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