Chapter 5 Flashcards
(20 cards)
Why Men Might Benefit From Commitment and Marriage (9 reasons)
(1) increased odds of succeeding in attracting a man
(2) increased ability to attract a more desirable mate
(3) increased paternity certainty,
(4) increased survival of his children
(5) increased reproductive success of children accrued through paternal investment
(6) increased social status
(7) added coalitional allies
(8) access to his partner’s resources and status
(9) increased lifespan.
estrus
the time during which she (a female chimpanzee) releases her eggs and shows maximal sexual receptivity.
How do humans show a markedly different form of mating from chimpanzees?
(1) women’s ovulation is relatively concealed or cryptic
(2) sexual activity among most humans occurs throughout the woman’s ovulation cycle
When ovulation is not advertised, how could males discern a female’s reproductive status?
The woman’s scent and appearance change to become more appealing
Reproductive value
the number of children a person of a given age and sex is likely
to have in the future.
fertility
actual reproductive performance
The constituents of beauty are neither _____ nor ________
arbitrary; culture bound
standards of beauty seem to emerge early in life and are to some extent consistent across cultures. Why would this be?
In some domains, ancestral men confronted a different set of adaptive mating problems than did ancestral women, and so their descendants are predicted to hold a somewhat different set of mate preferences as adaptive solutions. These preferences start with one of the most powerful cues to a woman’s reproductive status—her age.
Men universally prefer _______________ as brides
Younger women
Men desire young women because over evolutionary time, youth has consistently been linked with fertility. This explanation accounts for two facts that all other theories have difculty explaining:
(1) that men desire women who are increasingly
younger than they are as the men themselves get older
(2) that teenage males prefer women a few years older than they are, despite the fact that such women rarely reward them for such interest.
Men who are 50, for example, prefer women who are in their mid-30s (in sharp contrast to men’s age preferences for a short-term mate, which remain at the age of peak fertility. There are a few possible explanations:
(1) older men may have difficulty in actually attracting dramatically younger women, and their preferences may refect a compromise between their ideal and what they can get
(2) large age discrepancies may create less compatibility, greater marital confict, and more marital instability.
(3) modern marriage likely differs from ancestral marriage.
Our ancestors had access to two types of observable evidence of a woman’s reproductive value:
(1) features of physical appearance, such as full lips, clear skin, smooth skin, clear eyes, lustrous hair, good muscle tone, and body fat distribution
(2) features of behavior, such as a bouncy, youthful gait, an animated facial expression, and a high energy level.
Exploiting the new technology of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists Itzhak Aharon, Nancy Etcof, and their colleagues sought to identify the “reward value” of different images. They exposed heterosexual male participants to four sets of faces differing in attractiveness, as determined by prior ratings:
attractive females, average females, attractive males, and average males
When men looked at attractive female faces, the ____________ area of the brain became especially activated.
nucleus accumbens
U.S. women think that men want them to be _________ than is in fact the case.
thinner
Because of the abundance of cues conveyed by a woman’s physical appearance, and because male standards of beauty have evolved to correspond to these cues:
men place a premium on physical appearance and attractiveness in their mate preferences.
There are several lines of evidence that suggest that men might, in fact, be able to detect when women ovulate: (11 lines of evidence)
(1) during ovulation, women’s skin becomes sufused
with blood. This corresponds to the “glow” that women sometimes appear to have, a healthy reddening of the cheeks.
(2) women’s skin lightens slightly during ovulation as compared
with other times of the menstrual cycle—a cue universally thought to be a sexual attractant
(3) during ovulation, women’s level of circulating estrogen increases, which produces a corresponding decrease in women’s WHR (waist-to-hip ratio)
(4) ovulating women are touched more often by men in singles bars (5) men fnd the body odor of women to be more attractive and pleasant smelling during the follicular stage of the menstrual cycle
(6) men who smell T-shirts worn by ovulating women display a subsequent rise in testosterone levels compared to men who smell
shirts worn by non-ovulating women or shirts with a control scent
(7) there are vocal cues to ovulation—women’s voices rise in pitch, in the attractive feminine direction, at ovulation
(8) women’s faces are judged by both sexes to be more attractive during the fertile than during the luteal phase
(9) men perceive their romantic partners to be more attractive around ovulation
(10) women report feeling more attractive and desirable, as well as an increased interest in sex, around the time of ovulation
(11) a study of professional lap dancers working in
gentlemen’s clubs found that ovulating women received signifcantly higher tips than women in the non-ovulation phases of their cycle
Our forebears could have solved this uniquely male adaptive problem by seeking qualities in a potential mate that might increase the odds of securing their paternity. At least two preferences
in a mate could solve the problem for males:
(1) the desire for premarital chastity
(2) the quest for postmarital sexual fdelity.
Marriage patterns in the United States today confrm the fact that ________________ are most able to actualize their preferences.
men with resources
There could be at least two different reasons for the link between T (testosterone) and relationship status:
(1) T levels drop after becoming involved in a committed relationship. Alternatively, perhaps men with low T levels are more likely to get into committed relationships, whereas high-T men prefer to remain free to pursue short-term mating.
(2) a longitudinal study found that divorced men who remarry experience a subsequent drop in T levels. These findings suggest that T levels drop after forming a committed relationship.
