Elsevier

Hormones and Behavior

Volume 49, Issue 4, April 2006, Pages 509-518
Hormones and Behavior

Conditional expression of women's desires and men's mate guarding across the ovulatory cycle

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2005.10.006Get rights and content

Abstract

Thirty-eight normally cycling women provided daily reports of sexual interests and feelings for 35 days. Near ovulation, both pair-bonded and single women reported feeling more physically attractive and having greater interest in attending social gatherings where they might meet men. Pair-bonded women who were near ovulation reported greater extra-pair flirtation and greater mate guarding by their primary partner. As predicted, however, these effects were exhibited primarily by women who perceived their partners to be low on hypothesized good genes indicators (low in sexual attractiveness relative to investment attractiveness). Ovulation-contingent increases in partner mate guarding were also moderated by female physical attractiveness; midcycle increases in mate guarding were experienced primarily by less attractive women, whereas more attractive women experienced relatively high levels of mate guarding throughout their cycle. These findings demonstrate ovulation-contingent shifts in desires and behaviors that are sensitive to varying fitness payoffs, and they provide support for the good genes hypothesis of human female extra-pair mating. The daily assessment method provides an important supplement to existing studies using scheduled laboratory visits as the purpose of the study (examining cycle-related variation) is not known by participants.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 38 heterosexual women who participated for research credit in a psychology class at a large university in the United States. Twenty-five of the women classified themselves as currently involved in a “committed romantic relationship,” and these women comprised the sample in the pair-bonded analyses. Thirty-seven of the participants were between 17 and 22 years old; one participant was 43 years old (M = 19.50, SD = 4.05; when the 43-year-old was dropped from analyses, all of the

Prediction 1: does male sexual attractiveness moderate the association between women's cycle phase and extra-pair desires?

As predicted, the effect of Fertility Status was powerfully moderated by Male Sexual-versus-Investment Attractiveness, F(1,19) = 9.47, P = 0.004 (see Fig. 1). When women were mated to men with low Sexual-versus-Investment Attractiveness, they were particularly likely to experience increased attraction to men other than their partner when fertile. Women mated to men with high sexual-versus-investment attractiveness showed no tendency to be more attracted to men other than primary partners

Discussion

Women's reproductive biology has imposed heavy obligatory costs of parental investment and strong selection for a discriminating sexual psychology. This proposal, coupled with the fact that the period of maximal fertility within a woman's cycle is fleetingly brief, suggests that the expression of a woman's mating adaptations may be sensitive to or contingent upon her fertility status. This study provided evidence for this general thesis.

This study also supported a specific hypothesis about

Acknowledgments

We thank Yael Avivi, David Beaulieu, Emily Cowley, Jennifer Collins, Meena Dershin, Brennan O'Dell, Hsuchi Ting, and Rebecca Zahabian for assistance with data collection and entry. Clark Barrett, April Bleske, Dan Fessler, David Frederick, Mark Huppin, and Elizabeth Pillsworth provided helpful comments on an earlier draft. We gratefully acknowledge David Buss for discussion of the ideas contained in this paper and for articulating key elements of the background theory that led to this research.

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