Female Fertility and Male Mating: Women's Ovulatory Cues Influence Men's Physiology,Cognition, and Behavior

Evolutionary theories of mating suggest that shifting fertility levels during a woman's menstrual cycle play an important role in the formation and maintenance of romantic relationships. In this article, we review a burgeoning literature that has applied this framework to the investigation of male adaptations to female fertility. The studies reviewed here illuminate the ways in which men evolved to overcome the challenge of finding and attracting mates with peak levels of fertility. In particular, we review research that highlights the types of cues men may use to detect heightened fertility as well as the types of mating processes men display when encountering those cues. We discuss important avenues for future research on this topic as well as implications for psychological theories of romantic attraction.     

Latent Extinction in a Multiple-T Maze within Heterogeneous and Homogeneous Environments

This investigation found support for the general hypothesis that prior social experience influences current perception of historically relevant cues. Male college Ss, matched for quality of prior maternal evaluation, were separated into those (N = 40) who rated their fathers positive in their evaluations of them (HN) and those (N = 38) who rated their fathers as more negative (LN). These groups did not differ in their perception of maternal evaluative cues when presented alone. When paternal evaluative cues were presented as distractors, selective attention to maternal cues was more disrupted for the LN group. Deployment of attention to task-irrelevant paternal cues, as inferred from intrusions, did not differ for the HN and the LN groups. However, the LN subjects did demonstrate a negative qualitative bias in those intrusion errors which came from the task-irrelevant paternal set, whereas HN subjects showed a positive qualitative bias. Both biases were in keeping with paternal evaluative histories. Greater disruption of LN task performance may have been the result of responses, such as anxiety, associated with their negative bias.     

Can buy me love: Mate attraction goals lead to perceptual readiness for status products

Exposure to mating cues activates the goal to signal one's mate value to members of the opposite sex. This mate attraction goal may render men perceptually ready for products that signal their mate value to women. As men's mate value is partly determined by their financial prospects, men may be more likely to notice products that would signal their financial resources to women. The current study demonstrates that exposure to a sexily dressed woman increases single men's likelihood of noticing status products in a visual display. Not only do these findings further support the link between conspicuous consumption and male mating strategies, they are the first to demonstrate perceptual readiness for indirect (i.e., products) rather than direct (i.e., opposite sex individuals) means for reproduction.     

The evolution of human mating: trade-offs and strategic pluralism

During human evolutionary history, there were "trade-offs" between expending time and energy on child-rearing and mating, so both men and women evolved conditional mating strategies guided by cues signaling the circumstances. Many short-term matings might be successful for some men; others might try to find and keep a single mate, investing their effort in rearing her offspring. Recent evidence suggests that men with features signaling genetic benefits to offspring should be preferred by women as short-term mates, but there are trade-offs between a mate's genetic fitness and his willingness to help in child-rearing. It is these circumstances and the cues that signal them that underlie the variation in short- and long-term mating strategies between and within the sexes.     

The allure of forbidden food: On the role of attention in self-regulation

The aim of the present studies was to examine the impact of food cues on restrained eaters’ attention for food. Previous research has shown that restrained eaters spontaneously activate hedonic thoughts in response to palatable food cues, and that such food cues also lead them to inhibit their dieting goal. We argue that as a consequence, restrained eaters’ selective attention will automatically be drawn towards hedonically relevant food items. Consistent with our expectations, the results of two studies revealed that restrained eaters, but not unrestrained eaters, displayed an attentional bias for hedonically rated food items when they had been pre-exposed to food cues. However, this attentional bias did not occur when restrained eaters were primed with the concept of dieting, thereby rendering the regulation of eating behavior more successful. These findings are discussed in the context of implicit processes in self-regulation.     

Intending or Pretending? Automatic Evaluations of Goal Cues Discriminate True and False Intentions

This research presents a novel approach to discriminating between true and deceptive statements about intended future behavior. Arguing that true intentions are goal‐directed, we predict that people who genuinely intend to pursue a reported goal will implicitly evaluate goal‐relevant cues positively, whereas people who do not intend to pursue the goal will not. Participants in an experiment were instructed to tell the truth about a planned future behavior (true intention) or to falsely report that same behavior to mask their actual mock‐criminal intention (false intention). As predicted, an evaluative priming task showed that participants with true intention exhibited implicit positive evaluations of cues relevant to the reported goal, whereas participants with false intention did not. Subsequent analyses showed that implicit positivity significantly discriminated between true and false intentions. The findings are discussed in terms of theoretical contributions and implications for the development of future detection tools. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Saying no to negativity: The effects of context and motivation to control prejudice on automatic evaluative responses

