing blond wigs more often. An explanation for these results is that a greater degree of youth and good health is associated with women who have blond hair.
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Feelings of Disgust and Disgust-Induced Avoidance Weaken following Induced Sexual Arousal in Women
Charmaine Borg & Peter de Jong
PLoS ONE, September 2012
Background: Sex and disgust are basic, evolutionary relevant functions that are often construed as paradoxical. In general the stimuli involved in sexual encounters are, at least out of context strongly perceived to hold high disgust qualities. Saliva, sweat, semen and body odours are among the strongest disgust elicitors. This results in the intriguing question of how people succeed in having pleasurable sex at all. One possible explanation could be that sexual engagement temporarily reduces the disgust eliciting properties of particular stimuli or that sexual engagement might weaken the hesitation to actually approach these stimuli.
Methodology: Participants were healthy women (n = 90) randomly allocated to one of three groups: the sexual arousal, the non-sexual positive arousal, or the neutral control group. Film clips were used to elicit the relevant mood state. Participants engaged in 16 behavioural tasks, involving sex related (e.g., lubricate the vibrator) and non-sex related (e.g., take a sip of juice with a large insect in the cup) stimuli, to measure the impact of sexual arousal on feelings of disgust and actual avoidance behaviour.
Principal Findings: The sexual arousal group rated the sex related stimuli as less disgusting compared to the other groups. A similar tendency was evident for the non-sex disgusting stimuli. For both the sex and non-sex related behavioural tasks the sexual arousal group showed less avoidance behaviour (i.e., they conducted the highest percentage of tasks compared to the other groups).
Significance: This study has investigated how sexual arousal interplays with disgust and disgust eliciting properties in women, and has demonstrated that this relationship goes beyond subjective report by affecting the actual approach to disgusting stimuli. Hence, this could explain how we still manage to engage in pleasurable sexual activity. Moreover, these findings suggest that low sexual arousal might be a key feature in the maintenance of particular sexual dysfunctions.
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The sexual overperception bias is associated with sociosexuality
Emma Howell, Peter Etchells & Ian Penton-Voak
Personality and Individual Differences, December 2012, Pages 1012-1016
Abstract:
As reproductive rates have the potential to be higher in men than women, it is more costly (from an evolutionary perspective) for men to miss a mating opportunity than women. This asymmetry in costs has been proposed to result in men being more sensitive to cues to sexual opportunity than women, and thus men are more likely than women to misperceive sexual interest from opposite sex others. To investigate this sexual misperception bias, smiling male and female faces were presented to participants who were asked to judge whether the face appeared friendly or flirtatious. Participants also completed a sociosexual orientation questionnaire in order to assess their current attitudes towards sexual relationships. In general, we found that males perceive female faces as flirtatious significantly more often than females. However, our results also suggested that people with high scores on the sociosexuality inventory (who rated themselves as more likely to engage in short-term, casual relationships), regardless of sex, had a tendency to perceive the faces of potential mates as more flirtatious, and that this variable explained more variance than sex alone. Our findings demonstrate that sociosexuality may mediate biases in perceiving the sexual intent of others.
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Top-down influences on visual attention during listening are modulated by observer sex
John Shen & Laurent Itti
Vision Research, 15 July 2012, Pages 62-76
Abstract:
In conversation, women have a small advantage in decoding non-verbal communication compared to men. In light of these findings, we sought to determine whether sex differences also existed in visual attention during a related listening task, and if so, if the differences existed among attention to high-level aspects of the scene or to conspicuous visual features. Using eye-tracking and computational techniques, we present direct evidence that men and women orient attention differently during conversational listening. We tracked the eyes of 15 men and 19 women who watched and listened to 84 clips featuring 12 different speakers in various outdoor settings. At the fixation following each saccadic eye movement, we analyzed the type of object that was fixated. Men gazed more often at the mouth and women at the eyes of the speaker. Women more often exhibited "distracted" saccades directed away from the speaker and towards a background scene element. Examining the multi-scale center-surround variation in low-level visual features (static: color, intensity, orientation, and dynamic: motion energy), we found that men consistently selected regions which expressed more variation in dynamic features, which can be attributed to a male preference for motion and a female preference for areas that may contain nonverbal information about the speaker. In sum, significant differences were observed, which we speculate arise from different integration strategies of visual cues in selecting the final target of attention. Our findings have implications for studies of sex in nonverbal communication, as well as for more predictive models of visual attention.
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HaengRyang Huh
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Testosterone has been linked to a sexual preference for bodies rather than faces. Low digit ratio (2D:4D) and high facial width-to-height ratio (WHR) are associated with high prenatal testosterone. We tested whether low 2D:4D and high facial WHR were correlated with a preference for bodies over faces. Our sample consisted of 109 college students (64 males). A two-way analysis of variance demonstrated a significant main effect of digit ratio on the priority placed on paying attention to faces or bodies such that low 2D:4D was linked to a preference for bodies, but the effect of sex was not significant. There were no significant interaction effects. Another two-way analysis of variance revealed no significant effects for facial WHR and attentional priority but significant associations between sex and attentional priority. There were no significant interaction effects. Our findings indicate that individuals with low digit ratios tended to pay more attention to bodies than to faces compared with individuals with higher digit ratios, independently of sex. We also found that males tended to pay more attention to bodies than to faces compared with females, independently of facial WHR.
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Pornography Consumption, Cocaine Use, and Casual Sex Among U.S. Adults
Paul Wright
Psychological Reports, August 2012, Pages 305-310
Abstract:
This study utilized nationally representative longitudinal survey data from the 2006-2008 General Social Survey (GSS) to explore the interplay between U.S. adults' self-reported past pornography consumption, past cocaine use, and recent participation in casual sex. Participants in the longitudinal component of the 2006-2008 GSS were 867 women and 669 men (N = 1,536) ranging in age from 18 to at least 89 years (M = 45.46; SD = 16.91). Hierarchical logistic regression analysis was employed to analyze the data. After controlling for past casual sex and demographic covariates, the interaction of past pornography consumption and past cocaine use on recent casual sex was significant. Past cocaine users were more likely than non-cocaine users to have had recent casual sex (OR = 4.56), but past pornography consumption was unrelated to recent casual sex for past cocaine users (OR = 0.20). Conversely, past pornography consumption was associated with an increase in the odds of recent casual sex for non-cocaine users (OR = 2.74).