Depletion manipulations decrease openness to dissent via increased anger

We investigated a potential outcome of ego depletion manipulations and an important factor behind cooperative failure: a lack of openness to others' dissenting opinions. Across five studies in a variety of task settings, we examined the effect of depletion manipulations on openness to dissent and investigated two negative emotions as potential mediators of this process: fatigue and anger. The results demonstrated a negative effect of depletion manipulations on openness to dissent through increased anger rather than fatigue (Studies 1-5). In Studies 3 and 4, we also eliminated perceived trust towards a task counterpart as a significant mediator of the relationship between depletion manipulations and openness to dissent. These findings help clarify the nature of ego depletion manipulations and shed light on why individuals may fail to consider others' dissenting opinions and, thus, fall short of achieving cooperation.

Women's preferences for men's facial masculinity are strongest under favorable ecological conditions

The strength of sexual selection on secondary sexual traits varies depending on prevailing economic and ecological conditions. In humans, cross-cultural evidence suggests women’s preferences for men’s testosterone dependent masculine facial traits are stronger under conditions where health is compromised, male mortality rates are higher and economic development is higher. Here we use a sample of 4483 exclusively heterosexual women from 34 countries and employ mixed effects modelling to test how social, ecological and economic variables predict women’s facial masculinity preferences. We report women’s preferences for more masculine looking men are stronger in countries with higher sociosexuality and where national health indices and human development indices are higher, while no associations were found between preferences and indices of intra-sexual competition. Our results show that women’s preferences for masculine faces are stronger under conditions where offspring survival is higher and economic conditions are more favorable.

The Perception of Spontaneous and Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners’ judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communicative phenomena in human affiliation and cooperation.

Darling, Get Closer to Me: Spatial Proximity Amplifies Interpersonal Liking

Does close distance increase liking for a social object? In a preliminary sociogram task, an association between proximity and intimacy was found in drawings of self and others. In three experimental studies, male participants consistently preferred female targets who were (actually or appeared to be) close than far from them. Distance was manipulated through various means—sitting distance (Study 2), presenting two facial images separately to each eye by a stereoscopic device (Study 3), or a video clip (Study 4). This effect was stronger among those with deprived social needs and occurred in part because close (vs. far) targets seemed psychologically more accessible to the perceiver. Our findings offer rare experimental evidence for the empirically challenged propinquity effect and provide new insights on how distance shapes inner experience.

The Evolutionary Mismatch Hypothesis: Implications for Psychological Science

Human psychological mechanisms are adaptations that evolved to process environmental inputs, turning them into behavioral outputs that, on average, increase survival or reproductive prospects. Modern contexts, however, differ vastly from the environments that existed as human psychological mechanisms evolved. Many inputs now differ in quantity and intensity or no longer have the same fitness associations, thereby leading many mechanisms to produce maladaptive output. We present the precepts of this evolutionary mismatch process, highlight areas of mismatch, and consider implications for psychological science and policy.

The K-SF-42

The purpose of the present article is to propose an alternative short form for the 199-item Arizona Life History Battery (ALHB), which we are calling the K-SF-42, as it contains 42 items as compared with the 20 items of the Mini-K, the short form that has been in greatest use for the past decade. These 42 items were selected from the ALHB, unlike those of the Mini-K, making direct comparisons of the relative psychometric performance of the two alternative short forms a valid and instructive exercise. A series of secondary data analyses were performed upon a recently completed five-nation cross-cultural survey, which was originally designed to assess the role of life history strategy in the etiology of interpersonal aggression. Only data from the ALHB that were collected in all five cross-cultural replications were used for the present analyses. The single immediate objective of this secondary data analysis was producing the K-SF-42 such that it would perform optimally across all five cultures sampled, and perhaps even generalize well to other modern industrial societies not currently sampled as a result of the geographic breadth of those included in the present study. A novel method, based on the use of the Cross-Sample Geometric Mean as a criterion for item selection, was used for generating such a cross-culturally valid short form.

Dynamical Evolutionary Psychology: Mapping the Domains of the New Interactionist Paradigm

Dynamical systems and evolutionary theories have both been proposed as integrative approaches to psychology. These approaches are typically applied to different sets of questions. Dynamical systems models address the properties of psychological systems as they emerge and change over time; evolutionary models address the specific functions and contents of psychological structures. New insights can be achieved by integrating these two paradigms, and we propose a framework to begin doing so. The framework specifies a set of six evolutionarily fundamental social goals that place predictable constraints on emergent processes within and between individuals, influencing their dynamics over the short-term, and across developmental and evolutionary time scales. These social goals also predictably influence the dynamic emergence and change of cultural norms. This framework has heuristic as well as integrative potential, generating novel hypotheses within a number of unexplored areas atpsychology's interface with the other biological and social sciences.

