ORCID Profile
0000-0001-7777-0220
Current Organisation
University Of Strathclyde
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Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 11-2019
DOI: 10.1098/RSOS.181243
Abstract: Men are hypothesized to show stronger preferences for physical attractiveness in potential mates than women are, particularly when assessing the attractiveness of potential mates for short-term relationships. By contrast, women are thought to show stronger preferences for social status in potential mates than men are, particularly when assessing the attractiveness of potential mates for long-term relationships. These mate-preference sex differences are often claimed to be ‘universal' (i.e. stable across cultures). Consequently, we used an established ‘budget-allocation' task to investigate Chinese and UK participants' preferences for physical attractiveness and social status in potential mates. Confirmatory analyses replicated these sex differences in both s les, consistent with the suggestion that they occur in erse cultures. However, confirmatory analyses also showed that Chinese women had stronger preferences for social status than UK women did, suggesting cultural differences in the magnitude of mate-preference sex differences can also occur.
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 18-07-2018
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 04-01-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-2018
Abstract: When the adult sex ratio of the local population is biased toward women, men face greater costs due to increased direct intrasexual competition. In order to mitigate these costs, men may be more attuned to cues of other men’s physical dominance under these conditions. Consequently, we investigated the relationships between the extent to which people ( N = 3,586) ascribed high dominance to masculinized versus feminized faces and variation in adult sex ratio across U.S. states. Linear mixed models showed that masculinized faces were perceived as more dominant than feminized faces, particularly for judgments of men’s facial dominance. Dominance perceptions were weakly related to adult sex ratio, and this relationship was not moderated by face sex, participant sex, or their interaction. Thus, our results suggest that dominance perceptions are relatively unaffected by broad geographical differences in adult sex ratios.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 28-06-2017
DOI: 10.1101/156430
Abstract: Raised progesterone during the menstrual cycle is associated with suppressed physiological immune responses, reducing the probability that the immune system will compromise the blastocyst’s development. The Compensatory Prophylaxis Hypothesis proposes that this progesterone-linked immunosuppression triggers increased disgust responses to pathogen cues, compensating for the reduction in physiological immune responses by minimizing contact with pathogens. Although a popular and influential hypothesis, there is no direct, within-woman evidence for correlated changes in progesterone and pathogen disgust. To address this issue, we used a longitudinal design to test for correlated changes in salivary progesterone and pathogen disgust (measured using the pathogen disgust subscale of the Three Domain Disgust Scale) in a large s le of women (N=375). Our analyses showed no evidence that pathogen disgust tracked changes in progesterone, estradiol, testosterone, or cortisol. Thus, our results provide no support for the Compensatory Prophylaxis Hypothesis of variation in pathogen disgust.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 30-04-2018
Abstract: Although widely cited as strong evidence that sexual selection has shaped human facial-attractiveness judgments, findings suggesting that women’s preferences for masculine characteristics in men’s faces are related to women’s hormonal status are equivocal and controversial. Consequently, we conducted the largest-ever longitudinal study of the hormonal correlates of women’s preferences for facial masculinity ( N = 584). Analyses showed no compelling evidence that preferences for facial masculinity were related to changes in women’s salivary steroid hormone levels. Furthermore, both within-subjects and between-subjects comparisons showed no evidence that oral contraceptive use decreased masculinity preferences. However, women generally preferred masculinized over feminized versions of men’s faces, particularly when assessing men’s attractiveness for short-term, rather than long-term, relationships. Our results do not support the hypothesized link between women’s preferences for facial masculinity and their hormonal status.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2018
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 02-08-2022
DOI: 10.1007/S10508-022-02375-8
Abstract: While most studies on sexuality in later life report that sexual desire declines with age, little is known about the exact nature of age effects on sexual desire. Using self-reported dyadic sexual desire relating to a partner, dyadic sexual desire relating to an attractive person, and solitary sexual desire from a large ( N 8000) and age erse (14.6–80.2 years) online s le, the current study had three goals: First, we investigated relationships between men and women’s sexual desire and age. Second, we examined whether in idual differences such as gender/sex, sexual orientation, self-rated masculinity, relationship status, self-rated attractiveness, and self-rated health predict sexual desire. Third, we examined how these associations differed across sexual desire facets. On average, the associations between age and both men and women’s sexual desire followed nonlinear trends and differed between genders/sexes and types of sexual desire. Average levels of all types of sexual desire were generally higher in men. Dyadic sexual desire related positively to self-rated masculinity and having a romantic partner and solitary desire was higher in people with same-sex attraction. We discuss the results in the context of the evolutionary hypothesis that predict an increase of sexual desire and female reproductive effort prior to declining fertility. Our findings both support and challenge beliefs about gender/sex specificity of age effects on sexual desire and highlight the importance of differentiating between desire types.
