#evolutionarypsychology — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #evolutionarypsychology, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: August 10, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New research finds women’s buttocks play a more stable role in male physical attraction than breasts
A recent study published in Evolutionary Psychology suggests that men fall into distinct subgroups based on how much they prioritize a romantic partner’s physical features, particularly breasts and buttocks. The research indicates that most men value both traits, but a specific subset focuses predominantly on buttocks, and no equivalent group prioritizes breasts alone. These patterns provide evidence that buttocks tend to play a more central and stable role in male physical attraction than previously assumed.
Evolutionary psychology proposes that human mate selection relies heavily on physical traits that historically signaled health, youth, and reproductive viability. In human females, breasts and buttocks act as secondary sexual characteristics that develop during puberty. According to evolutionary frameworks, these features provided ancestral males with visual cues about a potential mate’s nutritional status, developmental stability, and fertility. Much of the existing literature treats both traits as similarly important indicators of female physical attractiveness.
Mehmet Mehmetoglu, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, initiated this research to understand how individual men differ in their specific preferences. Averaging preferences across a whole population can mask important variations among individuals.
“I’ve always had the impression, both from academic reading and, even more so, from just chatting with friends, that people assume buttocks and breasts are equally important to men,” Mehmetoglu explained. “In social settings, I’ve been asked this very question so many times that I’ve actually been thinking about it for the past 10 years. I realized that there wasn’t really a specific answer to this question. I was honestly just very curious to see the results!”
To explore these preferences, Mehmetoglu analyzed survey responses from 395 Norwegian men. The participants were predominantly young adults, with an average age of about 23, and most were not in a romantic relationship at the time. The survey asked respondents to rate the importance of a partner’s buttocks and breasts on a scale from one to five, where one meant not at all important and five meant very important.
Participants also rated how much they valued general traits like sexiness and intellectuality in a mate. The survey included questions to measure broader attitudes, asking participants to rate their agreement with statements reflecting egalitarianism, or the belief in equal rights and opportunities, and materialism, the desire for possessions that impress others. Mehmetoglu used a statistical technique called latent profile analysis to group the men based on their rating patterns. This method identifies naturally occurring categories within a dataset rather than forcing data into predefined boxes.
The analysis identified four distinct subgroups of men. The largest group, which the author called Highly Body-Oriented, made up 53 percent of the sample. These men rated both breasts and buttocks as highly important, with average scores of 4.1 and 4.4 out of five, respectively. The Moderately Body-Oriented group, representing 20 percent of the participants, showed a balanced but less intense interest, giving both features an average rating of 3.2.
A third group, making up 18 percent of the sample, was classified as Buttocks-Oriented. These men showed a strong preference for buttocks, with an average rating of 4.5, but gave breasts a much lower average rating of 2.5. The final 9 percent of men formed the Body-Unoriented group, placing minimal importance on either feature, with average ratings falling below two.
The statistical models consistently detected a group that favored buttocks across various mathematical solutions, but no group emerged that favored breasts exclusively. High ratings for breasts always appeared alongside high ratings for buttocks.
“I’ll be honest and admit that I was expecting to find a distinct ‘breasts-oriented’ segment, but I didn’t!” Mehmetoglu told PsyPost. “In every model we tested, a clear buttocks-oriented group appeared, but we found that ratings for breasts always co-occurred with high ratings for buttocks. This suggests that for most men, breasts are more of a ‘complementary’ feature rather than a primary preference on their own.”
Men may derive sufficient evolutionary cues related to youth and fertility by observing the buttocks alone. “The main takeaway is how buttocks seem to be a much more central and stable cue in the male brain than breasts,” Mehmetoglu noted. “It appears that this preference is ‘wired-in’ from millions of years ago because these features signal things like youth, fertility, and health.”
The broader attitudes measured in the survey also predicted which group a man was likely to fall into. A one-unit increase in how much a participant valued sexiness on the five-point scale increased his odds of belonging to the Highly Body-Oriented group by 501 percent compared to the Body-Unoriented group. Higher levels of materialism also increased the likelihood of being in the Buttocks-Oriented group by 86 percent. Materialistic individuals tend to value visible status signals, which can include a partner’s physical attractiveness.
In contrast, egalitarian attitudes were associated with a lower focus on physical features, and a preference for intellectuality was not statistically significant in predicting membership in any specific group. A one-unit increase in egalitarianism reduced a man’s odds of being in the Highly Body-Oriented group by 63 percent, which aligns with the tendency of egalitarian individuals to downplay traditional social status hierarchies.
“It was interesting to find that these physical preferences are actually linked to a person’s values,” Mehmetoglu explained. “For example, men who held stronger egalitarian views were less likely to be in the body-oriented groups, while those who placed greater value on materialism and status gave much more importance to these physical features. It shows that our broader worldview appears to influence the strength of our mate preferences!”
Reflecting on these deep-seated drives, Mehmetoglu offered a piece of practical advice for navigating the modern dating landscape. “For the average person, this shows that men’s mating psychology is both simple and deep-seated, but also that men should maybe be aware of these instincts and remember to look for other qualities too,” he added.
As with all research, there are some caveats. The findings reflect a specific cultural context. “The sample is quite specific,” Mehmetoglu pointed out. “It’s a young sample of Norwegian men (average age 23). Since the study was done in Norway, which is a very egalitarian society, the results are best generalized to similar social contexts. We used a ‘convenience sample,’ so it might not represent every demographic perfectly.”
A convenience sample refers to a group of participants who are selected because they are easily accessible, such as university students on a local campus, rather than a randomly selected cross-section of the entire population. The study also relied on self-reported survey data using single questions to measure complex traits like materialism and egalitarianism. Future research should aim to replicate these findings using established, multi-item psychological tests to measure these broad personal values, and observe whether self-reported priorities align with actual dating behaviors.
Future studies could also expand on this foundation by tracking eye movements to observe how men view varying physical combinations. “I am planning to do a similar study in a less egalitarian society to see if those different social constraints change these preference ‘camps’,” Mehmetoglu said. “I am also really interested in that 9% ‘Body-Unoriented’ group. Since they aren’t primarily focused on buttocks or breasts, I want to find out what actually drives their attraction, whether it’s personality, intelligence, or other facial features.”
The study, “Buttocks or Breasts? Identifying Latent Subgroups in Male Preferences for Female Bodily Features,” was authored by Mehmet Mehmetoglu.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ButtocksVsBreasts #MaleAttractionResearch #EvolutionaryPsychology #BodyOrientedPrefs #ButtocksOriented #PhysicalFeaturePreferences #DatingPsychology #NorwegianStudy #MatingPreferences #SexualSignals
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DATE: August 10, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: New research finds women’s buttocks play a more stable role in male physical attraction than breasts
A recent study published in Evolutionary Psychology suggests that men fall into distinct subgroups based on how much they prioritize a romantic partner’s physical features, particularly breasts and buttocks. The research indicates that most men value both traits, but a specific subset focuses predominantly on buttocks, and no equivalent group prioritizes breasts alone. These patterns provide evidence that buttocks tend to play a more central and stable role in male physical attraction than previously assumed.
Evolutionary psychology proposes that human mate selection relies heavily on physical traits that historically signaled health, youth, and reproductive viability. In human females, breasts and buttocks act as secondary sexual characteristics that develop during puberty. According to evolutionary frameworks, these features provided ancestral males with visual cues about a potential mate’s nutritional status, developmental stability, and fertility. Much of the existing literature treats both traits as similarly important indicators of female physical attractiveness.
Mehmet Mehmetoglu, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, initiated this research to understand how individual men differ in their specific preferences. Averaging preferences across a whole population can mask important variations among individuals.
“I’ve always had the impression, both from academic reading and, even more so, from just chatting with friends, that people assume buttocks and breasts are equally important to men,” Mehmetoglu explained. “In social settings, I’ve been asked this very question so many times that I’ve actually been thinking about it for the past 10 years. I realized that there wasn’t really a specific answer to this question. I was honestly just very curious to see the results!”
To explore these preferences, Mehmetoglu analyzed survey responses from 395 Norwegian men. The participants were predominantly young adults, with an average age of about 23, and most were not in a romantic relationship at the time. The survey asked respondents to rate the importance of a partner’s buttocks and breasts on a scale from one to five, where one meant not at all important and five meant very important.
