Evolution & Human Behavior RSS feed: Current Issue. Evolution and Human Behavior is an interdisciplinary journal, presenting research reports and theory in which evolutionary perspectives are brought to bear on the study of human behavior. It is primarily a scientific journal, but submissions from scholars in the humanities are also encouraged. Papers reporting on theoretical and empirical work on other species will be welcome if their relevance to the human animal is apparent. http://www.ehbonline.org/?rss=yesElsevier Inc.en © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Evolution & Human Behavior1090-5138333May 2012 © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. healthpermissions@elsevier.comhttp://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513811000821/abstract?rss=yesAbstract: Recently, Weston et al. (2004; Wide faces or large canines? The attractive versus the aggressive primate. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 271, 416–419) found that facial width-to-height ratio (WHR) is a sexually dimorphic characteristic in humans; males have higher facial WHR than females. Following this study, Carré et al. (2008; In your face: facial metrics predict aggressive behavior in the laboratory and in varsity and professional hockey players. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 275, 2651–2656) found that individual differences in facial WHR accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in aggressive behavior of men, but not women. I tested these two hypotheses in a sample of 470 Turkish university students. Facial WHR was measured from frontal photographs. I also measured the aggressiveness level of 212 individuals using the Buss and Perry aggressiveness questionnaire. The mean facial WHR (and standard deviation) was 1.89±0.12 for males and 1.91±0.11 for females. There was no relationship between facial WHR and the self-reported aggressive behavior for either sex. The facial WHR is not a sexually dimorphic characteristic (at least) for Turkish people, and it does not appear to be associated with self-reported trait aggression.Facial width-to-height ratio in a Turkish population is not sexually dimorphic and is unrelated to aggressive behaviorBarış Özener10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.08.001Evolution & Human Behavior 33, 3 (2012)2011-11-07Evolution & Human Behavior2011-11-07333S1090-5138(12)X0003-5Original Articles169173http://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513811000857/abstract?rss=yesAbstract: The recalibrational theory of human anger predicts positive correlations between aggressive formidability and anger levels in males, and between physical attractiveness and anger levels in females. We tested these predictions by using a three-dimensional body scanner to collect anthropometric data about male aggressive formidability (measures of upper body muscularity and leg–body ratio) and female bodily attractiveness (waist–hip ratio, body mass index, overall body shape femininity, and several other measures). Predictions were partially supported: in males, two of three anger measures correlated significantly positively with several muscularity measures; in females, self-perceived attractiveness correlated significantly positively with two anger measures. However, most of these significant results were observed only after excluding from the sample 27 participants who were older than undergraduate age, leaving a subsample of 40 males and 51 females. Evidence for relationships between anthropometric attractiveness indicators and anger measures was weak, but there was some evidence for relationships between anthropometric attractiveness indicators and self-perceived attractiveness measures. While our results support the recalibrational theory's prediction that anger usage and formidability are positively correlated in males and suggest that this formidability can be assessed via anthropometric measures alone, they also suggest that this prediction may not apply to populations older than undergraduate age. Further, our results suggest that while female anger levels relate positively to self-perceived attractiveness, they are unrelated to most anthropometric measures of bodily attractiveness.Anthropometric correlates of human angerMichael E. Price, James Dunn, Sian Hopkins, Jinsheng Kang10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.08.004Evolution & Human Behavior 33, 3 (2012)2011-10-13Evolution & Human Behavior2011-10-13333S1090-5138(12)X0003-5Original Articles174181http://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513811000997/abstract?rss=yesAbstract: Previous evolutionary literature demonstrating risk taking as a male mating strategy ignored cultural influences and the function of risk avoiding for women. The present research is the first to support the hypothesis that risk taking and risk avoiding, respectively, reflect Chinese male and female mating strategies. In Study 1, when under the impression of being watched by the opposite sex, Chinese men took more risks and women took fewer risks than when watched by a same sex or alone. In Study 2, Chinese male risk taking and female risk avoiding were positively related to their mating-related evaluation of the opposite-sex observer, and these results were reinforced by behavioral findings in Study 3. The implications of the findings regarding Chinese traditional mate preference and the evolutionary mechanism behind it are discussed.Mating strategies in Chinese culture: female risk avoiding vs. male risk takingWen Shan, Jin Shenghua, Hunter Morgan Davis, Kaiping Peng, Xiao Shao, Youyou Wu, Shuqing Liu, Jiewen Lu, Jinhua Yang, Weiqing Zhang, Miao Qiao, Jing Wang, Yi Wang10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.09.001Evolution & Human Behavior 33, 3 (2012)2011-12-26Evolution & Human Behavior2011-12-26333S1090-5138(12)X0003-5Original Articles182192http://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513811001000/abstract?rss=yesAbstract: Sexually dimorphic characteristics in men may act as cues, advertising long-term health, dominance, and reproductive potential to prospective mates. Evolution has accordingly adapted human cognition so that women perceive sexually dimorphic facial features as important when judging the attractiveness and suitability of potential mates. Here we provide evidence showing, for the first time, that women's memory for details encountered in recently experienced