Evolutionary Psychology最新文献

Four studies investigated sex differences in children's motivation and action patterns for climbing playground structures and a gymnasium rock wall to assess any influence of ancestral sexual-size dimorphism limiting tree-climbing agility. Study 1 examined yearly incidences of children aged 3 to 13 falling from monkey bars and jungle gyms in a 1985-1989 National Electronic Injury Surveillance System dataset. Injury incidences of 3- to 6-year-old girls were lower than those of same-aged boys with the inverse occurring between ages 7 through 10 (p < 0.001). Study 2 determined that, during two recess periods in 13 elementary schools, 3.14% of enrolled girls were climbing playground structures compared with 1.45% of enrolled boys (p = 0.021) who were less inclined to climb as they aged. Study 3 showed that 6 to 8 year-old girls climbing alone perched longer (p = 0.0004) on 3 jungle gyms in a regional park longer than same-aged boys. Extended perching by girls might reflect their greater desire for surveillance useful historically for assessing danger. For Study 4, video recordings were made of the climbing actions of 28 children 7- to 12- years of age enrolled in an indoor rock-wall climbing class for beginners. Girls exhibited marked climbing differences (p = 0.005), with discriminant function analysis classifying 84.6% of girls correctly and 86.7% of boys correctly. While tree climbing was not studied directly, the sex differences shown in these studies indicates that girls are motivated to climb playground structures more than boys and climb rock walls using different action patterns.

Creativity offers both survival and reproductive benefits, being a desirable trait in potential mates and linked to fertility and sexuality. We investigated whether viewing attractive faces of potential short-term or long-term partners in a simulated dating portal enhances participants' creativity. We also explored possible mediators (arousal, mood, sexual arousal, motivation, and attraction) and moderators (relationship status, satisfaction, mate value, and sociosexual orientation). In Study 1, 483 participants (M_age = 30.06, SD = 6.37; 242 women, 241 men) viewed either four attractive or four unattractive opposite-sex potential partners and wrote self-promotional bios. No significant creativity differences were found between the attractive and unattractive groups. However, men were more flexible and produced more original ideas than women, while women showed greater fluency and self-creativity promotion. In Study 2, 494 participants (M_age = 30.84, SD = 6.06; 258 women, 236 men) viewed profiles of attractive potential partners for either short-term or long-term inclined relationships. Women's fluency and originality were higher in the long-term condition, but sexual arousal negatively impacted both fluency and originality when choosing an attractive partner for a long-term relationship, particularly when a real date desirability with the mate was high. Overall, the results suggest that creativity is influenced by the mating context, though the effects were modest. Future studies should increase sample sizes, geographic diversity, and experimental settings.

Life history theory suggests that individuals vary in their sexual, reproductive, parental, familial, and social behavior in response to the physical and social challenges encountered during development. So-called "sugar relationships" generally involve exchanges of resources for sex and/or companionship between a younger partner and an older provider. This research aimed to explore the relationship between openness to sugar relationships and life history strategy. A total of 312 participants (192 women, 120 men) completed an extensive online questionnaire, including scales such as the Acceptance of Sugar Relationships in Young Women and Men Scale, High-K Strategy Scale, Multidimensional Measure of Sociosexual Orientation, Family Resources Scale, Childhood Unpredictability Scale, and Perceived Vulnerability to Disease Scale. The results indicate that openness to sugar relationships is primarily associated with short-term mating orientation, while the role of life history strategy appears to be weaker than previously assumed. Importantly, the SEM analysis reveals an indirect link between limited family resources in childhood and openness to sugar relationships, mediated by a fast life history strategy. This pathway suggests that early environmental constraints may shape an adaptive orientation toward immediate resource acquisition in adult relationships. No such associations were observed among men, indicating sex-specific patterns. These findings provide insight into how specific life history strategies, particularly in women, may influence attitudes toward resource-based relationships, illustrating the nuanced interactions between early experiences, life history orientation, and adult relational preferences.

Intimate relationships frequently come to an end, and in the current research, we have endeavored to examine how individuals would potentially react in the scenario where their intimate partner decides to terminate a relationship they wish to continue. More specifically, employing open-ended questionnaires on a sample of 219 Greek-speaking participants, we identified 79 possible reactions. Subsequently, using close-ended questionnaires on a sample of 442 Greek-speaking participants, we categorized these reactions into 13 broad factors. Participants indicated that they were more likely to feel sadness, inquire of their departing partners why they wish to end the relationship, and attempt to divert their thoughts elsewhere to avoid dwelling on the end of the relationship. Men indicated a higher likelihood than women to seek revenge sex, although significant sex differences were not observed in other reactions. Furthermore, we classified these 13 factors into three broader domains. The highest-rated domain was "Accept and forget," followed by "Sadness and depression," and "Physical and psychological aggression." These findings could enable us to gain a better understanding of the process of relationship dissolution, and could potentially be employed to identify and prevent reactions that may have harmful repercussions for the individuals involved in the relationship.