Participants also rated how much they valued general traits like sexiness and intellectuality in a mate. The survey included questions to measure broader attitudes, asking participants to rate their agreement with statements reflecting egalitarianism, or the belief in equal rights and opportunities, and materialism, the desire for possessions that impress others. Mehmetoglu used a statistical technique called latent profile analysis to group the men based on their rating patterns. This method identifies naturally occurring categories within a dataset rather than forcing data into predefined boxes.
The analysis identified four distinct subgroups of men. The largest group, which the author called Highly Body-Oriented, made up 53 percent of the sample. These men rated both breasts and buttocks as highly important, with average scores of 4.1 and 4.4 out of five, respectively. The Moderately Body-Oriented group, representing 20 percent of the participants, showed a balanced but less intense interest, giving both features an average rating of 3.2.
A third group, making up 18 percent of the sample, was classified as Buttocks-Oriented. These men showed a strong preference for buttocks, with an average rating of 4.5, but gave breasts a much lower average rating of 2.5. The final 9 percent of men formed the Body-Unoriented group, placing minimal importance on either feature, with average ratings falling below two.
The statistical models consistently detected a group that favored buttocks across various mathematical solutions, but no group emerged that favored breasts exclusively. High ratings for breasts always appeared alongside high ratings for buttocks.
“I’ll be honest and admit that I was expecting to find a distinct ‘breasts-oriented’ segment, but I didn’t!” Mehmetoglu told PsyPost. “In every model we tested, a clear buttocks-oriented group appeared, but we found that ratings for breasts always co-occurred with high ratings for buttocks. This suggests that for most men, breasts are more of a ‘complementary’ feature rather than a primary preference on their own.”
Men may derive sufficient evolutionary cues related to youth and fertility by observing the buttocks alone. “The main takeaway is how buttocks seem to be a much more central and stable cue in the male brain than breasts,” Mehmetoglu noted. “It appears that this preference is ‘wired-in’ from millions of years ago because these features signal things like youth, fertility, and health.”
The broader attitudes measured in the survey also predicted which group a man was likely to fall into. A one-unit increase in how much a participant valued sexiness on the five-point scale increased his odds of belonging to the Highly Body-Oriented group by 501 percent compared to the Body-Unoriented group. Higher levels of materialism also increased the likelihood of being in the Buttocks-Oriented group by 86 percent. Materialistic individuals tend to value visible status signals, which can include a partner’s physical attractiveness.
In contrast, egalitarian attitudes were associated with a lower focus on physical features, and a preference for intellectuality was not statistically significant in predicting membership in any specific group. A one-unit increase in egalitarianism reduced a man’s odds of being in the Highly Body-Oriented group by 63 percent, which aligns with the tendency of egalitarian individuals to downplay traditional social status hierarchies.
“It was interesting to find that these physical preferences are actually linked to a person’s values,” Mehmetoglu explained. “For example, men who held stronger egalitarian views were less likely to be in the body-oriented groups, while those who placed greater value on materialism and status gave much more importance to these physical features. It shows that our broader worldview appears to influence the strength of our mate preferences!”
Reflecting on these deep-seated drives, Mehmetoglu offered a piece of practical advice for navigating the modern dating landscape. “For the average person, this shows that men’s mating psychology is both simple and deep-seated, but also that men should maybe be aware of these instincts and remember to look for other qualities too,” he added.
As with all research, there are some caveats. The findings reflect a specific cultural context. “The sample is quite specific,” Mehmetoglu pointed out. “It’s a young sample of Norwegian men (average age 23). Since the study was done in Norway, which is a very egalitarian society, the results are best generalized to similar social contexts. We used a ‘convenience sample,’ so it might not represent every demographic perfectly.”
A convenience sample refers to a group of participants who are selected because they are easily accessible, such as university students on a local campus, rather than a randomly selected cross-section of the entire population. The study also relied on self-reported survey data using single questions to measure complex traits like materialism and egalitarianism. Future research should aim to replicate these findings using established, multi-item psychological tests to measure these broad personal values, and observe whether self-reported priorities align with actual dating behaviors.
Future studies could also expand on this foundation by tracking eye movements to observe how men view varying physical combinations. “I am planning to do a similar study in a less egalitarian society to see if those different social constraints change these preference ‘camps’,” Mehmetoglu said. “I am also really interested in that 9% ‘Body-Unoriented’ group. Since they aren’t primarily focused on buttocks or breasts, I want to find out what actually drives their attraction, whether it’s personality, intelligence, or other facial features.”
The study, “Buttocks or Breasts? Identifying Latent Subgroups in Male Preferences for Female Bodily Features,” was authored by Mehmet Mehmetoglu.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ButtocksVsBreasts #MaleAttractionResearch #EvolutionaryPsychology #BodyOrientedPrefs #ButtocksOriented #PhysicalFeaturePreferences #DatingPsychology #NorwegianStudy #MatingPreferences #SexualSignals
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Therapist shares 3 life-changing quotes she uses ‘almost daily’ with her patients
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/therapist-3-daily-life-changing-quotes-ex1/
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Therapist shares 3 life-changing quotes she uses ‘almost daily’ with her patients
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/therapist-3-daily-life-changing-quotes-ex1/
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DATE: July 27, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Men are more likely than women to view infidelity favorably when relationships falter
When adults feel unsatisfied with their romantic partnerships, they are more likely to develop a lenient attitude toward cheating. This psychological link is heavily influenced by a person’s baseline willingness to engage in casual sexual encounters. These findings were published recently in the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy.
Romantic relationships require a continuous investment of time and emotional energy. Psychologists often use the investment model of commitment to understand why people stay faithful in a pairing. This model suggests that satisfaction, the sheer quality of the relationship, and the appeal of alternative partners all interact to determine a person’s loyalty.
Unmet needs in a primary relationship often push people to seek intimacy elsewhere. A lack of sexual or emotional satisfaction can weaken the boundaries that usually prevent extradyadic affairs. Still, not every unhappy partner inevitably embarks on an affair, prompting researchers to look for underlying personality traits that tip the scales.
Human beings possess varying levels of openness to uncommitted sexual intimacy. Psychologists refer to this trait as sociosexual orientation, a concept that helps explain vast differences in romantic behavior. People with an unrestricted orientation are highly comfortable with physical intimacy outside of a committed romantic bond. They do not feel an absolute need for love or emotional attachment to enjoy sexual encounters.
Conversely, those with a restricted sociosexual orientation typically require a deep emotional bond before engaging in physical intimacy. They prefer long term strategies and heavy emotional investment with a single partner. Sociosexuality is generally broken down into three distinct components in modern psychological assessments. These include past behavioral tendencies, personal attitudes about casual intimacy, and an ongoing psychological desire for uncommitted encounters.
In the contemporary dating landscape, maintaining loyalty can be uniquely challenging for some individuals. Dating apps and digital messaging platforms provide a constant stream of alternative options for dissatisfied partners. For those with unrestricted tendencies, this modern accessibility might make an unfaithful mindset even easier to adopt.
Past research connects unrestricted sexual orientations with an increased likelihood of cheating. Less understood is exactly how the daily fluctuations in a primary relationship interact with these personal dispositions to shape thoughts about unfaithfulness. Kashish Pandey, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and colleagues wanted to map this specific psychological pathway.
Pandey, along with Priyanka Tiwari, Taranjeet Duggal, and Khusboo K from the Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies, designed a survey to test these interactions. They wanted to see if a person’s baseline view on casual sex bridges the gap between a struggling relationship and a willingness to cheat. The team also examined whether gender changed these dynamics, given the different social pressures placed on men and women globally.
The researchers recruited 303 adult participants from the local region encompassing Delhi, India. The sample included 135 men and 168 women, with ages ranging from 18 to 65 years old. A vast majority of these individuals were young adults between the ages of 18 and 24.
The participants reported a wide variety of relationship statuses. Just over half of the respondents were currently dating someone. The rest were cohabiting with a partner, in a loosely defined casual arrangement, or engaging in relationships they simply defined as fluid.
To gather data safely and anonymously, the researchers used online assessment tools. Participants received digital links to a questionnaire designed to take less than ten minutes to complete. The first section utilized a widely used psychological survey called the Revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory. This test asks respondents to rate their agreement with statements regarding their sexual desires and past behaviors.
The surveying process also utilized a nine question assessment designed to capture relationship quality. This measure asks participants to evaluate their current happiness and satisfaction levels with their partners. Finally, the team administered the Attitude Towards Infidelity Scale to gauge how acceptable participants found cheating in various scenarios.