The current research explored the interaction of context and motivation to control prejudice reactions (MCPR) on automatic evaluative responses toward individuals of different races. Three studies incorporated contextual backgrounds into an evaluative priming procedure. Across all three studies, White participants low in MCPR demonstrated automatic ingroup biases when threatening contexts were presented. However, in contexts where targets could be construed as threatening, Whites high in MCPR showed automatic outgroup biases in favor of Blacks over Whites. Importantly, this outgroup bias was driven by an automatic inhibition of negative responses toward Blacks. The results indicate that even at the automatic level, people high in motivation to control prejudice can inhibit negative responses toward Blacks in contexts that have cues associated with prejudice.     

Infants' perception of goal-directed actions: development through cue-based bootstrapping

It is now widely accepted that sensitivity to goal-directed actions emerges during the first year of life. However, controversy still surrounds the question of how this sensitivity emerges and develops. One set of views emphasizes the role of observing behavioral cues, while another emphasizes the role of experience with producing own action. In a series of four experiments we contrast these two views. In Experiment 1, it was shown that infants as young as 6 months old can interpret an unfamiliar human action as goal-directed when the action involves equifinal variations. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that 12- and 9-month-olds are also able to attribute goals to an inanimate action if it displays behavioral cues such as self-propelledness and an action-effect. In Experiment 4, we found that even 6-months-olds can encode the goal object of an inanimate action if all three cues, equifinality, self-propelledness and an action-effect, were present. These findings suggest that the ability to ascribe goal-directedness does not necessarily emerge from hands-on experience with particular actions and that it is independent from the specific appearance of the actor as long as sufficient behavioral cues are available. We propose a cue-based bootstrapping model in which an initial sensitivity to behavioral cues leads to learning about further cues. The further cues in turn inform about different kinds of goal-directed agents and about different types of actions. By uniting an innate base with a learning process, cue-based bootstrapping can help reconcile divergent views on the emergence of infants' ability to understand actions as goal-directed.     

On the Road to the Unconscious Self: Understanding when People Gain Self‐knowledge of Implicit Disgust Sensitivity from Behavioural Cues

On the basis of an integration of dual‐process models of information processing and the lens model framework of person perception, we conducted two studies to investigate whether self‐perceivers could detect their implicit disposition from video feedback of behavioural cues and whether these cues were used for explicit dispositional inferences under conditions that maximized the presumed self‐perception process. Using an approach that differed from previous research, we used the following: (i) a more detailed and stepwise self‐perception procedure; (ii) a specific explicit measure compared with a global explicit measure; and (iii) disgust sensitivity as a domain with clear, unambiguous cues and an assumed low self‐presentation bias. The results from two studies (N = 117 and N = 130) on disgust sensitivity provide the first evidence for the assumed process with regard to bodily reaction cues but not with regard to facial expression cues. These novel findings suggest that people can get to know their unconscious selves better if supporting conditions are met and the right behavioural cues are attended to. Additional boundary conditions of this self‐perception process were investigated using display rules and need for closure in Study 2. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Toward a psychophysics of agency: detecting gain and loss of control over auditory action effects

Theories of agency--the feeling of being in control of one's actions and their effects--emphasize either perceptual or cognitive aspects. This study addresses both aspects simultaneously in a finger-tapping paradigm. The tasks required participants to detect when synchronization of their taps with computer-controlled tones changed to self-controlled production of tones, or the reverse. For comparison, the tone sequences recorded in these active tapping conditions were also presented in passive listening conditions, in which participants had to detect the transition from computer to human control, or vice versa. Signal detection theory was applied to separate sensitivity from bias. Sensorimotor cues to agency were found to increase sensitivity in the active conditions compared with the passive conditions, which provided only perceptual cues. Analysis of bias revealed a tendency to attribute action effects to self-control. Thus, judgments of agency rely on veridical sensorimotor cues but can also be subject to cognitive bias.     

