Human Mating Behavior Research Articles

Communication analysis of human mating behavior based on evolution

As the basis of social development, information communication plays an important role in mate selection. In the process of reproduction, the most critical is the problem of mate selection in evolution, how to find the right spouse and maximize their own interests, is the main issue discussed in the academic circle. After understanding the basic concept of evolution, this paper probes into the importance of human mate choice behavior and clarifies the communication strategy in human mate choice behavior, so as to have a deeper understanding of communication theory and human behavior.

How people react to their Partners' infidelity: An explorative study

AbstractInfidelity is relatively common, with culprits not always been able to keep it secret from their partners. Accordingly, the current research aimed to study people's reactions to their partners' infidelity. More specifically, using qualitative research methods on a sample of 226 Greek‐speaking participants, Study 1 identified 94 possible reactions to infidelity. Study 2 employed quantitative research methods on a sample of 757 Greek‐speaking participants, and classified these reactions into 17 broad factors. Among the most probable reactions, were experiencing negative emotions, terminating the relationship, keeping physical distance from the unfaithful partner, and getting more information about the incident. Significant gender and age effects were found for several of the extracted factors. Using second‐order principal components analysis, the extracted factors were classified into four broader domains. The current research contributes to understanding an important aspect of human mating behavior, and its findings could be used to develop better ways to deal with infidelity.

The Influence of Evolutionary Psychology on Human Mating and Sexual Behavior

Over the course of history, human beings have taken keen interest in the mating activity. The survival of the human species has been dependent on sexual mating and human reproduction; the need for sexual companionship has played a pivotal role in building societies and establishing social as well as intimate relationships. To overcome the problem of finding a suitable sexual partner, men and women adopt different strategies, based on their roles in the society. This paper discusses the impact of Evolutionary Psychology on Human mating and sexual behavior. David Buss's Sexual Strategies Theory is considered one of the major research programs to investigate how this relationship works. This paper aims to provide an emotional and cultural perspective on how evolutionary psychology has influenced human sexual and mating behaviors. It can be said that Buss's theory, despite being one of its kind, has failed to look at the complete picture. These limitations are due to various reasons; such as over emphasis on the polygamous nature of men, the evaluation of parental investment of both sexes, the problems each of the sexes can solve by using these strategies and how mating is considered an individual activity instead of a cooperative one. The cultural, philosophical and emotional take on the evolution of human sexual behavior brings a fresh and creative outlook.

Different impacts of resources on opposite sex ratings of physical attractiveness by males and females

Abstract Parental investment hypotheses regarding mate selection suggest that human males should seek partners featured by youth and high fertility. However, females should be more sensitive to resources that can be invested on themselves and their offspring. Previous studies indicate that economic status is indeed important in male attractiveness. However, no previous study has quantified and compared the impact of equivalent resources on male and female attractiveness. Annual salary is a direct way to evaluate economic status. Here, we combined images of male and female body shape with information on annual salary to elucidate the influence of economic status on the attractiveness ratings by opposite sex raters in American, Chinese and European populations. We found that ratings of attractiveness were around 1000 times more sensitive to salary for females rating males, compared to males rating females. These results indicate that higher economic status can offset lower physical attractiveness in men much more easily than in women. Neither raters' BMI nor age influenced this effect for females rating male attractiveness. This difference explains many features of human mating behavior and may pose a barrier for male engagement in low-consumption lifestyles.

Monogamy and Nonmonogamy: Evolutionary Considerations and Treatment Challenges.

Few topics generate such controversy and emotional reactivity as the nature of human mating behavior. Unfortunately, and potentially to the detriment of good patient care, sexual medicine practitioners havelargely avoided this matter. An understanding of the scientific literature can empower practitioners to moreeffectively confront the inevitable monogamy and nonmonogamy challenges present in research and clinicalpractice. To review and summarize relevant scientific literature as a context to evaluate the more common myths and misunderstanding relating to the practice of monogamy and nonmonogamy in humans. This review also is intended to promote a discussion of the ways human mating strategies may impact sexual function and dysfunction for the individual and couple. A review of English written peer-reviewed evolutionary, anthropological, neuropsychiatric, zoological research, and other scholarly texts was conducted. Work published between 2000 and 2016 concentrating on evolutionary theory, long- and short-term mating strategies in primates and most specifically in humans, and consensual nonmonogamy was highlighted. Main outcomes included a brief explanation of evolutionary theory and a review of relevant literature regarding long- and short-term mating behaviors and consensual nonmonogamy. Serial sexual and social monogamy is the norm for humans. Across time and cultures, humans have adapted both long- and short-term mating strategies that are used flexibly, and sometimes simultaneously, based on unique personal, social, and environmental circumstances. Human mating behavior is individualistic, the result of numerous biopsychosocial influences. The clinician cannot assume that an individual presenting as a patient maintains a monogamy-valued view of his or her intimate relationship. Patients may experience conflict between the cultural monogamous ideal and their actual sexual behaviors. This conflict may be critical in understanding a patient's sexual concerns and in treatment planning. Awareness of these issues will aid the practitioner in sexual medicine.