After running a statistical analysis on the survey results, the researchers noted a distinct pattern across the demographics. Lower relationship quality correlated with a much more positive attitude toward unfaithfulness. Participants unhappy with their current partners viewed outside intimacy as far more acceptable than those in thriving partnerships. This baseline finding matched expectations based on previous studies regarding marital dissatisfaction.
The analysis also showed that this was not a direct emotional jump from unhappiness to approving of affairs. Instead, a person’s sociosexual orientation acted as an intermediate variable. People in less fulfilling relationships were more likely to harbor unrestricted views on casual intimacy generally.
This general openness to uncommitted intimacy then predicted a more lenient attitude toward cheating specifically. The researchers refer to this psychological chain of events as a mediated pathway. Essentially, a poor relationship environment might activate or strengthen a person’s existing tendency toward unrestrictive intimacy.
This phenomenon aligns with a psychological concept known as self congruency theory. Socially unrestricted individuals often experience an increase in wellbeing after casual sexual encounters because the behavior matches their internal values. When a primary relationship fails to provide satisfaction, unrestricted individuals might organically lean toward thoughts that feel authentic to their personal dispositions.
Gender also altered the strength of this psychological pathway. The survey data indicated that men tended to have a higher baseline level of unrestricted sociosexuality than women. When relationship quality dropped, the men were more prone than the women to view outside sexual partners favorably.
The study authors contextualized this gender difference within the framework of evolutionary psychology. They referenced the sexual strategies theory, which proposes that male and female mating behaviors evolved under different reproductive pressures. According to this perspective, ancestral men gained a reproductive advantage by seeking multiple partners across a lifetime.
In contrast, ancestral women possessed a heavier biological burden of parental investment, leading to more selective mating strategies. Beyond evolutionary theory, the researchers also pointed to strictly sociological explanations. In many closed societies, men face a far less severe social stigma for promiscuity than women do.
Because women face higher physical and social risks associated with extramarital affairs, they might maintain less favorable attitudes toward cheating even when profoundly unhappy in a relationship. The authors noted a few methodological limitations in their current work. Because the study relied on observational data collected at a single point in time, the results cannot establish a strict cause and effect relationship.
It remains entirely possible that a naturally high interest in casual physical intimacy directly causes a decline in a couple’s happiness, rather than the other way around. To better understand this timeline, future scholars would need to follow couples over several years. Such a longitudinal approach could track how attitudes organically shift as relationships evolve and confront daily challenges.
The current measurements only reflect mental attitudes and self reported dispositions. Favorable thoughts about cheating do not always translate into actual acts of unfaithfulness. The jump from a passing thought to a physical affair involves many other behavioral hurdles. A partner might fantasize about alternative partners but never act on those thoughts due to personal morals or logistical barriers.
Looking forward, researchers could examine how other life variables influence the behavioral boundaries of fidelity. Incorporating metrics like religious beliefs, career stress, and overall mental health could provide a wider context for relationship struggles. Replicating the survey among older populations might also yield different findings, as an aging demographic often reports different long term motivations.
Understanding these psychological pathways can directly benefit modern therapeutic practices. Relationship counselors can use these insights to tailor their approach according to a client’s baseline sociosexual orientation. The findings highlight the absolute importance of emotional transparency and proactive problem solving within a romantic bond.
Addressing relationship deficits early on might prevent a partner from seeking external validation. Fostering open communication channels allows couples to handle dissatisfaction before it morphs into a favorable view of outside intimacy. This proactive approach ultimately helps protect both partners’ psychological wellbeing.
The study, “The entwined nature of infidelity and relationship quality: parallels in theory and practice through a moderated mediation analysis,” was authored by Kashish Pandey, Priyanka Tiwari, Taranjeet Duggal, and Khusboo K.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #infidelity #relationshipquality #sociosexualorientation #monogamy #datingresearch #genderdifferences #evolutionarypsychology #trustinrelationships #relationshiptherapy #unfaithfulnessattitudes
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DATE: July 27, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Men are more likely than women to view infidelity favorably when relationships falter
When adults feel unsatisfied with their romantic partnerships, they are more likely to develop a lenient attitude toward cheating. This psychological link is heavily influenced by a person’s baseline willingness to engage in casual sexual encounters. These findings were published recently in the journal Sexual and Relationship Therapy.
Romantic relationships require a continuous investment of time and emotional energy. Psychologists often use the investment model of commitment to understand why people stay faithful in a pairing. This model suggests that satisfaction, the sheer quality of the relationship, and the appeal of alternative partners all interact to determine a person’s loyalty.
Unmet needs in a primary relationship often push people to seek intimacy elsewhere. A lack of sexual or emotional satisfaction can weaken the boundaries that usually prevent extradyadic affairs. Still, not every unhappy partner inevitably embarks on an affair, prompting researchers to look for underlying personality traits that tip the scales.
Human beings possess varying levels of openness to uncommitted sexual intimacy. Psychologists refer to this trait as sociosexual orientation, a concept that helps explain vast differences in romantic behavior. People with an unrestricted orientation are highly comfortable with physical intimacy outside of a committed romantic bond. They do not feel an absolute need for love or emotional attachment to enjoy sexual encounters.
Conversely, those with a restricted sociosexual orientation typically require a deep emotional bond before engaging in physical intimacy. They prefer long term strategies and heavy emotional investment with a single partner. Sociosexuality is generally broken down into three distinct components in modern psychological assessments. These include past behavioral tendencies, personal attitudes about casual intimacy, and an ongoing psychological desire for uncommitted encounters.
In the contemporary dating landscape, maintaining loyalty can be uniquely challenging for some individuals. Dating apps and digital messaging platforms provide a constant stream of alternative options for dissatisfied partners. For those with unrestricted tendencies, this modern accessibility might make an unfaithful mindset even easier to adopt.
Past research connects unrestricted sexual orientations with an increased likelihood of cheating. Less understood is exactly how the daily fluctuations in a primary relationship interact with these personal dispositions to shape thoughts about unfaithfulness. Kashish Pandey, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, and colleagues wanted to map this specific psychological pathway.
Pandey, along with Priyanka Tiwari, Taranjeet Duggal, and Khusboo K from the Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies, designed a survey to test these interactions. They wanted to see if a person’s baseline view on casual sex bridges the gap between a struggling relationship and a willingness to cheat. The team also examined whether gender changed these dynamics, given the different social pressures placed on men and women globally.
The researchers recruited 303 adult participants from the local region encompassing Delhi, India. The sample included 135 men and 168 women, with ages ranging from 18 to 65 years old. A vast majority of these individuals were young adults between the ages of 18 and 24.
The participants reported a wide variety of relationship statuses. Just over half of the respondents were currently dating someone. The rest were cohabiting with a partner, in a loosely defined casual arrangement, or engaging in relationships they simply defined as fluid.
To gather data safely and anonymously, the researchers used online assessment tools. Participants received digital links to a questionnaire designed to take less than ten minutes to complete. The first section utilized a widely used psychological survey called the Revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory. This test asks respondents to rate their agreement with statements regarding their sexual desires and past behaviors.
The surveying process also utilized a nine question assessment designed to capture relationship quality. This measure asks participants to evaluate their current happiness and satisfaction levels with their partners. Finally, the team administered the Attitude Towards Infidelity Scale to gauge how acceptable participants found cheating in various scenarios.
After running a statistical analysis on the survey results, the researchers noted a distinct pattern across the demographics. Lower relationship quality correlated with a much more positive attitude toward unfaithfulness. Participants unhappy with their current partners viewed outside intimacy as far more acceptable than those in thriving partnerships. This baseline finding matched expectations based on previous studies regarding marital dissatisfaction.
The analysis also showed that this was not a direct emotional jump from unhappiness to approving of affairs. Instead, a person’s sociosexual orientation acted as an intermediate variable. People in less fulfilling relationships were more likely to harbor unrestricted views on casual intimacy generally.
This general openness to uncommitted intimacy then predicted a more lenient attitude toward cheating specifically. The researchers refer to this psychological chain of events as a mediated pathway. Essentially, a poor relationship environment might activate or strengthen a person’s existing tendency toward unrestrictive intimacy.