The role of aesthetic sensitivity in body dysmorphic disorder

Individuals with a higher aesthetic sensitivity may be more vulnerable to developing body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). Aesthetic sensitivity has 3 components: (a) perceptual, (b) emotional, and (c) evaluative. Individuals with BDD (n = 50) were compared with a control group of individuals with an education or employment in art and design related fields (n = 50) and a control group of individuals without aesthetic training (n = 50). A facial photograph of each participant was manipulated to create a 9-image symmetry continuum. Presented with the continuum on a computer, participants were required to select and rate the image representing their self-actual, self-ideal, idea of perfect, most physically attractive, most pleasure, and most disgust. Control symmetry continua examined the specificity of the disturbance. As predicted, BDD participants displayed no distortion in their perceptual processing but were disturbed in their negative emotional/evaluative processing of their self-image. A significant discrepancy between their self-actual and self-ideal, resulting from an absent self-serving bias in their self-actual (a bias exhibited by controls) appears to be the source of their disturbance. They also overvalued the importance of appearance and self-objectified. These aesthetic evaluations may predispose individuals to BDD and/or maintain the disorder.     

Post-Evaluative Biases Toward Somatic Stimuli and Cardiovascular Responses in Social Anxiety

Cognitive models of social anxiety emphasize the role of an attentional shift toward cues related to somatic state in social anxiety. We examined attentional biases to somatic cues and cardiovascular reactivity in response to a social evaluative task. Participants performed an impromptu speech during which they received standardized negative evaluative comments. Participants then completed a dot-probe task with social evaluative, somatic, and anger-related words. Blood pressure (BP) and heart rate (HR) were assessed in 1-minute intervals during baseline, the speech task, and the dot-probe task. Despite the fact that a high social anxiety group reported higher levels of anxiety, high and low social anxiety groups did not differ in their speech task-evoked BP or HR responses. Furthermore, the high social anxiety group, compared to the low social anxiety group, exhibited greater attentional biases to somatic words, suggesting greater attention directed toward information pertinent to somatic arousal.     

Great apes infer others’ goals based on context

In previous studies claiming to demonstrate that great apes understand the goals of others, the apes could potentially have been using subtle behavioral cues present during the test to succeed. In the current studies, we ruled out the use of such cues by making the behavior of the experimenter identical in the test phase of both the experimental and control conditions; the only difference was the preceding “context.” In the first study, apes interpreted a human’s ambiguous action as having the underlying goal of opening a box, or not, based on that human’s previous actions with similar boxes. In the second study, chimpanzees learned that when a human stood up she was going to go get food for them, but when a novel, unexpected event happened, they changed their expectation—presumably based on their understanding that this new event led the human to change her goal. These studies suggest that great apes do not need concurrent behavioral cues to infer others’ goals, but can do so from a variety of different types of cues—even cues displaced in time.     

不同线索下特质焦虑个体的返回抑制

焦虑与注意偏向的研究是近年来情绪与认知领域的热点。为探讨特质焦虑个体的注意偏向特点及其返回抑制能力是否受不同线索的调节, 采用特质焦虑量表筛选高特质焦虑大学生29名, 低特质焦虑大学生28名完成线索-靶子任务。要求被试在提示线索消失后, 对位置进行快而准地辨别反应, 分别探索中性和情绪性提示线索下被试的返回抑制。结果发现：(1)在中性线索条件下, 高焦虑个体平均反应时慢于低焦虑个体。(2) 在情绪线索条件下, 高焦虑个体在负性线索下的反应时小于在正性线索下的反应时; 高、低焦虑个体在各种SOA条件下均出现了返回抑制, 但各组返回抑制量受到情绪线索的调节：在正性情绪线索条件下, 两组返回抑制量没有显著差异; 在负性情绪线索下, 高焦虑个体返回抑制量显著小于低焦虑个体。这表明, (1)焦虑个体的注意偏向受到刺激信息的影响：只对负性情绪线索出现注意警觉; (2)只有在涉及负性情绪信息时高、低焦虑个体返回抑制能力才有差异, 高焦虑个体存在对负性情绪线索的抑制困难。     

Effect of training and familiarity on responsiveness to human cues in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris)

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) seem to possess an evolved competency to follow human-given cues, often out-performing their wild progenitor the wolf (Canis lupus) on cue-following tasks. However, domestication may not be solely responsible for the socio-cognitive skills of dogs, with ontogenetic experience also playing a role. This research evaluated the effects of intensive training on cue-following behaviour using an unreinforced object-choice paradigm. The responses of dogs that were trained to competitive levels were compared to those of pet dogs with only basic training, and dogs living in an animal shelter that demonstrated no or only rudimentary following of basic commands. Using a cue-following task where three types of cues were presented by familiar and unfamiliar human partners, the number of cues followed by each training group were recorded. All dogs found cues where gesture was combined with a congruent head and eye movement easier to follow than either gesture or eye gaze alone. Whether the cue-giver was familiar or not had a significant effect on number of cues followed in homed dogs, and the performance of shelter dogs was comparable to the other groups when faced with an unfamiliar cue-giver. Contrary to predictions, level of training did not improve performance on the cue-following task. This work does provide support for the presence of an evolved adaptation to exploit social cues provided by humans that can be augmented by familiarity with the cue giver. However, additional joint activity as experienced in an intensive training regime does not seem to increase accuracy in following human-given cues.     

