Women's preferences for male behavioral displays change across the menstrual cycle

Abstract— Women prefer both the scent of symmetrical men and masculine male faces more during the fertile (late follicular and ovulatory) phases of their menstrual cycles than during their infertile (e.g., luteal) phases. Men's behavioral displays in social settings may convey signals that affect women's attraction to men even more strongly. This study examined shifts in women's preferences for these behavioral displays. A sample of 237 normally ovulating women viewed 36 or 40 videotaped men who were competing for a potential lunch date and then rated each man's attractiveness as a short-term and a long-term mate. As predicted, women's preference for men who displayed social presence and direct intrasexual competitiveness increased on high-fertility days relative to low-fertility days, but only in a short-term, not a long-term, mating context. These findings add to the growing literature indicating that women's mate preferences systematically vary across the reproductive cycle.     

What makes the windows task difficult for young children: rule inference or rule use?

The windows task is difficult for young children. In this task, a child is shown two boxes with windows revealing that one is empty, whereas the other contains a treat. The child is asked to point to a box for an opponent to look in. The child then "wins" the contents of the other box (the treat). To pass the task, the child must use a rule such as "point to the empty box." But crucially, because the child is not told this rule by the experimenter, he or she must first infer it. Therefore, the windows task has two distinct requirements: (a) infer the rule "point to the empty box" and, once the rule is inferred, (b) use the rule by holding it in mind while inhibiting the prepotent response of pointing to the treat. In this study, the authors sought to determine which of these two requirements was responsible for poor performance on the windows task. They compared the performance of 3(1/2)-year-olds (N=40) on four tasks: the standard windows task, a version of the windows task that required rule use but not rule inference, and two versions of the day-night task that also required rule use but not rule inference. The relative performance on these four tasks and the pattern of correlations among them suggested that children had difficulty in inferring a rule that enables them to pass the task, whereas they had little difficulty in using the rule. Little evidence was obtained to suggest that the standard windows task requires inhibition.     

Active prompting to decrease cell phone use and increase seat belt use while driving

Automobile crashes are the leading cause of death for those aged 3 to 33, with 43,005 (118 per day) Americans killed in 2002 alone. Seat belt use reduces the risk of serious injury in an accident, and refraining from using a cell phone while driving reduces the risk of an accident. Cell phone use while driving increases accident rates, and leads to 2,600 U.S. fatalities each year. An active prompting procedure was employed to increase seat belt use and decrease cell phone use among drivers exiting a university parking lot. A multiple baseline with reversal design was used to evaluate the presentation of two signs: "Please Hang Up, I Care" and "Please Buckle Up, I Care." The proportion of drivers who complied with the seat belt prompt was high and in line with previous research. The proportion of drivers who hung up their cell phones in response to the prompt was about equal to that of the seat belt prompt. A procedure that reduces cell phone use among automobile drivers is a significant contribution to the behavioral safety literature.     

Response to commentary on the multimodal treatment study of ADHD (MTA): mining the meaning of the MTA