This phenomenon aligns with a psychological concept known as self congruency theory. Socially unrestricted individuals often experience an increase in wellbeing after casual sexual encounters because the behavior matches their internal values. When a primary relationship fails to provide satisfaction, unrestricted individuals might organically lean toward thoughts that feel authentic to their personal dispositions.
Gender also altered the strength of this psychological pathway. The survey data indicated that men tended to have a higher baseline level of unrestricted sociosexuality than women. When relationship quality dropped, the men were more prone than the women to view outside sexual partners favorably.
The study authors contextualized this gender difference within the framework of evolutionary psychology. They referenced the sexual strategies theory, which proposes that male and female mating behaviors evolved under different reproductive pressures. According to this perspective, ancestral men gained a reproductive advantage by seeking multiple partners across a lifetime.
In contrast, ancestral women possessed a heavier biological burden of parental investment, leading to more selective mating strategies. Beyond evolutionary theory, the researchers also pointed to strictly sociological explanations. In many closed societies, men face a far less severe social stigma for promiscuity than women do.
Because women face higher physical and social risks associated with extramarital affairs, they might maintain less favorable attitudes toward cheating even when profoundly unhappy in a relationship. The authors noted a few methodological limitations in their current work. Because the study relied on observational data collected at a single point in time, the results cannot establish a strict cause and effect relationship.
It remains entirely possible that a naturally high interest in casual physical intimacy directly causes a decline in a couple’s happiness, rather than the other way around. To better understand this timeline, future scholars would need to follow couples over several years. Such a longitudinal approach could track how attitudes organically shift as relationships evolve and confront daily challenges.
The current measurements only reflect mental attitudes and self reported dispositions. Favorable thoughts about cheating do not always translate into actual acts of unfaithfulness. The jump from a passing thought to a physical affair involves many other behavioral hurdles. A partner might fantasize about alternative partners but never act on those thoughts due to personal morals or logistical barriers.
Looking forward, researchers could examine how other life variables influence the behavioral boundaries of fidelity. Incorporating metrics like religious beliefs, career stress, and overall mental health could provide a wider context for relationship struggles. Replicating the survey among older populations might also yield different findings, as an aging demographic often reports different long term motivations.
Understanding these psychological pathways can directly benefit modern therapeutic practices. Relationship counselors can use these insights to tailor their approach according to a client’s baseline sociosexual orientation. The findings highlight the absolute importance of emotional transparency and proactive problem solving within a romantic bond.
Addressing relationship deficits early on might prevent a partner from seeking external validation. Fostering open communication channels allows couples to handle dissatisfaction before it morphs into a favorable view of outside intimacy. This proactive approach ultimately helps protect both partners’ psychological wellbeing.
The study, “The entwined nature of infidelity and relationship quality: parallels in theory and practice through a moderated mediation analysis,” was authored by Kashish Pandey, Priyanka Tiwari, Taranjeet Duggal, and Khusboo K.
-------------------------------------------------
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #infidelity #relationshipquality #sociosexualorientation #monogamy #datingresearch #genderdifferences #evolutionarypsychology #trustinrelationships #relationshiptherapy #unfaithfulnessattitudes
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DATE: July 27, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: The psychology of jealousy: Study explores how perceived mate value is linked to relationship conflict
A recent study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior suggests that how individuals perceive their own attractiveness and desirability compared to their romantic partners is linked to relationship tension. The findings indicate that feeling more replaceable than a primary partner tends to predict greater conflict and feelings of competition, regardless of whether the relationship is monogamous or open. However, people in consensually non-monogamous relationships who practice open communication and experience joy for their partner’s other romances tend to report less jealousy and conflict overall.
In relationship psychology, mate value refers to a person’s overall desirability as a romantic partner. This concept encompasses traits such as physical appearance, personality, social status, and access to resources. When partners evaluate each other, they often notice differences in these traits, which is known as a mate value discrepancy.
Past research shows that when people feel they have a lower mate value than their partner, they often feel insecure. They might worry about being replaced by someone more attractive or successful. This insecurity tends to trigger jealousy and behaviors aimed at guarding the partner from rivals, which psychologists call mate retention.
Most prior studies on this topic only looked at monogamous relationships. In monogamy, people expect to have only one partner at a time, which theoretically reduces competition. Consensually non-monogamous relationships operate quite differently, as partners explicitly agree that they can have romantic or sexual relationships with other people.
Because people in consensually non-monogamous relationships are openly exposed to their partner’s other partners, they might regularly observe differences in mate value. Faith Swanson, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at Texas State University and a prevention specialist at Cenikor Foundations, wanted to explore how these dynamics play out across different mating styles. The study was conducted under the supervision of Rhonda N. Balzarini, an assistant professor of psychology at Texas State University and an affiliated researcher at the Kinsey Institute.
“One thing that’s always fascinated me is that humans have a long history of flexible mating systems, but a lot of relationship research still focuses almost entirely on monogamy,” Swanson said. “We wanted to know whether the same evolutionary processes that shape jealousy, conflict, and mate guarding in monogamous couples also apply to consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships, or whether people adapt to those relationships in different ways.”
The researchers analyzed data from a final sample of 512 participants. This group included 312 individuals in monogamous relationships and 200 individuals in consensually non-monogamous relationships. Participants were recruited through social media advertisements and online forums. The sample was international, spanning 62 countries, though the majority of participants identified as white, female, and living in Europe or North America, with an average age of about 35 years old.
Participants completed online surveys regarding themselves and up to two current romantic partners. They answered questions to assess their own mate value and the mate value of each partner. To do this, they rated how difficult it would be to replace themselves or their partner on various domains, such as physical attractiveness, emotional stability, and financial resources.
The survey also measured the frequency of conflict with each partner. Participants reported their anticipated jealousy by rating how distressed they would feel if their partner became intimate with someone else. To measure mate retention, participants indicated how often they used specific tactics to keep their partner. Psychologists generally divide these into two categories: “benefit-provisioning” tactics, which are positive behaviors like giving gifts or showing love and care, and “cost-inflicting” tactics, which are negative behaviors like monopolizing the partner’s time or putting down competitors.
Another measure assessed intrasexual competitiveness, which is the tendency to view people of the same sex as rivals for romantic attention. Finally, participants in consensually non-monogamous relationships answered questions about specific relationship maintenance strategies. These strategies included disclosing attractions to others, discussing jealousy openly, establishing a partner hierarchy, and experiencing compersion. Compersion is defined as feeling joy or positive emotions when a partner is romantically or sexually involved with someone else. The survey also asked about structural practices, such as how partners distribute resources like time and money, their willingness to help raise a partner’s children, and their dedication to sexual health and safer sex practices.
The analysis revealed several nuanced patterns regarding how partners compare themselves to one another. “Across both monogamous and CNM relationships, people who perceived themselves as lower in mate value tended to report more conflict and greater competitiveness with potential rivals,” Swanson explained.
“From an evolutionary perspective, that makes sense,” Swanson added. “If someone feels more replaceable than their partner, they may become more sensitive to potential threats to the relationship because, ancestrally, losing a valuable partner could have had important reproductive or survival consequences.”
Some of the results challenged previous assumptions about primary partnerships. “One finding that surprised us was that mate value discrepancies did not consistently predict jealousy or mate retention in primary relationships, despite prior research suggesting they should,” Swanson noted. “Instead, the strongest and most consistent associations involved conflict and intrasexual competitiveness.”
The data provides evidence for a different pattern when looking at secondary partners in non-monogamous relationships. A secondary partner is typically someone with whom an individual has a less intertwined or newer relationship, compared to a primary partner.
“We were also intrigued that in CNM relationships, perceiving oneself as higher in mate value than a secondary partner was associated with greater conflict, jealousy, and mate retention,” Swanson told PsyPost. “This suggests that relationship dynamics may differ depending on whether someone is interacting with a primary or secondary partner, raising interesting questions for future research.”
The researchers suspect this happens because secondary relationships are often newer, less stable, and lack the established boundaries of a primary pair-bond. Without a deep history of conflict resolution, perceived differences in desirability might trigger frustration, especially if a highly desirable person feels entitled to a certain relationship quality or fears the unstable arrangement will fall apart.
Engaging in specific communication strategies was associated with reduced relationship tension. “At the same time, one of the encouraging findings was that mate value dynamics aren’t fixed,” Swanson said. “For example, in CNM relationships, practices like openly communicating about jealousy and discussing attractions to others were associated with less conflict and jealousy.”
