bims-chumac Biomed News
on Context effects on human mate choice
Issue of 2021–09–26
seven papers selected by
Thomas Krichel, Open Library Society
  1. Can Sexual Appeal, Beauty, or Virtue Increase the Opportunity for a Woman to Be Selected as a Spouse? The Mediating Role of Human Uniqueness.
  2. Female-biased sex ratios in urban centers create a "fertility trap" in post-war Finland.
  3. Predicting attractiveness from face parts reveals multiple covarying cues.
  4. Sex Differences in Attitudes Toward Casual Sex: Using STI Contraction Likelihoods to Assess Evolved Mating Strategies.
  5. Overestimation of eye size: People see themselves with bigger eyes in a holistic approach.
  6. Feeling Like a Fetish: Racialized Feelings, Fetishization, and the Contours of Sexual Racism on Gay Dating Apps.
  7. Relationship Satisfaction and Infidelity-Related Behaviors on Social Networks: A Preliminary Online Study of Hispanic Women.
  1. Front Psychol. 2021 ;12 698712
    Can Sexual Appeal, Beauty, or Virtue Increase the Opportunity for a Woman to Be Selected as a Spouse? The Mediating Role of Human Uniqueness.
    Ji Lai, Daoqun Ding, Xinling Chen, Shenglan Li.
      High mating value is believed to correspond with high mating opportunities. On that premise, this study explores three cues that are linked to women of high long-term mating value, namely a "beautiful" facial appearance, "sexually attractive" body shape, and "virtuous" behavior. With exclusive attention focused on the above cues, this study examines what kind of human attributes would make a contribution to women's mating opportunities. The results reveal that both "beautiful" women and "virtuous" women were assessed (in this study) as having greater mating opportunities than "sexually attractive" women. In regard to the human attributes, only the "beautiful" woman was assessed as having high levels of human uniqueness and human nature. Meanwhile, "virtuous" women were assessed as having higher levels of human uniqueness but lower levels of human nature. In contrast, "sexually attractive" women were assessed as having lower levels of human uniqueness but higher levels of human nature. In addition, the results of a mediation analysis show that the trait of human uniqueness, and not human nature, was the mediator between the three types of women and women's mating opportunities. This finding means that, when women have higher levels of human uniqueness, they can acquire more mating opportunities. These findings contribute an improved understanding to why and how "beauty" or "virtue" increases the opportunity for woman to be selected as a spouse.
    Keywords:  human nature; human uniqueness; mating opportunity; mating values; women stereotypes
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.698712
  2. Behav Ecol. 2021 Jul-Aug;32(4):32(4): 590-598
    Female-biased sex ratios in urban centers create a "fertility trap" in post-war Finland.
    Jenni E Pettay, Virpi Lummaa, Robert Lynch, John Loehr.
      Because sex ratios are a key factor regulating mating success and subsequent fitness both across and within species, there is widespread interest in how population-wide sex ratio imbalances affect marriage markets and the formation of families in human societies. Although most modern cities have more women than men and suffer from low fertility rates, the effects of female-biased sex ratios have garnered less attention than male-biased ratios. Here, we analyze how sex ratios are linked to marriages, reproductive histories, dispersal, and urbanization by taking advantage of a natural experiment in which an entire population was forcibly displaced during World War II to other local Finnish populations of varying sizes and sex ratios. Using a discrete time-event generalized linear mixed-effects model, and including factors that change across time, such as annual sex ratio, we show how sex ratios, reproduction, and migration are connected in a female-dominated environment. Young childless women migrated toward urban centers where work was available to women, and away from male-biased rural areas. In such areas where there were more females, women were less likely to start reproduction. Despite this constraint, women showed little flexibility in mate choice, with no evidence for an increase in partner age difference in female-biased areas. We propose that together these behaviors and conditions combine to generate an "urban fertility trap" which may have important consequences for our understanding of the fertility dynamics of today including the current fertility decline across the developed world.
