Original ArticleMusical improvisation skill in a prospective partner is associated with mate value and preferences, consistent with sexual selection and parental investment theory: Implications for the origin of music☆
Section snippets
Design
To test these predictions, the experiment needs to measure participants’ evaluations of possible opposite-sex partners as a function of their sex, facial attractiveness, and music performance quality in a factorial design. The two continuous independent variables were varied parametrically in three levels to maintain a minimum number of conditions, which yields a 2 sex × 3 musical performance quality (MPQ) × 3 facial attractiveness (FA) design. Possible effects of individual listener
Results
The background data and the descriptive statistics of the experiment are first presented. Next are the effects tested statistically, with particular focus on the critical predictions, and the effects are finally summarised in multiple regression models.
Discussion
We addressed the hypothesis that human music might have evolved through sexual selection in an experiment testing predictions based on fitness signalling and parental investment theory. All four incrementally specific hypotheses were supported by the results, with some exceptions from the overall patterns of the two more general hypotheses: (a) Males’ ratings exhibited neither a consistent trend or a statistically significant effect of MPQ upon Health and Parenting Skill, which (b) was also the
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Geoffrey Miller and an anonymous reviewer for careful and detailed comments that helped us to substantially improve the paper. We also thank Christoph Braun, Martin Gründl, Claus Marberger, Christoph Scherber, and all others involved in BeautyCheck for letting us use their excellent images of faces.
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2021, Evolution and Human BehaviorCitation Excerpt :And occasionally, purely due to vagaries of chance, randomization may turn out to be a poor substitute for counterbalancing and proceed to create serious confounds in the data (Bressan, 2019). In still other studies the order was fixed and this was stated clearly: long-term came first in one case (Li et al., 2013), short-term came first in all the others (Jauk et al., 2016; Lindová et al., 2016; Madison, Holmquist, & Vestin, 2018; Place, Todd, Penke, & Asendorpf, 2010; Puts, 2005; Roney, Hanson, Durante, & Maestripieri, 2006; Tornquist & Chiappe, 2015; Varangis, Lanzieri, Hildebrandt, & Feldman, 2012). More often, presentation order was not specified explicitly and could, at best, be inferred from formulations such as “participants rated how attractive they found the person as a long-term mate and as a short-term mate”.
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2019, Evolution and Human BehaviorCitation Excerpt :Some theories suggest that musical and artistic ability are an honest signal of underlying genetic quality (Miller, 2000), for instance, an individual's intelligence (Mosing et al., 2015). However, studies investigating this have typically emphasised that displays of musical and/or artistic ability should only be advantageous for men (e.g. Madison, Holmquist, & Vestin, 2017; Watkins, 2017). Our findings suggest that displays of musical/artistic ability are also important for female attractiveness.
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2018, Trends in Ecology and EvolutionCitation Excerpt :However, this finding must be contrasted with positive evidence for H4: women prefer more complex music and better performers. Women, more than men, would choose higher-quality performers for long-term relationships [7], and – around ovulation – they would pick a composer of more complex music for short-term relationships [6]. Notice that, while H1–3 would hold for a general natural selection framework, H4 would provide evidence for sexual selection in particular (but see [8,9]).
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Part of this work was supported by a grant to the first author from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (P2008:0887).