“This suggests that while emotional processes like jealousy and competitiveness may have deep evolutionary roots influencing the ways in which we perceive relationship security, how we manage and integrate them are flexible and shaped by processes like communication, trust, and negotiation between partners,” she explained.
On the other hand, endorsing a partner hierarchy, which involves explicitly prioritizing one partner over others, was linked to more frequent conflict, increased jealousy, and higher rates of mate guarding. The scientists also found that high mate value individuals with multiple partners sometimes engaged in more positive mate retention, such as giving benefit-provisioning gifts or showing affection, to maintain their relationships.
The scientists also noted some differences between men and women, which may reflect different evolutionary mating strategies. For instance, men who perceived their own mate value as low were more likely to view other men as romantic competitors, likely because they feel a heightened need to compete for access to partners. In contrast, women in monogamous relationships reported more competitiveness when they perceived their partner as highly desirable. The researchers suggest that because women are often oriented toward long-term mating, they may fiercely guard a highly desirable partner to protect their established bond. Both men and women in non-monogamous relationships reported less sexual and possessive jealousy than their monogamous counterparts.
Readers should note that psychological factors do not exist in a vacuum. “Most of the effects were relatively modest, which is common in psychological research because human relationships are incredibly complex,” Swanson pointed out. “Mate value perceptions explained part of the picture, but certainly not all of it.”
“I’d think of mate value as one cue among many that people use to evaluate relationship security,” Swanson added. “Factors like communication, attachment style, trust, personality, and shared experiences are also incredibly important. Our findings suggest that mate value perceptions contribute to relationship dynamics, but they’re only one piece of a much larger puzzle.”
To prevent misinterpretations, the researchers emphasize the limits of their data. “A key point in the study is that participants’ perceptions of their own mate value were more strongly associated with conflict and intrasexual competitiveness than either their perceptions of a partner’s mate value, or the discrepancy between their two partners,” Swanson emphasized. “In other words, how someone perceives their own value explains more about conflict and competitiveness than how they perceive their partner(s).”
Because the research design was cross-sectional, it only captures a single snapshot in time. “It’s also important not to interpret these findings as causal,” she warned. “Because the study was cross-sectional, we can’t conclude that mate value perceptions lead to conflict or competition.”
“It’s equally possible that experiencing conflict or competition influences how people evaluate themselves and their partners, so future longitudinal research will be needed to untangle these relationships,” Swanson noted.
The sample size for analyzing secondary partners was also relatively small. Only 88 participants provided data for a second partner. This small sample limits the statistical power of those specific findings, meaning the results related to secondary partners should be replicated in larger groups.
“I’d love to continue exploring how evolved mating psychology interacts with modern relationship structures,” Swanson said of her future plans. “Humans have such flexible mating systems, and I think there’s so much we don’t understand about how evolved psychological mechanisms influence our relationships.”
“Moving forward, I’d like to conduct longitudinal research and collect data from both members of a couple, rather than relying on one partner’s perspective,” she added. This approach would capture reciprocal dynamics that exist between both people in a couple.
“I think one of the most important contributions of this work is that it expands relationship science beyond a monogamy-only perspective,” Swanson concluded. “Rather than assuming the same psychological processes operate identically across all relationships, our findings suggest that some mechanisms are shared, while others depend on relationship context and the ways partners manage challenges together.”
“Ultimately, the study reinforces that relationships, whether monogamous or consensually non-monogamous, are shaped not only by perceptions of mate value, but also by the communication and maintenance practices partners use to navigate them,” she said.
The study, “How Perceived Mate Value Discrepancies are Related to Jealousy, Mate Guarding, Intrasexual Competition, and Partner Conflict in Monogamous and Consensually Nonmonogamous Relationships,” was authored by Faith L. Swanson, Rhonda N. Balzarini, Justin K. Mogilski, and Taylor M. Himes.
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-
DATE: July 27, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: The psychology of jealousy: Study explores how perceived mate value is linked to relationship conflict
A recent study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior suggests that how individuals perceive their own attractiveness and desirability compared to their romantic partners is linked to relationship tension. The findings indicate that feeling more replaceable than a primary partner tends to predict greater conflict and feelings of competition, regardless of whether the relationship is monogamous or open. However, people in consensually non-monogamous relationships who practice open communication and experience joy for their partner’s other romances tend to report less jealousy and conflict overall.
In relationship psychology, mate value refers to a person’s overall desirability as a romantic partner. This concept encompasses traits such as physical appearance, personality, social status, and access to resources. When partners evaluate each other, they often notice differences in these traits, which is known as a mate value discrepancy.
Past research shows that when people feel they have a lower mate value than their partner, they often feel insecure. They might worry about being replaced by someone more attractive or successful. This insecurity tends to trigger jealousy and behaviors aimed at guarding the partner from rivals, which psychologists call mate retention.
Most prior studies on this topic only looked at monogamous relationships. In monogamy, people expect to have only one partner at a time, which theoretically reduces competition. Consensually non-monogamous relationships operate quite differently, as partners explicitly agree that they can have romantic or sexual relationships with other people.
Because people in consensually non-monogamous relationships are openly exposed to their partner’s other partners, they might regularly observe differences in mate value. Faith Swanson, a researcher in the Department of Psychology at Texas State University and a prevention specialist at Cenikor Foundations, wanted to explore how these dynamics play out across different mating styles. The study was conducted under the supervision of Rhonda N. Balzarini, an assistant professor of psychology at Texas State University and an affiliated researcher at the Kinsey Institute.
“One thing that’s always fascinated me is that humans have a long history of flexible mating systems, but a lot of relationship research still focuses almost entirely on monogamy,” Swanson said. “We wanted to know whether the same evolutionary processes that shape jealousy, conflict, and mate guarding in monogamous couples also apply to consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships, or whether people adapt to those relationships in different ways.”
The researchers analyzed data from a final sample of 512 participants. This group included 312 individuals in monogamous relationships and 200 individuals in consensually non-monogamous relationships. Participants were recruited through social media advertisements and online forums. The sample was international, spanning 62 countries, though the majority of participants identified as white, female, and living in Europe or North America, with an average age of about 35 years old.
Participants completed online surveys regarding themselves and up to two current romantic partners. They answered questions to assess their own mate value and the mate value of each partner. To do this, they rated how difficult it would be to replace themselves or their partner on various domains, such as physical attractiveness, emotional stability, and financial resources.
The survey also measured the frequency of conflict with each partner. Participants reported their anticipated jealousy by rating how distressed they would feel if their partner became intimate with someone else. To measure mate retention, participants indicated how often they used specific tactics to keep their partner. Psychologists generally divide these into two categories: “benefit-provisioning” tactics, which are positive behaviors like giving gifts or showing love and care, and “cost-inflicting” tactics, which are negative behaviors like monopolizing the partner’s time or putting down competitors.
Another measure assessed intrasexual competitiveness, which is the tendency to view people of the same sex as rivals for romantic attention. Finally, participants in consensually non-monogamous relationships answered questions about specific relationship maintenance strategies. These strategies included disclosing attractions to others, discussing jealousy openly, establishing a partner hierarchy, and experiencing compersion. Compersion is defined as feeling joy or positive emotions when a partner is romantically or sexually involved with someone else. The survey also asked about structural practices, such as how partners distribute resources like time and money, their willingness to help raise a partner’s children, and their dedication to sexual health and safer sex practices.
The analysis revealed several nuanced patterns regarding how partners compare themselves to one another. “Across both monogamous and CNM relationships, people who perceived themselves as lower in mate value tended to report more conflict and greater competitiveness with potential rivals,” Swanson explained.
“From an evolutionary perspective, that makes sense,” Swanson added. “If someone feels more replaceable than their partner, they may become more sensitive to potential threats to the relationship because, ancestrally, losing a valuable partner could have had important reproductive or survival consequences.”
Some of the results challenged previous assumptions about primary partnerships. “One finding that surprised us was that mate value discrepancies did not consistently predict jealousy or mate retention in primary relationships, despite prior research suggesting they should,” Swanson noted. “Instead, the strongest and most consistent associations involved conflict and intrasexual competitiveness.”
The data provides evidence for a different pattern when looking at secondary partners in non-monogamous relationships. A secondary partner is typically someone with whom an individual has a less intertwined or newer relationship, compared to a primary partner.