episodes is also systematically biased by the presence of men's facial cues signaling enhanced or reduced sexual dimorphism. Importantly, the direction and strength of this bias are predicted by individual differences in women's preferences for masculine versus feminine facial features in men and are triggered specifically while viewing images of male but not female faces. No analogous effects were observed in male participants viewing images of feminized and masculinized women's faces despite the fact that male participants showed strong preferences for feminized facial features. These findings reveal a preference-dependent memory enhancement in women that would promote retention of information from encounters with preferred potential mates. We propose that women's memory for recently experienced episodes may therefore be functionally specialized for mate choice and in particular for the comparative evaluation of alternative potential mates. This also raises the possibility that similar specialization may be present in other species where it has been established that precursor, ‘episodic-like’ forms of memory exist.Evidence of adaptation for mate choice within women's memoryKevin Allan, Benedict C. Jones, Lisa M. DeBruine, David S. Smith10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.09.002Evolution & Human Behavior 33, 3 (2012)2011-12-26Evolution & Human Behavior2011-12-26333S1090-5138(12)X0003-5Original Articles193199http://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513811001012/abstract?rss=yesAbstract: Previous research has posited that facial expressions of emotion may serve as honest signals of cooperation. Although findings from several empirical studies support this position, prior studies have not used comprehensive and dynamic measures of facial expression as potential predictors of behaviorally defined cooperation. The authors investigated (a) specific positive and negative facial actions displayed among strangers immediately following verbal promises of commitment within an unrestricted acquaintance period and (b) anonymous, behaviorally defined decisions of cooperation or defection in a one-shot, two-person Prisoner's Dilemma game occurring directly following the acquaintance period. The Facial Action Coding System [Ekman P. & Friesen W.V. (1978). Facial Action Coding System. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychology Press] was used to measure affect-related facial actions. It was found that facial actions related to enjoyment were predictive of cooperative decisions within dyads; additionally, facial actions related to contempt were predictive of noncooperative decisions within dyads. Furthermore, and consistent with previous works, participants were able to accurately predict their partner's decisions following the acquaintance period. These results suggest that facial actions may function as honest signals of cooperative intent. These findings also provide a possible explanation for the association between subjective affective experience and facial expression that advances understanding of cooperative behavior.Facial expressions as honest signals of cooperative intent in a one-shot anonymous Prisoner's Dilemma gameLawrence Ian Reed, Katharine N. Zeglen, Karen L. Schmidt10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.09.003Evolution & Human Behavior 33, 3 (2012)2011-12-26Evolution & Human Behavior2011-12-26333S1090-5138(12)X0003-5Original Articles200209http://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513811001024/abstract?rss=yesAbstract: It may be adaptive for voters to recognize good leadership qualities among politicians. Men with lower-pitched voices are found to be more dominant and attractive than are men with higher-pitched voices. Candidate attractiveness and vocal quality relate to voting behavior, but no study has tested the influence of voice pitch on voting-related perceptions. We tested whether voice pitch influenced perceptions of politicians and how these perceptions related to voting behavior. In Study 1, we manipulated voice pitch of recordings of US presidents and asked participants to attribute personality traits to the voices and to choose the voice they preferred to vote for. We found that lower-pitched voices were associated with favorable personality traits more often than were higher-pitched voices and that people preferred to vote for politicians with lower-pitched rather than higher-pitched voices. Furthermore, lower voice pitch was more strongly associated with physical prowess than with integrity in a wartime voting scenario. Thus, sensitivity to vocal cues to dominance was heightened during wartime. In Study 2, we found that participants preferred to vote for the candidate with the lower-pitched voice when given the choice between two unfamiliar men's voices speaking a neutral sentence. Taken together, our results suggest that candidates' voice pitch has an important influence on voting behavior and that men with lower-pitched voices may have an advantage in political elections.Voice pitch influences voting behaviorCara C. Tigue, Diana J. Borak, Jillian J.M. O'Connor, Charles Schandl, David R. Feinberg10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.09.004Evolution & Human Behavior 33, 3 (2012)2011-11-16Evolution & Human Behavior2011-11-16333S1090-5138(12)X0003-5Original Articles210216http://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513811001036/abstract?rss=yesAbstract: At an ultimate level of explanation, the causes of incest aversion have been linked to the reproductive costs of inbreeding, whereas at a proximate level of explanation, experienced environmental cues relating to the successful recognition of kin have been shown to moderate both the likelihood of engaging in incest and the aversion to descriptions of third-party incest. However, little is known concerning how incest aversion is moderated by evolutionarily relevant factors presented in such descriptions. As disgust has been suggested to down-regulate incestuous sexual interest, we investigated to what extent the gender, biological relatedness, co-residence, and family-relationship type of actors described in incest scenarios moderate the elicited disgust of men and women reading those descriptions. Analyzing responses from 434 participants, we found that women are more disgusted by incest than men, that descriptions of biological incest elicited more disgust than sociolegal incest, that