    Keywords:  dispersal; fertility; mate choice; migration; reproduction; sex ratio; urbanization
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1093/beheco/arab007
  3. Br J Psychol. 2021 Sep 20.
    Predicting attractiveness from face parts reveals multiple covarying cues.
    Chang Hong Liu, Andrew W Young, Jiaxin Li, Xinran Tian, Wenfeng Chen.
      In most studies of facial attractiveness perception, judgments are based on the whole face images. Here we investigated how attractiveness judgments from parts of faces compare to perceived attractiveness of the whole face, and to each other. We manipulated the extent and regions of occlusion, where either the left/right or the top/bottom half of the face was occluded. We also further segmented the face into relatively small horizontal regions involving the forehead, eyes, nose, or mouth. The results demonstrated the correlated nature of face regions, such that an attractiveness judgment for one face part can be highly predictive of the attractiveness of the whole face or the other parts. The left/right half of the face created more accurate predictions than the top/bottom half. Judgments involving a larger area of the face (i.e., left/right or top/bottom halves) produced more accurate predictions than those derived from smaller regions, such as the eyes or the mouth alone, but even the smallest and most featureless region investigated (the forehead) provided useful information. The correlated nature of the attractiveness of face parts shows that perceived attractiveness is determined by multiple covarying cues that the visual system can exploit to determine attractiveness from a single glance.
    Keywords:  facial attractiveness; inferences about attractiveness; occlusion; parts; whole
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12532
  4. Front Psychol. 2021 ;12 706149
    Sex Differences in Attitudes Toward Casual Sex: Using STI Contraction Likelihoods to Assess Evolved Mating Strategies.
    R Nathan Pipitone, Lesley Cruz, Helen N Morales, Daniela Aladro, Serena R Savitsky, Maria Koroleva, Francesca Valdez, Erin Campbell, Sam Miranda.
      Previous work shows that males are more likely to pursue casual sex if given the opportunity, compared to females, on average. One component of this strategy is risk-taking, and males have been shown to take more risks than females in a variety of contexts. Here, we investigate the extent to which sex differences exist considering casual sexual encounters involving sexually transmitted infections (STIs) using a hypothetical sexual scenario which attempts to circumvent several factors that may contribute to a female's hesitancy to engage in casual sex encounters. Two hundred and forty-six college students rated their willingness to engage in a satisfying casual sexual encounter with someone judged to be personable as a function of sex, varying STI contraction likelihoods, several STI types, and two levels of hypothetical partner attractiveness. We also assess how individual levels of sociosexuality (as measured by the SOI-R) impact findings. Our findings show that males report higher likelihoods of sexual engagement compared to females in general. This trend continued for lower likelihoods of STI contraction in all four STI types (Cold, Chlamydia, Herpes, HIV), with larger effects shown in the high attractiveness partner condition. For higher STI contraction likelihoods and more severe STI types, along with lower partner attractiveness levels, sex differences shrank. Factoring in participant SOI-R scores attenuated the effects somewhat, although it failed to alter findings substantially with predicted sex differences continuing to exist. These results offer further insight into evolved sex differences in human mating systems and provide an additional framework to test sexual risk-taking among males and females.
    Keywords:  casual sex; evolved mating strategies; risk-taking; sex differences; sexually transmitted infections; sociosexuality
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.706149
  5. Acta Psychol (Amst). 2021 Sep 17. pii: S0001-6918(21)00169-4. [Epub ahead of print]220 103419
    Overestimation of eye size: People see themselves with bigger eyes in a holistic approach.
    Kyoko Hine, Hikaru Okubo.