“We were also intrigued that in CNM relationships, perceiving oneself as higher in mate value than a secondary partner was associated with greater conflict, jealousy, and mate retention,” Swanson told PsyPost. “This suggests that relationship dynamics may differ depending on whether someone is interacting with a primary or secondary partner, raising interesting questions for future research.”
The researchers suspect this happens because secondary relationships are often newer, less stable, and lack the established boundaries of a primary pair-bond. Without a deep history of conflict resolution, perceived differences in desirability might trigger frustration, especially if a highly desirable person feels entitled to a certain relationship quality or fears the unstable arrangement will fall apart.
Engaging in specific communication strategies was associated with reduced relationship tension. “At the same time, one of the encouraging findings was that mate value dynamics aren’t fixed,” Swanson said. “For example, in CNM relationships, practices like openly communicating about jealousy and discussing attractions to others were associated with less conflict and jealousy.”
“This suggests that while emotional processes like jealousy and competitiveness may have deep evolutionary roots influencing the ways in which we perceive relationship security, how we manage and integrate them are flexible and shaped by processes like communication, trust, and negotiation between partners,” she explained.
On the other hand, endorsing a partner hierarchy, which involves explicitly prioritizing one partner over others, was linked to more frequent conflict, increased jealousy, and higher rates of mate guarding. The scientists also found that high mate value individuals with multiple partners sometimes engaged in more positive mate retention, such as giving benefit-provisioning gifts or showing affection, to maintain their relationships.
The scientists also noted some differences between men and women, which may reflect different evolutionary mating strategies. For instance, men who perceived their own mate value as low were more likely to view other men as romantic competitors, likely because they feel a heightened need to compete for access to partners. In contrast, women in monogamous relationships reported more competitiveness when they perceived their partner as highly desirable. The researchers suggest that because women are often oriented toward long-term mating, they may fiercely guard a highly desirable partner to protect their established bond. Both men and women in non-monogamous relationships reported less sexual and possessive jealousy than their monogamous counterparts.
Readers should note that psychological factors do not exist in a vacuum. “Most of the effects were relatively modest, which is common in psychological research because human relationships are incredibly complex,” Swanson pointed out. “Mate value perceptions explained part of the picture, but certainly not all of it.”
“I’d think of mate value as one cue among many that people use to evaluate relationship security,” Swanson added. “Factors like communication, attachment style, trust, personality, and shared experiences are also incredibly important. Our findings suggest that mate value perceptions contribute to relationship dynamics, but they’re only one piece of a much larger puzzle.”
To prevent misinterpretations, the researchers emphasize the limits of their data. “A key point in the study is that participants’ perceptions of their own mate value were more strongly associated with conflict and intrasexual competitiveness than either their perceptions of a partner’s mate value, or the discrepancy between their two partners,” Swanson emphasized. “In other words, how someone perceives their own value explains more about conflict and competitiveness than how they perceive their partner(s).”
Because the research design was cross-sectional, it only captures a single snapshot in time. “It’s also important not to interpret these findings as causal,” she warned. “Because the study was cross-sectional, we can’t conclude that mate value perceptions lead to conflict or competition.”
“It’s equally possible that experiencing conflict or competition influences how people evaluate themselves and their partners, so future longitudinal research will be needed to untangle these relationships,” Swanson noted.
The sample size for analyzing secondary partners was also relatively small. Only 88 participants provided data for a second partner. This small sample limits the statistical power of those specific findings, meaning the results related to secondary partners should be replicated in larger groups.
“I’d love to continue exploring how evolved mating psychology interacts with modern relationship structures,” Swanson said of her future plans. “Humans have such flexible mating systems, and I think there’s so much we don’t understand about how evolved psychological mechanisms influence our relationships.”
“Moving forward, I’d like to conduct longitudinal research and collect data from both members of a couple, rather than relying on one partner’s perspective,” she added. This approach would capture reciprocal dynamics that exist between both people in a couple.
“I think one of the most important contributions of this work is that it expands relationship science beyond a monogamy-only perspective,” Swanson concluded. “Rather than assuming the same psychological processes operate identically across all relationships, our findings suggest that some mechanisms are shared, while others depend on relationship context and the ways partners manage challenges together.”
“Ultimately, the study reinforces that relationships, whether monogamous or consensually non-monogamous, are shaped not only by perceptions of mate value, but also by the communication and maintenance practices partners use to navigate them,” she said.
The study, “How Perceived Mate Value Discrepancies are Related to Jealousy, Mate Guarding, Intrasexual Competition, and Partner Conflict in Monogamous and Consensually Nonmonogamous Relationships,” was authored by Faith L. Swanson, Rhonda N. Balzarini, Justin K. Mogilski, and Taylor M. Himes.
-------------------------------------------------
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-
DATE: July 22, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Adults with depression show a negative attentional bias, but new research suggests it is highly task-specific
A recent study published in Comprehensive Psychiatry provides evidence that adults experiencing clinical depression tend to process information differently, often paying more attention to negative details in their environment. The research suggests that this attentional shift is real but might depend heavily on the specific mental tasks used to measure it. These findings help scientists better understand how depression affects the mind and point toward potential ways to tailor future treatments.
Major depressive disorder is a common mental health condition characterized by persistent sadness and a loss of interest in daily activities. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists a diminished ability to think or concentrate as one of the core symptoms of a major depressive episode. To understand this specific symptom, psychologists study selective attention. Selective attention is the brain’s fundamental ability to focus on relevant information while filtering out distractions.
The cognitive model of depression suggests that depressive symptoms are maintained by a negative attentional bias. This means a person has a tendency to automatically focus more on depressing or negative information, such as sad faces or pessimistic words. In a healthy brain, selective attention helps a person prioritize goal-relevant stimuli without getting overwhelmed. In a depressed brain, this cognitive system might instead prioritize negative emotional triggers.
The scientific literature on this topic has been mixed. Some past studies have shown a strong negative bias in depressed individuals, but others have shown no significant difference. Other studies suggest depressed people simply lack the positive bias normally seen in healthy individuals. The mixed nature of this past research prompted the current study.
Jessica Hur, a graduate student at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Medical Science, noted that the project began during her undergraduate studies. “This study started as a summer research project during my undergraduate degree, and I am proud of how it has grown into a published systematic review and meta-analysis,” Hur said. “It was genuinely a collaborative effort, and I would encourage readers to check out the full paper as it is open access!”
Hur explained that evolutionary psychology inspired the investigation. “I first became interested in this topic through my earlier research on the analytical rumination hypothesis and evolutionary perspectives on depression, which propose that some depressive symptoms may reflect an adaptive shift in cognitive resources rather than a pure deficit,” Hur said. The analytical rumination hypothesis suggests that depression evolved as a way to help people focus intensely on solving complex, persistent problems.
“That made me curious whether attention itself, and not only rumination, might show a similar pattern in major depressive disorder,” Hur told PsyPost. “Because the literature on selective attention in depression was mixed and had not been comprehensively reviewed in over a decade, we set out to determine whether adults with depression reliably show a negative attentional bias and, if so, under what conditions.”
To answer these questions, the researchers performed a systematic review and a meta-analysis. A systematic review involves collecting all the published studies on a specific topic to look at broad patterns. A meta-analysis uses statistical tools to combine the mathematical data from those studies into one large analysis. The researchers searched major academic databases to find peer-reviewed studies comparing adults with depression to healthy controls.
The authors gathered 87 previous studies that compared adults experiencing a major depressive episode to healthy controls. In total, the combined research included 4,685 participants with depression and 4,206 healthy participants. The average age of the participants was about 36 years old, and nearly 65 percent of them were female. Most studies required participants to have moderate to severe levels of depression.
The researchers focused on studies that used three specific psychological tests. The first was the original color-word Stroop task. This test asks people to name the color of a font when it spells a conflicting color word, testing a person’s ability to block out distractions. The researchers measured the reaction times of the participants to see how much the conflicting information slowed them down.
The second test was the emotional Stroop task. This version is similar to the original test but uses emotionally charged words, like sad or angry words, instead of color names. It tests if negative words cause more interference than neutral words. The third test was the dot-probe task, which involves showing two images side by side on a screen.
In the dot-probe task, usually, one image is a neutral face and the other is an emotional face. These faces appear for just a fraction of a second before a small dot appears in the location of one of the images. This test measures how quickly a person reacts to the dot. If a person reacts faster when the dot appears in the exact spot where the negative face used to be, it suggests their attention was automatically drawn to the negative image.
