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Testing Assumptions About Human Mating Psychology: Dealbreakers and Mate Preferences
Full text linkAssumptions about human mating psychology can range from a lay person’s entertaining intuitions to ideas that are taken for granted by mating researchers but that, upon closer examination, rest on precarious theoretical and empirical foundations. Dealbreakers and short-term mate preferences are two topics that most people feel like they understand, but the research investigating these topics is limited to a handful of studies, leaving some important questions untested. Here, my aim is to offer some clarity about dealbreakers and mate preferences through the precision of computational models and the power of a large, cross-cultural dataset. In chapter one I ask two questions. First, what are dealbreakers? And second, how do dealbreakers influence attraction and mate choice? I use an evolutionary perspective to generate hypotheses about how dealbreakers might be used by the mind. I propose that dealbreakers can either be disqualifiers or preferences. By disqualifiers, I mean traits that cause us to eliminate people as potential mates. By preferences, I mean traits that influence how attractive we find a potential mate. I use agent-based modeling, a method where computer simulated agents serve as avatars for real life participants and interact in a simulated mating market, to test between these two possibilities. Here, I found evidence that many of the traits we consider to be dealbreakers, such as smoking status, height, and religion, are not used by the mind as disqualifiers, rather they act like preferences and are integrated into overall assessments of mate value. A person’s sex, on the other hand, acts like a disqualifier. If a person is not our preferred sex, we do not consider them to be a potential mate.
In chapter two I examine patterns of short-term mate preferences in over 50,000 participants from 56 countries around the world. I test whether men and women have different short-term preferences, and if short-term preferences vary across countries due to disease prevalence, gender equality levels, and sex ratio. Additionally, I examine patterns of long-term mate preferences, to see if previous findings replicate. Overall, I found that both men and women, on average, prefer short-term sexual partners who are kind, healthy, and attractive, but women had higher ideal preferences for short-term mates than men did. There was one exception to that pattern— both men and women preferred the same level of physical attractiveness in a short-term mate, on average.
In chapter three I explore whether short-term mate preferences and long-term mate preferences are different from each other, indicating distinct short-term and long-term mating strategies. I used the same cross-cultural data from chapter two and a machine learning technique to explore whether individuals have different short-term and long-term mate preferences. I found that there are differences between short-term and long-term preferences, on average. Physical attractiveness preferences are higher, while kindness and resources preferences are lower, for short-term mates compared to long-term mates. However, I found that most participants (59-80%) preferred the same type of ideal mate for short-term and long-term relationships. Overall, this dissertation helps to bolster the theoretical and empirical foundations of dealbreakers and mate preferences research
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Jealousy and the Emotions Debate: Conceptualizing Romantic Jealousy as a Bayesian Infidelity-Detector
Full text linkFor decades, affective scientists have debated whether discrete emotions—such as anger, sadness, fear, and so on—are products of discrete adaptations or a common set of domain-general systems. To date, however, evidence for and against each of these positions has often rested on tests of specific design features, such as non-verbal signals, which may not generalize across all plausible emotion adaptations. Here, we take a novel approach to this debate by examining whether romantic jealousy—an emotion which lacks any known facial expression or other recognizable signal—shows evidence of optimal design for infidelity detection. Because Bayes' Theorem represents the optimal method for updating one's beliefs in the presence of new information, we probed the possibility that jealousy tracks the posterior probability of infidelity computed using Bayes' Theorem. Participants were shown a series of infidelity cues and asked to rate one of the terms in the equation for Bayes' Theorem (e.g., the likelihood of a person who is cheating engaging in suspicious behavior X, the likelihood of a person who is not cheating engaging in suspicious behavior X, the likelihood of cheating in general, etc.) and/or jealousy, depending on condition. Across three studies conducted using Prolific, the results revealed strong evidence for the possibility that romantic jealousy approximates optimal design for infidelity detection--with up to 89% of the variance in jealousy explained by the posterior probability of infidelity computed using Bayes' Theorem. More broadly, these results suggest that tests of special design appropriate to an emotion's hypothesized function—rather than tests of more general features, such as signaling—may be most well-suited for distinguishing between emotion hypotheses
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Evolution, computer simulation, and human mate selection
Full text linkPrior research has amassed an impressive catalog of human mate preferences. These include universal preferences for features such as kindness, intelligence, and dependability; sex-differentiated attributes such as youth; and physical features such as bodily symmetry and degree of lumbar curvature. However, psychologists lack understanding of what these many preferences do. This dissertation presents three sets of studies that form the foundation of a broader research program exploring the effects of mate preferences on mating outcomes and implications of these effects for the study of preferences. Chapter 2 presents three studies that use agent-based modeling to determine whether people’s stated mate preferences drive their mate choices at all. These studies suggest that mate preferences do guide mate selection, but their effects are not intuitively obvious because of the complex dynamics inherent to realistic mating markets. Three studies in Chapter 3 compare several algorithms for how our mate selection psychology could translate our many individual preferences into mating decisions. Data from agent-based models and real human couples suggest that human mate preferences are integrated into feelings of attraction according to a Euclidean algorithm that represents preferences and potential mates as points within a multidimensional preference space. This multidimensionality has many potential implications for the study of mate preferences; Chapter 4 explores one such implication: how to accurately quantify sex differences in mate preferences. Altogether this dissertation presents a novel perspective on the role of human mate preferences in mating outcomes and new tools for studying mate preferences and human mate choice.Psycholog
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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