Mate preferences toward agency and communion

Agency and communion constitute two fundamental dimensions of social perception. Universal dimensions of mate preferences represent both agentic and communal content, but a direct test of mate preferences toward agency and communion is lacking. The present study examined preferences toward agentic and communal traits in mate preferences among 206 heterosexual individuals (112 females), analysing the role of the target's sex and actor's sexual strategy. Results showed that women demonstrated higher expectations toward agentic and communal traits in a potential partner than men. Preference for agency in short-term relationships did not differ from preferences toward agency and communion in long-term relationships, but preferences toward communion of partner in short-term relationships was significantly lower. These results were discussed in light of the signaling role of agency and communion in human mating behavior.

The impact of perceived disease threat on women's desire for novel dating and sexual partners: is variety the best medicine?

Researchers in the evolutionary sciences have long understood men's desire to mate with a variety of women. Because men's obligatory investment in offspring production is relatively small, men can directly increase their number of descendants by mating with multiple partners. Relatively less is known, however, about the conditions that favor sexual variety seeking in women. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, we examined the relationship between the perceived pathogen load in an environment and women's desire for sexual variety. Across 5 experiments, we primed women with cues indicating that the rate of disease is increasing in their environment. We then measured their desire for novel sexual and dating partners. Results revealed that women with a history of vulnerability to illness respond to these cues by desiring a greater number of novel partners. This shift was not found in men and did not predict variety seeking in a nonsexual domain. In addition to providing evidence of a novel conceptual link between the pathogen load and patterns of human mating behavior, this research also provides new insights into women's mating psychology and the conditions that favor sexual variety seeking in the greater investing sex.

The Association Between 2D:4D Ratios and Sociosexuality: A Failure to Replicate

Researchers investigating the role of biological factors in the development and maintenance of interest in uncommitted sexual activity (i.e., sociosexuality) have reported that greater prenatal androgen action in women, as inferred by the ratio of the 2nd to 4th digit, is associated with greater interest in uncommitted sexual relationships, as measured by scores on the Sociosexuality Orientation Inventory (SOI) (Clark, 2004). This evidence suggesting a rather extensive role for prenatal factors in human mating behavior has been cited over 20 times in the literature. However, despite this indication of the impact of the research results on theories of human sex differences, there are no published replications of the original finding. For that reason, the association between 2D:4D ratios and sociosexuality was evaluated in two studies. In the first study, using methodology similar to the original report, no significant association between 2D:4D ratios and SOI scores was found either in women (n = 25) or men (n = 25). Next, to test the possibility that moderating factors, such as menstrual cycle phase and circulating testosterone levels, influence the strength of the association between 2D:4D ratios and sociosexuality, salivary hormone levels and behaviors were measured during the early follicular and mid-luteal phase of the menstrual cycle in women not using hormonal contraceptives (n = 40) and at two time points in women using oral contraceptives (n = 44) and in men (n = 42). Women and men in this study showed the expected sex differences in hormone levels and behavior. However, circulating hormones and 2D:4D ratios were unrelated to measures of sociosexuality obtained at the two test sessions. In sum, these data suggest that factors other than prenatal and circulating hormones explain the sex differences in self-reports of sociosexuality.

Pair-Bonded Humans Conform to Sexual Stereotypes in Web-Based Advertisements for Extra-Marital Partners

Partners advertisements provide advertisers with access to a large pool of prospective mates, and have proven useful in documenting sex differences in human mating preferences. We coded data from an Internet site (AshleyMadison.com) catering to advertisers engaged in existing pair-bonded relationships. While we predicted that pair-bonding may liberate advertisers from conforming to sexual stereotypes of male promiscuity and female choosiness, our results are uniformly consistent with those stereotypes. Our findings thus provide further evidence that human mating behavior is highly constrained by fundamental biological differences between males and females.

Parent-Offspring Conflict over Mating: The Case of Beauty

In pre-industrial societies parents exercise a strong influence over the mating decisions of their offspring. As modern pre-industrial societies approximate the way of life in ancestral human societies, human mating behavior should be seen as the outcome of a co-evolutionary process between parental and offspring's mating choice. Both parents and offspring have evolved mating preferences, which enable them to select those mates and in-laws who maximize their inclusive fitness. Following Trivers' (1974) theory of parent-offspring conflict, it is hypothesized that in-law and mating preferences substantially overlap, but also differ with respect to the beauty trait of a mating candidate. This hypothesis is tested on a sample of 292 parents. It is found that the two sets of preferences are strongly correlated, while beauty is preferred significantly more in a mating partner than in an in-law.