When looking at the 87 studies as a whole, the researchers found that about 84 percent of them reported differences in selective attention between the depressed and healthy groups. Out of the studies that specifically looked for a negative bias, about 74 percent found that depressed individuals paid more attention to negative stimuli. The depressed participants tended to perform worse on attention tasks in almost every scenario.
The authors then used 19 of those studies to run their detailed statistical meta-analyses. The combined statistics showed that depression was linked to a significant negative bias during the dot-probe task. People with depression were much more likely to have their attention grabbed by negative facial expressions compared to healthy individuals. This specific finding provides evidence that automatic attention might be altered during a depressive episode.
The statistical analysis for the two Stroop tasks did not reach significance. The depressed participants did show a slight numerical trend toward being more distracted by conflicting words and negative words. The researchers calculated ratios of the average reaction times to account for different testing scales. The mathematical evidence was not strong enough to confidently say this difference was not due to chance.
The inconsistency across the different tests stood out to the research team. “The main takeaway is that attention in depression is likely altered, but not in one simple or uniform way,” Hur said. “The result appears to depend heavily on the type of attention being measured and how it is assessed.”
The reliance on specific tests was an unexpected revelation. “The most surprising part was how task-specific the negative attentional bias turned out to be,” Hur said. “It only showed up reliably with the dot-probe task, not the Stroop tasks, even though all three are used somewhat interchangeably in the literature as measures of selective attention.”
This discrepancy indicates a need for better testing tools in the future. “This highlighted the need for more standardized and psychometrically validated measures before firm conclusions can be drawn about how depression affects attention,” Hur explained. Psychometrically validated measures are tests that have been rigorously proven to be reliable and accurate over multiple testing sessions.
The researchers also checked to see if traits like age or depression severity changed the results. They found that age played a specific role in the dot-probe task results. Older adults with depression showed a stronger tendency to focus on negative faces than younger adults with depression. This suggests that aging might increase a person’s sensitivity to emotionally negative cues.
Readers might misinterpret these findings to mean that all individuals with depression process information the exact same way. The study provides evidence that attentional differences exist, but these mental patterns likely vary from person to person. “I want to pre-empt the idea that this confirms people with depression are simply ‘wired’ to fixate on negative things,” Hur said.
Hur noted that the evidence is currently limited to specific scenarios. “Our quantitative evidence for a negative bias was robust for only one task type (dot-probe), and even that finding was based on a small number of studies,” Hur said. “More importantly, I think the field needs to move beyond documenting that this bias exists and start focusing more on why it exists.”
Scientists are actively debating the true nature of this attentional shift. “One open question we highlight in the paper is whether this attentional shift toward negative information is best understood the way it is traditionally framed, as a symptom or nuisance to be corrected, or whether it could reflect something more adaptive, a reallocation of cognitive resources toward processing and resolving a significant problem,” Hur explained.
This alternative view suggests depression might cause people to hyper-focus on threats to help identify and solve environmental problems. “Currently, we cannot distinguish between these two explanations, and I think that is one of the more important next steps for this line of research,” Hur added.
The research team noted several limitations in their own analysis. The number of studies that provided enough specific data for the statistical meta-analysis was quite small. This small sample size makes it difficult to detect subtle patterns in the data. The researchers also used a mathematical formula to standardize the different depression scales used across the original studies, which might have introduced some measurement errors.
Many of the original studies did not provide detailed information about the medications participants were taking. Psychiatric medications can heavily influence a person’s attention and reaction times. Not knowing the exact doses or types of drugs makes it harder to isolate the physical effects of depression itself. Additionally, some studies included participants who also had anxiety disorders, which commonly occur alongside depression but can influence attention in their own ways.
Another issue is that age might be confused with the overall length of a person’s illness. Older adults might have a stronger negative bias simply because they have been dealing with depression for more years and have experienced more depressive episodes. Most of the original studies did not record the age when the participants first developed depression. This missing information makes it impossible to separate the effects of getting older from the effects of having a long-term mental health condition.
The researchers decided to only include dot-probe studies that showed images for exactly half a second. This time frame is known as supraliminal presentation, meaning the image is shown long enough for a person to consciously register it. By only looking at half-second intervals, the researchers might have missed entirely different patterns that happen at much faster or slower speeds.
Moving forward, researchers hope to continue investigating the evolutionary purposes of depression. “Longer term, I am contributing to the design of a randomized controlled trial that further examines evolutionary perspectives on depression, this time testing the iatrogenic hypothesis, the idea that antidepressants may interfere with the brain’s natural homeostatic mechanisms, such that discontinuing them could increase the risk of relapse,” Hur said. The iatrogenic hypothesis explores how medical treatments might accidentally cause unintended side effects or disrupt the body’s natural balance.
This future research will build upon the foundational concepts explored in the current review. “It is a pharmacological extension of the same evolutionary framework that first drew me to this area,” Hur said. “Ultimately, I want to keep testing these evolutionary theories because, if the evidence supports them, they could help reduce stigma surrounding depression. Some depressive symptoms may be evolved responses to adversity rather than simply signs that something in the brain is malfunctioning.”
The study, “Selective attention in adults with major depressive disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis of task-specific differences and negative bias,” was authored by Jessica K. Hur, Natalie C.W. Ho, Marta M. Maslej, Paul W. Andrews, Meryl A. Butters, Bruce Milliken, and Benoit H. Mulsant.
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-
DATE: July 22, 2026 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Adults with depression show a negative attentional bias, but new research suggests it is highly task-specific
A recent study published in Comprehensive Psychiatry provides evidence that adults experiencing clinical depression tend to process information differently, often paying more attention to negative details in their environment. The research suggests that this attentional shift is real but might depend heavily on the specific mental tasks used to measure it. These findings help scientists better understand how depression affects the mind and point toward potential ways to tailor future treatments.
Major depressive disorder is a common mental health condition characterized by persistent sadness and a loss of interest in daily activities. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lists a diminished ability to think or concentrate as one of the core symptoms of a major depressive episode. To understand this specific symptom, psychologists study selective attention. Selective attention is the brain’s fundamental ability to focus on relevant information while filtering out distractions.
The cognitive model of depression suggests that depressive symptoms are maintained by a negative attentional bias. This means a person has a tendency to automatically focus more on depressing or negative information, such as sad faces or pessimistic words. In a healthy brain, selective attention helps a person prioritize goal-relevant stimuli without getting overwhelmed. In a depressed brain, this cognitive system might instead prioritize negative emotional triggers.
The scientific literature on this topic has been mixed. Some past studies have shown a strong negative bias in depressed individuals, but others have shown no significant difference. Other studies suggest depressed people simply lack the positive bias normally seen in healthy individuals. The mixed nature of this past research prompted the current study.
Jessica Hur, a graduate student at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Medical Science, noted that the project began during her undergraduate studies. “This study started as a summer research project during my undergraduate degree, and I am proud of how it has grown into a published systematic review and meta-analysis,” Hur said. “It was genuinely a collaborative effort, and I would encourage readers to check out the full paper as it is open access!”
Hur explained that evolutionary psychology inspired the investigation. “I first became interested in this topic through my earlier research on the analytical rumination hypothesis and evolutionary perspectives on depression, which propose that some depressive symptoms may reflect an adaptive shift in cognitive resources rather than a pure deficit,” Hur said. The analytical rumination hypothesis suggests that depression evolved as a way to help people focus intensely on solving complex, persistent problems.
“That made me curious whether attention itself, and not only rumination, might show a similar pattern in major depressive disorder,” Hur told PsyPost. “Because the literature on selective attention in depression was mixed and had not been comprehensively reviewed in over a decade, we set out to determine whether adults with depression reliably show a negative attentional bias and, if so, under what conditions.”
To answer these questions, the researchers performed a systematic review and a meta-analysis. A systematic review involves collecting all the published studies on a specific topic to look at broad patterns. A meta-analysis uses statistical tools to combine the mathematical data from those studies into one large analysis. The researchers searched major academic databases to find peer-reviewed studies comparing adults with depression to healthy controls.
The authors gathered 87 previous studies that compared adults experiencing a major depressive episode to healthy controls. In total, the combined research included 4,685 participants with depression and 4,206 healthy participants. The average age of the participants was about 36 years old, and nearly 65 percent of them were female. Most studies required participants to have moderate to severe levels of depression.