Relationship Trajectories: A Meta-Theoretical Framework and Theoretical Applications

This article introduces a metatheoretical framework—the Relationship Trajectories Framework—that conceptualizes how human mating relationships develop across their complete time span, from the moment two people meet until the relationship ends. The framework depicts relationships as arc-shaped evaluative trajectories that vary on five dimensions: shape (which includes ascent, peak, and descent), fluctuation, threshold, composition, and density. The framework can depict single trajectories in isolation or two partners’ trajectories with respect to each other (dyadic trajectories). Two theoretical models demonstrate the generative power of the framework—the relationship coordination and strategic timing (ReCAST) model and the sociosexuality trajectory model—both of which integrate close relationships and evolutionary psychological perspectives on mating. Finally, additional examples illustrate how the framework can generate new research questions about core relationships topics.     

Evaluative expectations and the gender schema: Is failed inconsistency better?

Are evaluative assessments a part of the information that constitutes the gender stereotype? Two studies tested this question by presenting participants (50 female and 43 male college students, for whom English was their native language) with information that manipulated both the knowledge of gender roles and the evaluative assessments of performance in those roles. Participants tried to learn statements like “Jane is a good nurse” or “John is a bad nurse.” Memory for these relationships was then tested. Results indicated that when the person's name and the role were consistent with the gender stereotype, a positive evaluative connection made the statement easier to recall than a negative evaluative connection. However, an inconsistent name—role pairing was easier to recall when the evaluative connection was negative rather than positive. The results are interpreted as support for an evaluative bias that is part of the knowledge associated with gender differences.     

Low self-esteem and the neural basis of attentional bias for social rejection cues: Evidence from the N2pc ERP component

Previous studies have indicated that individuals with low self-esteem show an attentional bias toward information concerning social rejection. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether task-irrelevant rejection cues could capture the visuo-spatial attention of low self-esteem individuals during a demanding visual detection task. The N2pc ERP component was measured as an index of the allocation of spatial attention. Results revealed that rejection cues induced greater N2pc component responses among individuals with low levels of self-esteem than for those with high levels of self-esteem. These results suggest that task-irrelevant rejection cues are likely to capture the attention of individuals with low self-esteem but not those with high self-esteem. These findings provide direct electrophysiological support for the idea that individuals with low levels of self-esteem show an attentional bias for cues related to social rejection.     

食物线索注意偏向及其神经机制

与其他类型的刺激相比, 个体会优先注意食物相关刺激, 即对食物刺激的注意偏向。对影响食物线索注意偏向个体因素研究的分析发现：(1)在状态因素中, 饥饿以及与自我威胁有关的、唤起强度大的负性情绪对食物线索注意偏向有增强作用, 这在注意加工的早期和晚期都有体现; (2)在特质因素中, 行为研究发现, 相比于体重正常个体和非限制性饮食者, 超重/肥胖个体以及唤起节食目标的成功限制性饮食者没有更强的注意偏向, 但是, ERP研究发现, 在注意加工的早期阶段, 就出现了特质因素对食物线索注意偏向的影响; (3) fMRI研究发现, 对食物线索的注意过程伴随着脑岛、眶额叶皮层等与奖励相关的脑区及视觉注意网络的激活。未来研究需要：(1)从动态角度研究注意偏向, 进一步提高测量的信度; (2)使用专门的范式探究个体因素影响注意偏向的神经机制; (3)严格分离不同状态因素; (4)对被试进行严谨筛选和划分, 做好被试间的对比研究。     

Overt attention and predictiveness in human contingency learning

Two experiments used eye-tracking procedures to investigate the relationship between attention and associative learning in human participants. These experiments found greater overt attention to cues experienced as predictive of the outcomes with which they were paired, than to cues experienced as nonpredictive. Moreover, this attentional bias persisted into a second training phase when all cues were equally predictive of the outcomes with which they were paired, and it was accompanied by a related bias in the rate of learning about these cues. These findings are consistent with the attentional model of associative learning proposed by Mackintosh (1975), but not with that proposed by Pearce and Hall (1980).