Environmental threat influences preferences for sexual dimorphism in male and female faces but not voices or dances

Abstract

During evolution, humans faced the trade-off between preferences for feminine and masculine traits which are presumably connected to parental care, and genetic quality or provisioning abilities, respectively. Recent research has shown that environmental factors influence preferences for femininity/masculinity in potential mates. However, studies mainly focus on women's preferences for isolated cues in men. We examined the influence of pathogen and resource threat on women's and men's preference for femininity/masculinity in opposite sex unmanipulated faces, voices, and dances. Three hundred seventy (206 women) students, aged 18–35 years, from universities across the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, were primed with newspaper-like articles on either pathogen threat ( Aedes aegypti , and its mosquito-borne diseases) or resource threat (=economic crisis), and compared to a control-priming condition (lions poisoned in a Kenyan Reserve). Participants were randomly assigned to rate attractiveness of the stimuli in one of the mating strategies (i.e., short-term or long-term relationship context). After each priming article, participants rated attractiveness of pre-rated masculine and feminine stimuli of the opposite sex in a standalone-rating design. The environmental threats and the control-priming conditions were shown in a random sequence. We found that the environmental threat and the mating strategies had no systematic effect on preferences for faces, voices and behavior, suggesting that different modalities can cue to different individual qualities and can be used differently according to the environmental context and relationship strategy. The environmental threat only had a weak effect on preferences for facial femininity-masculinity: women found feminine male faces more attractive under pathogen threat, while men found feminine female faces more attractive under resource threat. This is in contrast to some previous studies, and shows that effect of ecological factors on human psychology should be submitted to a more rigorous scrutiny. The mating strategies only interacted with voice attractiveness: women rated male voices as more attractive after being primed with any type of environmental threat when considering long-term relationship context, while in men this was true when considering short-term relationship. Finally, feminine dance videos were perceived as attractive under environmental threat, irrespective of sex, type of environmental threat or mating strategy.