Country roads, take me home… to my friends: How intelligence, population density, and friendship affect modern happiness

We propose the savanna theory of happiness, which suggests that it is not only the current consequences of a given situation but also its ancestral consequences that affect individuals' life satisfaction and explains why such influences of ancestral consequences might interact with intelligence. We choose two varied factors that characterize basic differences between ancestral and modern life - population density and frequency of socialization with friends - as empirical test cases. As predicted by the theory, population density is negatively, and frequency of socialization with friends is positively, associated with life satisfaction. More importantly, the main associations of life satisfaction with population density and socialization with friends significantly interact with intelligence, and, in the latter case, the main association is reversed among the extremely intelligent. More intelligent individuals experience lower life satisfaction with more frequent socialization with friends. This study highlights the utility of incorporating evolutionary perspectives in the study of subjective well-being.

Relationship Dealbreakers

Mate preference research has focused on traits people desire in partners (i.e., dealmakers) rather than what traits they avoid (i.e., dealbreakers), but mate preferences calibrate to both maximize benefits and minimize costs. Across six studies ( N > 6,500), we identified and examined relationship dealbreakers, and how they function across relationship contexts. Dealbreakers were associated with undesirable personality traits; unhealthy lifestyles in sexual, romantic, and friendship contexts; and divergent mating strategies in sexual and romantic contexts. Dealbreakers were stronger in long-term (vs. short-term) relationship contexts, and stronger in women (vs. men) in short-term contexts. People with higher mate value reported more dealbreakers; people with less-restricted mating strategies reported fewer dealbreakers. Consistent with prospect and error management theories, people weighed dealbreakers more negatively than they weighed dealmakers positively; this effect was stronger for women (vs. men) and people in committed relationships. These findings support adaptive attentional biases in human social cognition.

Too materialistic to get married and have children?

We developed new materials to induce a luxury mindset and activate materialistic values, and examined materialism's relationship to attitudes toward marriage and having children in Singapore. Path analyses indicated that materialistic values led to more negative attitudes toward marriage, which led to more negative attitudes toward children, which in turn led to a decreased number of children desired. Results across two studies highlight, at the individual level, the tradeoff between materialistic values and attitudes toward marriage and procreation and suggest that a consideration of psychological variables such as materialistic values may allow for a better understanding of larger-scale socioeconomic issues including low fertility rates among developed countries. We discuss implications and describe how psychological factors relating to low fertility fit within evolutionary mismatch and life history theory frameworks.

Cross-cultural variation in men's preference for sexual dimorphism in women's faces

Both attractiveness judgements and mate preferences vary considerably cross-culturally. We investigated whether men's preference for femininity in women's faces varies between 28 countries with diverse health conditions by analysing responses of 1972 heterosexual participants. Although men in all countries preferred feminized over masculinized female faces, we found substantial differences between countries in the magnitude of men's preferences. Using an average femininity preference for each country, we found men's facial femininity preferences correlated positively with the health of the nation, which explained 50.4% of the variation among countries. The weakest preferences for femininity were found in Nepal and strongest in Japan. As high femininity in women is associated with lower success in competition for resources and lower dominance, it is possible that in harsher environments, men prefer cues to resource holding potential over high fecundity.

Predicting Romantic Interest and Decisions in the Very Early Stages of Mate Selection

In the current study, opposite-sex strangers had 10-min conversations with a possible further date in mind. Based on judgments from partners and observers, three main findings were produced. First, judgments of attractiveness/vitality perceptions (compared with warmth/trustworthiness and status/resources) were the most accurate and were predominant in influencing romantic interest and decisions about further contact. Second, women were more cautious and choosy than men—women underestimated their partner’s romantic interest, whereas men exaggerated it, and women were less likely to want further contact. Third, a mediational model found that women (compared with men) were less likely to want further contact because they perceived their partners as possessing less attractiveness/vitality and as falling shorter of their minimum standards of attractiveness/vitality, thus generating lower romantic interest. These novel results are discussed in terms of the mixed findings from prior research, evolutionary psychology, and the functionality of lay psychology in early mate-selection contexts.