      A face contains crucial information for identification; moreover, face recognition is superior to other types of recognition. Notably, one's own face is recognized better than other familiar faces. However, it is unclear whether one's own face, especially one's own internal facial features, is represented more accurately than other faces. Here, we investigated how one's own internal facial features were represented. We conducted a psychological experiment in which the participants were required to adjust eye size to the real size in photos of their own or well-known celebrities' faces. To investigate why individuals' own and celebrity facial representations were different, two types of photos were prepared, with and without external features. It was found that the accuracy of eye size for one's own face was better than that for celebrities' faces in the condition without external features, in which holistic processing was less involved than in the condition with external features. This implies that the eye size of one's own face was represented more accurately than that of other familiar faces when external features were removed. Moreover, the accuracy of the eye size of one's own face in the condition with external features was worse than that in the condition without external features; the adjusted eye size in the condition with external features was larger than that in the condition without external features. In contrast, for celebrities' faces, there was no significant difference between the conditions with and without external features. The adjusted eye sizes in all conditions were overestimated compared to real eye sizes. Previous research indicated that eye size was adjusted to a larger size when evaluating as more attractive, in which the evaluation is related to holistic processing. Based on this perspective, it could be that one's own face was represented as more attractive in the condition with external features in the current study. Taken together, the results indicated that the representation of own eye size, which is an internal facial feature, was affected by the visibility of the external features.
    Keywords:  Attractiveness; External feature; Eye size; Holistic processing; Own face representation
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103419
  6. J Sex Res. 2021 Sep 22. 1-13
    Feeling Like a Fetish: Racialized Feelings, Fetishization, and the Contours of Sexual Racism on Gay Dating Apps.
    Lawrence Stacey, TehQuin D Forbes.
      Whom we date and are intimate with is structured by race and racism. Recent research has focused on "personal preference" discourse and sexual stereotyping to highlight how and why race and racism affect online and offline interactions. Yet relatively less work focuses on racial fetishization - race-based fixation on a bodily part or characteristic that involves both idolization and demonization of racial difference. Drawing on recent theorizing around racialized feelings, we investigated how racial fetishization materializes and makes men of color feel. We used two sources of data: 858 unique profile screenshots and 26 in-depth interviews with users of Grindr, Scruff, and Jack'd - three popular dating apps for sexual minority men. We found that while instances of racial fetishization were rare in public profiles, a majority of men of color discussed its prevalence. As a result of racial fetishization, men of color described feeling: (1) objectified; (2) that it hindered the formation of platonic or intimate connections; and (3) boxed in and minimized to a stereotype. Our results suggest that racial fetishization induces particular racialized feelings in men of color, and we suggest ways that these racialized feelings might be connected to the reproduction of racial and sexual inequality.
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2021.1979455
  7. Eur J Investig Health Psychol Educ. 2019 Dec 15. 10(1): 297-309
    Relationship Satisfaction and Infidelity-Related Behaviors on Social Networks: A Preliminary Online Study of Hispanic Women.
    Juan Aníbal González-Rivera, Francisco Aquino-Serrano, Emily M Pérez-Torres.
      The purpose of this online study was to develop an explicative model regarding the origin of infidelity-related behaviors on social networks for Hispanic women. We propose that sexual satisfaction and emotional intimacy have a direct impact on the satisfaction of couple relationships, and an indirect impact in the development of infidelity-related behaviors on social networks. To investigate this proposal, we used a non-probabilistic sample of 341 Hispanic women living in Puerto Rico. Statistical analyses confirmed that satisfaction and ambivalence in couple relationship completely mediate the association between sexual satisfaction and infidelity-related behaviors on social networks, as well as the relationship between emotional intimacy and infidelity-related behaviors on social networks. Overall, women who practice infidelity-related behaviors on social networks showed less sexual satisfaction, less emotional intimacy, less relationship satisfaction, and greater ambivalence. Our results provide theoretical and empirical evidence on how infidelity-related behaviors on social networks develop in couple relationships, and these results could help to inform possible forms of prevention and intervention.
    Keywords:  emotional intimacy; infidelity behaviors; relationship ambivalence; relationship satisfaction; sexual satisfaction; social networks
    DOI:  https://doi.org/10.3390/ejihpe10010023
This page is being maintained by Thomas Krichel. It was last updated on 2025‒07‒31 at 5:12.