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 13-06-2018
Abstract: How organisms discount the value of future rewards is associated with many important outcomes, and may be a central component of theories of life-history. According to life-history theories, prioritizing immediacy is indicative of an accelerated strategy (i.e. reaching reproductive maturity quickly and producing many offspring at the cost of long-term investment). Previous work extrapolating life-history theories to facultative calibration of life-history traits within in iduals has theorized that cues to mortality can trigger an accelerated strategy however, compelling evidence for this hypothesis in modern humans is lacking. We assessed whether country-level life expectancy predicts in idual future discounting behaviour across multiple intertemporal choice items in a s le of 13 429 participants from 54 countries. In iduals in countries with lower life expectancy were more likely to prefer an immediate reward to one that is delayed. In iduals from countries with greater life expectancy were especially more willing to wait for a future reward when the relative gain in choosing the future reward was large and/or the delay period was short. These results suggest that cues to mortality can influence the way in iduals evaluate intertemporal decisions, which in turn can inform life-history trade-offs. We also found that older (but not very old) participants were more willing to wait for a future reward when there is a greater relative gain and/or shorter delay period, consistent with theoretical models that suggest in iduals are more future-orientated at middle age.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2018
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 29-11-2019
DOI: 10.1002/AJHB.23203
Abstract: Ancestrally, strength is likely to have played a critical role in determining the ability to obtain and retain resources and the allocation of social status among humans. Responses to facial cues of strength are therefore thought to play an important role in human social interaction. Although many researchers have proposed that sexually dimorphic facial morphology is reliably correlated with physical strength, evidence for this hypothesis is somewhat mixed. Moreover, to date, only one study has investigated the putative relationship between facial masculinity and physical strength in women. Consequently, we tested for correlations between handgrip strength and objective measures of face-shape masculinity. 531 women took part in the study. We measured each participant's handgrip strength (dominant hand). Sexual dimorphism of face shape was objectively measured from each face photograph using two methods: discriminant analysis and vector analysis. These methods use shape components derived from principal component analyses of facial landmarks to measure the probability of the face being classified as male (discriminant analysis method) or to locate the face on a female-male continuum (vector analysis method). Our analyses revealed that handgrip strength is, at best, only weakly correlated with facial masculinity in women. There was a weak significant association between handgrip strength and one measure of women's facial masculinity. The relationship between handgrip strength and our other measure of women's facial masculinity was not significant. Together, these results do not support the hypothesis that face-shape masculinity is an important cue of physical strength, at least in women.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2018
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 09-2020
DOI: 10.1098/RSOS.190699
Abstract: Evidence that affective factors (e.g. anxiety, depression, affect) are significantly related to in idual differences in emotion recognition is mixed. Palermo et al . (Palermo et al . 2018 J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 44 , 503–517) reported that in iduals who scored lower in anxiety performed significantly better on two measures of facial-expression recognition (emotion-matching and emotion-labelling tasks), but not a third measure (the multimodal emotion recognition test). By contrast, facial-expression recognition was not significantly correlated with measures of depression, positive or negative affect, empathy, or autistic-like traits. Because the range of affective factors considered in this study and its use of multiple expression-recognition tasks mean that it is a relatively comprehensive investigation of the role of affective factors in facial expression recognition, we carried out a direct replication. In common with Palermo et al . (Palermo et al . 2018 J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 44 , 503–517), scores on the DASS anxiety subscale negatively predicted performance on the emotion recognition tasks across multiple analyses, although these correlations were only consistently significant for performance on the emotion-labelling task. However, and by contrast with Palermo et al . (Palermo et al . 2018 J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 44 , 503–517), other affective factors (e.g. those related to empathy) often also significantly predicted emotion-recognition performance. Collectively, these results support the proposal that affective factors predict in idual differences in emotion recognition, but that these correlations are not necessarily specific to measures of general anxiety, such as the DASS anxiety subscale.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 24-09-2018
DOI: 10.1101/425017
Abstract: Ancestrally, strength is likely to have played a critical role in determining the ability to obtain and retain resources and the allocation of social status among humans. Responses to facial cues of strength are therefore thought to play an important role in human social interaction. Although many researchers have proposed that sexually dimorphic facial morphology is reliably correlated with physical strength, evidence for this hypothesis is somewhat mixed. Moreover, to date, only one study has investigated the putative relationship between facial masculinity and physical strength in women. Consequently, we tested for correlations between handgrip strength and objective measures of face-shape masculinity. 531 women took part in the study. We measured each participant’s handgrip strength (dominant hand). Sexual dimorphism of face shape was objectively measured from each face photograph using two methods: discriminant analysis and vector analysis. These methods use shape components derived from principal component analyses of facial landmarks to measure the probability of the face being classified as male (discriminant analysis method) or to locate the face on a female-male continuum (vector analysis method). Our analyses revealed that handgrip strength is, at best, only weakly correlated with facial masculinity in women. There was a weak significant association between handgrip strength and one measure of women’s facial masculinity. The relationship between handgrip strength and our other measure of women’s facial masculinity was not significant. Together, these results do not support the hypothesis that face-shape masculinity is an important cue of physical strength, at least in women.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2021