descriptions of incest between family members having co-resided elicited more disgust than incest between family members growing up apart, and that descriptions of incest between a parent and a child elicited more disgust than incest between siblings. Our conclusion is that variations in the degree of disgust elicited by descriptions of third-party incest are consistent with evolutionary hypotheses concerning inbreeding avoidance.Disgust elicited by third-party incest: the roles of biological relatedness, co-residence, and family relationshipJan Antfolk, Mira Karlsson, Anna Bäckström, Pekka Santtila10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.09.005Evolution & Human Behavior 33, 3 (2012)2011-12-26Evolution & Human Behavior2011-12-26333S1090-5138(12)X0003-5Original Articles217223http://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513811001061/abstract?rss=yesAbstract: The propensity for religious belief and behavior is a universal feature of human societies, but religious practice often imposes substantial costs upon its practitioners. This suggests that during human cultural evolution, the costs associated with religiosity might have been traded off for psychological or social benefits that redounded to fitness on average. One possible benefit of religious belief and behavior, which virtually every world religion extols, is delay of gratification—that is, the ability to forego small rewards available immediately in the interest of obtaining larger rewards that are available only after a time delay. In this study, we found that religious commitment was associated with a tendency to forgo immediate rewards in order to gain larger, future rewards. We also found that this relationship was partially mediated by future time orientation, which is a subjective sense that the future is very close in time and is approaching rapidly. Although the effect sizes of these associations were relatively small in magnitude, they were obtained even when controlling for sex and the Big Five personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism).Religious people discount the future lessEvan C. Carter, Michael E. McCullough, Jungmeen Kim-Spoon, Carolina Corrales, Adam Blake10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.09.006Evolution & Human Behavior 33, 3 (2012)2011-12-26Evolution & Human Behavior2011-12-26333S1090-5138(12)X0003-5Original Articles224231http://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513811001073/abstract?rss=yesAbstract: How communication systems emerge and remain stable is an important question in both cognitive science and evolutionary biology. For communication to arise, not only must individuals cooperate by signaling reliable information, but they must also coordinate and perpetuate signals. Most studies on the emergence of communication in humans typically consider scenarios where individuals implicitly share the same interests. Likewise, most studies on human cooperation consider scenarios where shared conventions of signals and meanings cannot be developed de novo. Here, we combined both approaches with an economic experiment where participants could develop a common language, but under different conditions fostering or hindering cooperation. Participants endeavored to acquire a resource through a learning task in a computer-based environment. After this task, participants had the option to transmit a signal (a color) to a fellow group member, who would subsequently play the same learning task. We varied the way participants competed with each other (either global scale or local scale) and the cost of transmitting a signal (either costly or noncostly) and tracked the way in which signals were used as communication among players. Under global competition, players signaled more often and more consistently, scored higher individual payoffs, and established shared associations of signals and meanings. In addition, costly signals were also more likely to be used under global competition; whereas under local competition, fewer signals were sent and no effective communication system was developed. Our results demonstrate that communication involves both a coordination and a cooperative dilemma and show the importance of studying language evolution under different conditions influencing human cooperation.The establishment of communication systems depends on the scale of competitionMiguel dos Santos, João F. Matias Rodrigues, Claus Wedekind, Daniel J. Rankin10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.09.007Evolution & Human Behavior 33, 3 (2012)2011-12-26Evolution & Human Behavior2011-12-26333S1090-5138(12)X0003-5Original Articles232240http://www.ehbonline.org/article/PIIS1090513811001085/abstract?rss=yesAbstract: Traditional criteria for modularity assert that perceptual adaptations for processing evolutionarily important stimuli should operate “automatically” in the sense of requiring no central attentional resources. Here, we test the validity of this automaticity criterion by assessing the attentional demands of a well-studied perceptual adaptation: judgment of facial attractiveness. We used locus-of-slack logic in a dual-task psychological refractory period paradigm, where Task 1 was a speeded judgment of tone pitch (low vs. high), and Task 2 was a speeded judgment of whether a face was attractive or unattractive, with the Task-2 judgment manipulated to have a low or a high difficulty level. In two studies (N=36 and N=73 female participants; 384 trials each), the Task 2 difficulty effects were additive with stimulus-onset asynchronies (100, 300, 500 or 900 ms) on Task 2 response times. According to the locus-of-slack logic, this result implies that participants could not discriminate facial attractiveness level, while their central attentional resources were still occupied by Task 1. If the human capacity for perceiving facial attractiveness—a premier example of an adaptation—does not show automaticity in this sense, automaticity may not be a useful criterion for identifying psychological adaptations.Perception of facial attractiveness requires some attentional resources: implications for the “automaticity” of psychological adaptationsKyunghun Jung, Eric Ruthruff, Joshua M. Tybur, Nicholas Gaspelin, Geoffrey Miller10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.10.001Evolution & Human Behavior 33, 3 (2012)2011-12-26Evolution & Human Behavior2011-12-26333S1090-5138(12)X0003-5Original Articles241250