Mating and labor markets are fundamental drivers of societal dynamics. Yet, equity of access to these domains differs between the sexes due to numerous biological, economic, psychological, and socio-cultural factors. These inequalities and their impacts can accentuate perceptions, preferences, and behaviors of males and females in different ways. Utilizing a large cross-sectional sample of those currently engaged in the Australian mating market (n = 1072 online daters), we explored the impact of sex and individual differences on the perceptions of men's ease of access to a decent job in the labor market (opportunity), women's economic dependence on men (economic inequality), and relative reproductive opportunity (dating access) for both sexes. Our study identifies both sex differences and symmetries in socio-economic factors (such as education level and having offspring) correlating with the perceptions of both economic and dating market access for Australian online daters. Additionally, key resource endowment indicators (income and unemployment) also reflect differences in both sexes' perceptions of both access and gender equity. That said, our study finds that perceptions of access to both (economic and mating) markets shows far greater variation based on biological age (especially for women) than any other factor.

Life history theory suggests that in harsh, unpredictable environments, individuals may benefit from adopting a fast life history strategy. This may involve experiencing boredom more frequently and intensely as an adaptive mechanism to seek novel stimuli, potentially increasing the number of sexual partners and offspring. This study explored the relationship between trait boredom-a chronic characteristic of feeling bored-and fast life history strategies. Our findings confirmed a positive association between boredom proneness and fast life history strategies at both individual and country levels. In Study 1, fast life history strategy was positively correlated with boredom proneness and mediated the relationship between perceived childhood support/resources and boredom proneness. In Study 2, we conducted a multi-level analysis using secondary data from 15 countries. The results showed that countries with higher boredom proneness scores showed more indicators of faster life history strategies. These results suggest that trait boredom may be a functional characteristic of fast life history strategists. This study is the first empirical investigation of trait boredom within a life history framework, highlighting trait boredom's functional role from evolutionary and ecological perspectives.

The effects of natural selection on personality traits are still understudied, which is in contrast with their importance for analyzing the evolution of personality. In the present research, we analyzed natural selection on the Big Five personality traits by estimating the relations between personality characteristics and evolutionary fitness (reproductive success: i.e., number of children) using the World Values Survey wave 6 data (N = 22,636; 17 countries). Using multilevel Poisson regression models with random slopes, we obtained a positive linear association between conscientiousness and reproductive success. We also detected a nonlinear association between openness and the criterion measure: additional graphical and ANOVA analyses showed that nonlinearity emerged from the fact that only individuals with above average openness had lower reproductive success. The effect sizes of the associations between personality traits and reproductive success were low. Finally, we detected variation in selection gradients (i.e., differences in fixed model coefficients) across the countries-coefficients with both positive and negative signs are estimated for extraversion, neuroticism, and openness. This variation is in accordance with the state-dependent models of personality evolution, where environment is viewed as an external state-the environment's moderating effect on the personality-fitness link may preserve inter-individual variation in behavior within and between the populations.

In this article, we examine the relations between extreme environmental harshness during childhood and personal fertility ideals in African students. The study is informed by biological models of predictive adaptive responses (PAR) for individual reproductive schedules in the context of life history theory (LHT). Following theoretical models of external and internal environmental cues, we tested whether war and starvation during childhood differentially predict African students' personal fertility ideals in terms of their desired number of children and their desired age of first parenthood. The data were collected in eight different countries from sub-Saharan Africa with an overall sample size of N = 392. Standardized effect estimates were obtained using a Bayesian approach. The results suggest that war and starvation are predictive of the desired number of children, but not of the desired age of first parenthood. Moreover, the effect estimates varied considerably between females and males, indicating possible interactions between the two independent variables depending on the students' sex. Furthermore, we found a small negative correlation between the desired number of children and the desired age of first parenthood, providing only weak support for a clustering of the two variables on a slow-fast continuum. The results are discussed in light of current models of individual life histories in humans.

Evidence is abundant that evolution by selection has produced sex differences in the design of adaptations to solve the problems surrounding reproduction. A prime example is the design of human jealousy, which research suggests is triggered by distinct evoking acts that are specific challenges for women and men in their exclusive reproductive bond. It follows that jealousy would be directed toward driving away interlopers who could potentially threaten the bond with the romantic partner or increase mate retention efforts in response to sex-specific threats. To explore this possibility, we use as a methodological innovation an economic game for the evocation of jealousy. With a modified dictator game, we showed men and women in a committed relationship, conditions in which the partner or an intrasexual rival allocates money to (investing condition), or obtains money from (receiving condition), the partner or an opposite sex third party that they recently met. A sample of 56 heterosexual couples (n = 112) participated in a laboratory setting. Our results show the different scenarios of this dictator game exerted the expected evocation of jealousy (controlling individual differences), with women being more jealous by the partner's allocation of resources to a rival, and men reporting slightly more jealousy by their partner receiving money from a rival. We discuss the implications of this method to advance the comprehension of the adaptive function of sex differences in jealousy, the use of economic games, and possible modifications to improve the similarity of the game to a real assessment of actual male jealousy.

In four preregistered studies, we tested implications from a cooperation model that explains victim-blaming as a strategic move, as a way for people to avoid the costs of helping victims (who seem to be unpromising cooperation partners) without paying the reputational cost of being seen as ungenerous, reluctant cooperators. An implication of this perspective is that, if an individual is identified as a poor cooperation prospect to start with, people would be likely to blame that individual for his/her own misfortune, notably by suggesting that the victim was negligent. The four studies presented here support this interpretation, as participants attributed more negligence to an accident victim if that victim had been initially described as less prosocial, either because they denied benefits to others or because they created costs for others. These results are consistent with a familiar result, that people blame victims more if they feel (or want to be seen as) more socially distant from that victim. The present studies may offer a simple, cooperation-based account of this and other aspects of victim-blaming.