In the December 2000 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, we published a set of papers presenting secondary analyses of the Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD (MTA), and R. A. Barkley (2000) provided a commentary. A critique of the design of the study (MTA Cooperative Group, 1999) was presented based on a theoretical perspective of a behavioral inhibition deficit that has been hypothesized as the core deficit of ADHD (R. A. Barkley, 1997). The commentary questioned the design and analysis of the MTA in terms of (1) the empirical criteria for selection of components of behavioral (Beh) intervention, (2) the effectiveness of the Beh intervention, (3) the methods for analyses at the group and individual level, (4) implications of the MTA findings for clinical practice, (5) the role of genetics in response to treatment, and (6) the lack of a nontreatment control group. In this response, we relate the content of the papers to the commentary, (1) by reviewing the selection criteria for the Beh treatment, as outlined by K. C. Wells, W. E. Pelham, et al. (2000), (2) by addressing the myth that the MTA Beh treatment was ineffective (Pelham, 1999), (3) by describing the use of analyses at the level of the individual participant, as presented by J. S. March et al. (2000) and W. E. Pelham et al. (2000) as well as elsewhere by J. M. Swanson et al. (2001) and C. K. Conners et al. (2001), (4) by relating some of the suggestions from the secondary analyses about clinically relevant factors such as comorbidity (as presented by J. S. March et al., 2000) and family and parental characteristics (as presented by B. Hoza et al., 2000, S. P. Hinshaw et al., 2000, and K. C. Wells, J. N. Epstein, et al., 2000), (5) by discussing the statistical concept of heritability and the lack of a significant difference in the presence of ADHD symptoms in parents of the MTA families compared to parents in the classmate-control families (as presented by J. N. Epstein, et al., 2000), and (6) by acknowledging that an ethically necessary weakness of the MTA design is that it did not include a no-treatment control group. We discuss the use of secondary analyses to suggest how, when, and for what subgroups effectiveness of the Beh treatment may have been manifested. Finally, we invite others to use the large and rich data set that will soon be available in the public domain, to perform secondary analyses to mine the meaning of the MTA and to evaluate theories of ADHD and response to treatments.     

Semantic and phonological influences on the processing of words and pseudohomophones

In two experiments, we investigated the relationship between semantics and phonology in the lexical decision task. In the first experiment, lexical decisions to words with large semantic neighborhoods were faster than those to words with sparse semantic neighborhoods. Conversely, this effect of semantic neighborhood was reversed for pseudohomophones (e.g., nale). That is, pseudohomophones based on words with large semantic neighborhoods took longer to reject than did those based on words with sparse semantic neighborhoods. In the second experiment, we found the magnitude of the semantic neighborhood effect for words to be a function of nonword foil type. Taken together, these results indicate that semantic neighborhood size affects processing of both words and pseudohomophones, and that the effect of semantic neighborhood size for words is more pronounced when pseudohomophone foils are employed. These effects are discussed in terms of a model in which the orthographic, phonological, and semantic systems are fully interactive.     

Comparison of 26-item and 20-item versions of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale for psychiatric outpatients

This study compared the 20-item revised Toronto Alexithymia Scale with the 26-item version for 257 psychiatric outpatients. Scores on the 20-item version significantly correlated with those on the 26-item inventory even when controlled for depressed mood. Furthermore, the 20-item scale showed greater internal consistency. Factor analysis for both versions indicated three subfactors but the factors in the TAS-20 accounted for greater common variance (92%) than for the factors in the TAS-26 (78%). The total variance accounted for by these factors on the TAS-20 (45%) was also greater than for the TAS-26 (38%).     

Dual-task performance as a function of adult age and task complexity

A dual-task procedure was used to examine capacity demands of letter-matching in younger and older adults. Older subjects generally were slower on both tasks than were younger adults, but this difference was especially pronounced for the late stages of category matching, suggesting that retrieval and comparison of category information is particularly demanding for older adults.     

Toward an Evolutionary History of Female Sociosexual Variation

ABSTRACT Considerable progress has been made in behavioral genetics toward providing theoretical accounts of individual differences One theoretical task, however, has been largely neglected—that of constructing evolutionary accounts of behaviorally relevant genetic variance We attempt to address this task with respect to the genetic variance underlying sociosexuality, that is, the differences in the implicit prerequisites (in terms of time, attachment, commitment, etc) to entering a sexual relationship Specifically, we argue that genetic variance on this trait for females could have been maintained through frequency-dependent selection In our evolutionary past, restricted females-those who require relatively more time, attachment, and commitment-could have benefited through paternal investment in their offspring Unrestricted females—those who require relatively less time, attachment, and commitment—could have benefited through the quality of their mate's genes passed on to their sons Moreover, the value of these alternate „strategies” could have been frequency-dependent One prediction that follows from this evolutionary history is tested and supported in three studies Those females genetically predisposed to be unrestricted are found to produce relatively more sons than females predisposed to be restricted Additional predictions are offered and alternative accounts are discussed