Judging a man by the width of his face: the role of facial ratios and dominance in mate choice at speed-dating events

Previous research has shown that men with higher facial width-to-height ratios (fWHRs) have higher testosterone and are more aggressive, more powerful, and more financially successful. We tested whether they are also more attractive to women in the ecologically valid mating context of speed dating. Men's fWHR was positively associated with their perceived dominance, likelihood of being chosen for a second date, and attractiveness to women for short-term, but not long-term, relationships. Perceived dominance (by itself and through physical attractiveness) mediated the relationship between fWHR and attractiveness to women for short-term relationships. Furthermore, men's perceptions of their own dominance showed patterns of association with mating desirability similar to those of fWHR. These results support the idea that fWHR is a physical marker of dominance. This is the first study to show that male dominance and higher fWHRs are attractive to women for short-term relationships in a controlled and interactive situation that could actually lead to mating and dating.

Playing Hard–To–Get: Manipulating One'S Perceived Availability as A Mate

‘Playing hard–to–get’ is a mating tactic in which people give the impression that they are ostensibly uninterested to get others to desire them more. This topic has received little attention because of theoretical and methodological limitations of prior work. We present four studies drawn from four different American universities that examined playing hard–to–get as part of a supply–side economics model of dating. In Studies 1a (N = 100) and 1b (N = 491), we identified the tactics that characterize playing hard–to–get and how often men and women enact them. In Study 2 (N = 290), we assessed reasons why men and women play hard–to–get along with the personality traits associated with these reasons. In Studies 3 (N = 270) and 4 (N = 425), we manipulated the rate per week prospective mates went out with people they had just met and assessed participants’ willingness to engage in casual sex and serious romantic relationships with prospective mates (Study 3) and the money and time they were willing to invest in prospective mates (Study 4). We frame our results using a sexual economics model to understand the role of perceived availability in mating dynamics. Copyright © 2012 European Association of Personality Psychology

Mate preferences do predict attraction and choices in the early stages of mate selection

Although mate preference research has firmly established that men value physical attractiveness more than women do and women value social status more than men do, recent speed-dating studies have indicated mixed evidence (at best) for whether people's sex-differentiated mate preferences predict actual mate choices. According to an evolutionary, mate preference priority model (Li, Bailey, Kenrick, & Linsenmeier, 2002; Li & Kenrick, 2006; Li, Valentine, & Patel, 2011), the sexes are largely similar in what they ideally like, but for long-term mates, they should differ on what they most want to avoid in early selection contexts. Following this model, we conducted experiments using online messaging and modified speed-dating platforms. Results indicate that when a mating pool includes people at the low end of social status and physical attractiveness, mate choice criteria are sex-differentiated: Men, more than women, chose mates based on physical attractiveness, whereas women, more than men, chose mates based on social status. In addition, individuals who more greatly valued social status or physical attractiveness on paper valued these traits more in their actual choices. In particular, mate choices were sex-differentiated when considering long-term relationships but not short-term ones, where both sexes shunned partners with low physical attractiveness. The findings validate a large body of mate preferences research and an evolutionary perspective on mating, and they have implications for research using speed-dating and other interactive contexts.

Quick and Dirty: Some Psychosocial Costs Associated with the Dark Triad in Three Countries

The current study provides the first examination of the relationship between life history indicators and the Dark Triad traits in an international sample drawn from the U.S. ( n = 264), Singapore ( n = 185), and Poland ( n = 177). In all three samples, the Dark Triad traits were associated with psychosocial costs, although there were more links in the Singaporean and Polish samples than in the American sample. In the U.S., the quality of one's romantic relationships and psychopathy were negatively correlated. Narcissism was higher in the Polish and American samples than in the Singaporean sample. Men scored higher than women did regardless of location and the sex difference in the individual differences in life histories was mediated by the Dark Triad composite. Results suggest the Dark Triad are related to a volatile socioecology composed of psychosocial costs in the familial, romantic, and platonic relationships.

The Antihero in Popular Culture: Life History Theory and the Dark Triad Personality Traits

The Dark Triad of personality is composed of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Despite the common belief that these traits are undesirable, the media is awash with characters that embody the Dark Triad. Characters like Gregory House, M.D., Batman (a.k.a. the Dark Knight), and James Bond all embody these traits and are some of the most popular media franchises today. As entertaining as these characters are, they provide us with a window into the dark side of human nature. Instead of treating the dark side of human nature as inherently maladaptive, we provide an alternative view that, despite their costs, traits like these can confer reproductive and survival benefits for the individual. In so doing, we review the research on the Dark Triad traits and provide a theoretical account for how these traits can confer some positive benefits. To facilitate comprehension, we provide examples taken from the media to show how evolutionary psychology and popular culture intersect.