Browsing by Subject "Mating strategy"

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    Mating strategy, disgust, and food neophobia
    (Elsevier, 2015) Al-Shawaf, L.; Lewis, D. M. G.; Alley, T. R.; Buss, D. M.
    Food neophobia and disgust are commonly thought to be linked, but this hypothesis is typically implicitly assumed rather than directly tested. Evidence for the connection has been based on conceptually and empirically unsound measures of disgust, unpublished research, and indirect findings. This study (N = 283) provides the first direct evidence of a relationship between trait-level food neophobia and trait-level pathogen disgust. Unexpectedly, we also found that food neophobia varies as a function of sexual disgust and is linked to mating strategy. Using an evolutionary framework, we propose a novel hypothesis that may account for these previously undiscovered findings: the food neophilia as mating display hypothesis. Our discussion centers on future research directions for discriminatively testing this novel hypothesis.
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    The openness-calibration hypothesis
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2015) Lewis, D. M. G.; Al-Shawaf, L.; Yilmaz, C.
    The current study tested the hypotheses that (1) psychological adaptations calibrate Openness to Experience to facilitate or deter pursuit of short-term mating, and (2) this calibration varies as a function of mating strategy, physical attractiveness, and sex—individual differences that shift the costs and benefits of alternative personality strategies. Participants completed a personality inventory before and after reading vignettes describing mating opportunities of different durations (short- and long-term) with individuals of differing levels of attractiveness. Among study findings, participants presented with short-term mating opportunities with individuals of average attractiveness exhibited down-regulated Openness relative to those presented with highly attractive mates. Moreover, these effects varied as a function of the interaction between participants’ sex, mating strategy, and attractiveness. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that evolved psychological mechanisms adaptively calibrate Openness levels in response to short-term mating opportunities. More broadly, they highlight the heuristic value of an evolutionary framework for the study of personality and individual differences.