Greater Emphasis on Female Attractiveness inHomo Sapiens:A Revised Solution to an Old Evolutionary Riddle

Substantial evidence from psychology and cross-cultural anthropology supports a general rule of greater emphasis on female physical attractiveness in Homo sapiens. As sensed by Darwin (1871) and clarified by Trivers (1972) , generally higher female parental investment is a key determinant of a common pattern of sexual selection in which male animals are more competitive, more eager sexually and more conspicuous in courtship display, ornamentation, and coloration. Therefore, given the larger minimal and average parental investment of human females, keener physical attractiveness pressure among women has long been considered an evolutionary riddle. This paper briefly surveys previous thinking on the question, before offering a revised explanation for why we should expect humans to sharply depart from general zoological pattern of greater emphasis on male attractiveness. This contribution hinges on the argument that humans have been seen as anomalies mainly because we have been held up to the wrong zoological comparison groups. I argue that humans are a partially sex-role reversed species, and more emphasis on female physical attractiveness is relatively common in such species. This solution to the riddle, like those of other evolutionists, is based on peculiarities in human mating behavior, so this paper is also presented as a refinement of current thinking about the evolution of human mating preferences.

The Evolutionary Psychology of Human Mate Choice

Abstract The recent incorporation of sexual selection theories into the rubric of evolutionary psychology has produced an important framework from which to examine human mating behavior. Here we review the extant empirical and theoretical work regarding heterosexual human mating preferences and reproductive strategies. Initially, we review contemporary evolutionary psychology's adaptationism, including the incorporation of modern theories of sexual selection, adaptive genetic variation, and mate choice. Next, we examine women's and men's mating preferences, focusing on the adaptive significance of material, genetic and fertility benefits, and their relationship to environmental characteristics. Following this, we consider human mate choice in relation to non-adaptive preferences. This discussion ends with a look at context effects for individual differences in mate-preferences and reproductive strategies.

Sexual and pornographic Web searching: Trends analysis

The level of sexual or pornographic Web searching is a major subject of political debate, particularly in the United States. United States federal prosecutors recently, as of 2006, requested that the major Web search engines, Yahoo, American Online (AOL), MSN and Google provide a sampling of their search queries and indexes of Web sites, in order to allow the examination of various aspects of pornographic searching and retrieval. This paper examines studies that have analyzed Web search logs to determine the level of sexual or pornographic searches on publically available Web search engines from 1997 to 2005. Results show that sexual or pornographic queries have declined as a proportion of all Web queries since 1997 and currently represented less than four percent of Web queries. In conclusion, the paper provides perspectives on the results, including issues of self–regulated choice and human mating behavior.

The trees are not the forest, and monogamy is certainly not a kind of wood

The target article, which is part of a larger study, the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP), seeks to explore cross-culturally aspects of human mating behavior on a global scale. However the nonrepresentation of large cultures restricts the depth of this study. The inferences drawn from such a sample must therefore remain limited despite the impressive sample sizes. In a larger context it raises thoughts on how partial disclosures may misrepresent the design of the larger study.

Mating games: the evolution of human mating transactions

We propose a new, evolutionary, game-theoretic model of conditional human mating strategies that integrates currently disconnected bodies of data into a single mathematically-explicit theory of human mating transactions. The model focuses on the problem of how much resource a male must provide to a female to secure and retain her as a mate. By using bidding-game models, we show how the male’s minimally required resource incentive varies as a function of his own mate value, the value of the female, and the distribution of the mate values of their available alternative mates. The resulting theory parsimoniously accounts for strategic pluralism within the sexes, mate choice differences between the sexes, and assortative mating, while generating a rich set of testable new predictions about human mating behavior. Key words: assortative mating, evolution, game theory, human mating, mate choice, mating strategies. [Behav Ecol] S exual selection theory (Darwin, 1871) has recently been used by a number of evolutionary thinkers to explain men’s and women’s particular, and often conflicting, mating strategies (see Buss, 1994; Buss and Schmitt, 1993; Gangestad and Simpson, 2000). In this article, we extend such work by developing a set of mathematically explicit game-theoretic models of mate choice between potential mates. Our quantitative models incorporate evolutionarily-relevant contextual cues (phenotypic quality, resources, and outside options), into game theoretic models designed to generate the evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) for mating transactions at specific moments in time. Using the concept of the ESS and game theory allows us to predict the evolved solution (specific