Abstract: Science is often perceived to be a self-correcting enterprise. In principle, the assessment of scientific claims is supposed to proceed in a cumulative fashion, with the reigning theories of the day progressively approximating truth more accurately over time. In practice, however, cumulative self-correction tends to proceed less efficiently than one might naively suppose. Far from evaluating new evidence dispassionately and infallibly, in idual scientists often cling stubbornly to prior findings. Here we explore the dynamics of scientific self-correction at an in idual rather than collective level. In 13 written statements, researchers from erse branches of psychology share why and how they have lost confidence in one of their own published findings. We qualitatively characterize these disclosures and explore their implications. A cross-disciplinary survey suggests that such loss-of-confidence sentiments are surprisingly common among members of the broader scientific population yet rarely become part of the public record. We argue that removing barriers to self-correction at the in idual level is imperative if the scientific community as a whole is to achieve the ideal of efficient self-correction.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-2018
Abstract: Concerns about the veracity of psychological research have been growing. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative s les, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which one or more research projects are conducted across multiple lab sites, offers a pragmatic solution to these and other current methodological challenges. The Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA) is a distributed network of laboratories designed to enable and support crowdsourced research projects. These projects can focus on novel research questions or replicate prior research in large, erse s les. The PSA’s mission is to accelerate the accumulation of reliable and generalizable evidence in psychological science. Here, we describe the background, structure, principles, procedures, benefits, and challenges of the PSA. In contrast to other crowdsourced research networks, the PSA is ongoing (as opposed to time limited), efficient (in that structures and principles are reused for different projects), decentralized, erse (in both subjects and researchers), and inclusive (of proposals, contributions, and other relevant input from anyone inside or outside the network). The PSA and other approaches to crowdsourced psychological science will advance understanding of mental processes and behaviors by enabling rigorous research and systematic examination of its generalizability.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 27-09-2017
DOI: 10.1101/192054
Abstract: Mate preferences and mating-related behaviors are hypothesized to change over the menstrual cycle in ways that function to increase reproductive fitness. Results of recent large-scale studies suggest that many of these hormone-linked behavioral changes are less robust than was previously thought. One specific hypothesis that has not yet been subject to a large-scale test is the proposal that women’s preference for associating with male kin is down-regulated during the ovulatory (high-fertility) phase of the menstrual cycle. Consequently, we used a longitudinal design to investigate the relationship between changes in women’s steroid hormone levels and their perceptions of faces experimentally manipulated to possess kinship cues (Study 1). Analyses suggested that women viewed men’s faces displaying kinship cues more positively (i.e., more attractive and trustworthy) when estradiol-to-progesterone ratio was high. Since estradiol-to-progesterone ratio is positively associated with conception risk during the menstrual cycle, these results directly contradict the hypothesis that women’s preference for associating with male kin is down-regulated during the ovulatory (high-fertility) phase of the menstrual cycle. Study 2 employed a daily diary approach and found no evidence that women reported spending less time in the company of male kin or thought about male kin less often during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Thus, neither study found evidence that inbreeding avoidance is up-regulated during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2015
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 28-09-2022
DOI: 10.1017/EHS.2022.41
Abstract: Mate preferences and mating-related behaviors are hypothesized to change over the menstrual cycle to increase reproductive fitness. Recent large-scale studies suggest that previously reported hormone-linked behavioral changes are not robust. The proposal that women's preference for associating with male kin is down-regulated during the ovulatory (high-fertility) phase of the menstrual cycle to reduce inbreeding has not been tested in large s les. Consequently, we investigated the relationship between longitudinal changes in women's steroid hormone levels and their perceptions of faces experimentally manipulated to possess kinship cues (Study 1). Women viewed faces displaying kinship cues as more attractive and trustworthy, but this effect was not related to hormonal proxies of conception risk. Study 2 employed a daily diary approach and found no evidence that women spent less time with kin generally or with male kin specifically during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Thus, neither study found evidence that inbreeding avoidance is up-regulated during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle.
Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Date: 11-05-2017
DOI: 10.1101/136549
Abstract: Although widely cited as strong evidence that sexual selection has shaped human facial attractiveness judgments, evidence that preferences for masculine characteristics in men’s faces are related to women’s hormonal status is equivocal and controversial. Consequently, we conducted the largest ever longitudinal study of the hormonal correlates of women’s preferences for facial masculinity (N=584). Analyses showed no compelling evidence that preferences for facial masculinity were related to changes in women’s salivary steroid hormone levels. Furthermore, both within-subject and between-subject comparisons showed no evidence that oral contraceptive use decreased masculinity preferences. However, women generally preferred masculinized over feminized versions of men’s faces, particularly when assessing men’s attractiveness for short-term, rather than long-term, relationships. Our results do not support the hypothesized link between women’s preferences for facial masculinity and their hormonal status.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Benedict Jones.