The researchers focused on studies that used three specific psychological tests. The first was the original color-word Stroop task. This test asks people to name the color of a font when it spells a conflicting color word, testing a person’s ability to block out distractions. The researchers measured the reaction times of the participants to see how much the conflicting information slowed them down.
The second test was the emotional Stroop task. This version is similar to the original test but uses emotionally charged words, like sad or angry words, instead of color names. It tests if negative words cause more interference than neutral words. The third test was the dot-probe task, which involves showing two images side by side on a screen.
In the dot-probe task, usually, one image is a neutral face and the other is an emotional face. These faces appear for just a fraction of a second before a small dot appears in the location of one of the images. This test measures how quickly a person reacts to the dot. If a person reacts faster when the dot appears in the exact spot where the negative face used to be, it suggests their attention was automatically drawn to the negative image.
When looking at the 87 studies as a whole, the researchers found that about 84 percent of them reported differences in selective attention between the depressed and healthy groups. Out of the studies that specifically looked for a negative bias, about 74 percent found that depressed individuals paid more attention to negative stimuli. The depressed participants tended to perform worse on attention tasks in almost every scenario.
The authors then used 19 of those studies to run their detailed statistical meta-analyses. The combined statistics showed that depression was linked to a significant negative bias during the dot-probe task. People with depression were much more likely to have their attention grabbed by negative facial expressions compared to healthy individuals. This specific finding provides evidence that automatic attention might be altered during a depressive episode.
The statistical analysis for the two Stroop tasks did not reach significance. The depressed participants did show a slight numerical trend toward being more distracted by conflicting words and negative words. The researchers calculated ratios of the average reaction times to account for different testing scales. The mathematical evidence was not strong enough to confidently say this difference was not due to chance.
The inconsistency across the different tests stood out to the research team. “The main takeaway is that attention in depression is likely altered, but not in one simple or uniform way,” Hur said. “The result appears to depend heavily on the type of attention being measured and how it is assessed.”
The reliance on specific tests was an unexpected revelation. “The most surprising part was how task-specific the negative attentional bias turned out to be,” Hur said. “It only showed up reliably with the dot-probe task, not the Stroop tasks, even though all three are used somewhat interchangeably in the literature as measures of selective attention.”
This discrepancy indicates a need for better testing tools in the future. “This highlighted the need for more standardized and psychometrically validated measures before firm conclusions can be drawn about how depression affects attention,” Hur explained. Psychometrically validated measures are tests that have been rigorously proven to be reliable and accurate over multiple testing sessions.
The researchers also checked to see if traits like age or depression severity changed the results. They found that age played a specific role in the dot-probe task results. Older adults with depression showed a stronger tendency to focus on negative faces than younger adults with depression. This suggests that aging might increase a person’s sensitivity to emotionally negative cues.
Readers might misinterpret these findings to mean that all individuals with depression process information the exact same way. The study provides evidence that attentional differences exist, but these mental patterns likely vary from person to person. “I want to pre-empt the idea that this confirms people with depression are simply ‘wired’ to fixate on negative things,” Hur said.
Hur noted that the evidence is currently limited to specific scenarios. “Our quantitative evidence for a negative bias was robust for only one task type (dot-probe), and even that finding was based on a small number of studies,” Hur said. “More importantly, I think the field needs to move beyond documenting that this bias exists and start focusing more on why it exists.”
Scientists are actively debating the true nature of this attentional shift. “One open question we highlight in the paper is whether this attentional shift toward negative information is best understood the way it is traditionally framed, as a symptom or nuisance to be corrected, or whether it could reflect something more adaptive, a reallocation of cognitive resources toward processing and resolving a significant problem,” Hur explained.
This alternative view suggests depression might cause people to hyper-focus on threats to help identify and solve environmental problems. “Currently, we cannot distinguish between these two explanations, and I think that is one of the more important next steps for this line of research,” Hur added.
The research team noted several limitations in their own analysis. The number of studies that provided enough specific data for the statistical meta-analysis was quite small. This small sample size makes it difficult to detect subtle patterns in the data. The researchers also used a mathematical formula to standardize the different depression scales used across the original studies, which might have introduced some measurement errors.
Many of the original studies did not provide detailed information about the medications participants were taking. Psychiatric medications can heavily influence a person’s attention and reaction times. Not knowing the exact doses or types of drugs makes it harder to isolate the physical effects of depression itself. Additionally, some studies included participants who also had anxiety disorders, which commonly occur alongside depression but can influence attention in their own ways.
Another issue is that age might be confused with the overall length of a person’s illness. Older adults might have a stronger negative bias simply because they have been dealing with depression for more years and have experienced more depressive episodes. Most of the original studies did not record the age when the participants first developed depression. This missing information makes it impossible to separate the effects of getting older from the effects of having a long-term mental health condition.
The researchers decided to only include dot-probe studies that showed images for exactly half a second. This time frame is known as supraliminal presentation, meaning the image is shown long enough for a person to consciously register it. By only looking at half-second intervals, the researchers might have missed entirely different patterns that happen at much faster or slower speeds.
Moving forward, researchers hope to continue investigating the evolutionary purposes of depression. “Longer term, I am contributing to the design of a randomized controlled trial that further examines evolutionary perspectives on depression, this time testing the iatrogenic hypothesis, the idea that antidepressants may interfere with the brain’s natural homeostatic mechanisms, such that discontinuing them could increase the risk of relapse,” Hur said. The iatrogenic hypothesis explores how medical treatments might accidentally cause unintended side effects or disrupt the body’s natural balance.
This future research will build upon the foundational concepts explored in the current review. “It is a pharmacological extension of the same evolutionary framework that first drew me to this area,” Hur said. “Ultimately, I want to keep testing these evolutionary theories because, if the evidence supports them, they could help reduce stigma surrounding depression. Some depressive symptoms may be evolved responses to adversity rather than simply signs that something in the brain is malfunctioning.”
The study, “Selective attention in adults with major depressive disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis of task-specific differences and negative bias,” was authored by Jessica K. Hur, Natalie C.W. Ho, Marta M. Maslej, Paul W. Andrews, Meryl A. Butters, Bruce Milliken, and Benoit H. Mulsant.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #depression #attentionbias #dotprobe #strop task #emotionalstroop #selectiveattention #mentalhealthresearch #evolutionarypsychology #major depressive disorder #cognitivebias
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DATE: July 21, 2026 at 10:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Jealousy increases men’s support for feminine honor norms, study finds
A recent study found that men become somewhat more supportive of feminine honor norms when they feel jealous. This was not the case with women. Additionally, individuals with a more restricted mating orientation also showed greater support for feminine honor norms. The paper was published in Cognition and Emotion.
Feminine honor norms are cultural expectations about how women should behave to be regarded as respectable and honorable. They typically require women to uphold a reputation for sexual purity through behaviors such as dressing modestly or maintaining virginity before marriage. A woman’s behavior may be seen as reflecting not only on herself but also on her family or wider social group.
These norms can therefore encourage women to avoid actions that might attract gossip, criticism, or accusations of impropriety. They may also prescribe traditional gender roles, such as being caring, loyal, obedient, and devoted to family responsibilities.
Feminine honor norms are often reinforced by relatives, peers, religious teachings, and community expectations. In many cultures, it is considered that a woman abiding by feminine honor norms also protects the honor of her partner. Feminine honor norms can sometimes provide women with a valued social identity, but they can also restrict autonomy and justify unequal monitoring or control.
“I wanted to understand the psychological roots of feminine honor norms — the expectation that women be sexually pure, chaste, and loyal to their husbands and family,” said study author Pelin Gul, an assistant professor of social psychology in the Department of Sustainability and Well-Being at the University of Groningen’s Campus Fryslan.
“These norms underpin the social control and restriction of women’s access to work, education, and health, and they underlie many harmful practices, such as honor-based violence, forced marriage, and virginity testing. So, understanding support for feminine honor norms felt like a natural first step toward understanding these broader harmful practices against women,” Gul told PsyPost. “I also have a personal connection to this question. As a woman from Turkey, a so-called honor culture, I’ve long wondered why some people endorse these norms while others don’t, and I wanted to know whether there’s a deeper psychological explanation behind that variation.”
While researchers often cite protecting the honor of male partners or upholding patriarchal dominance as explanations for these norms, some scientists suggest an alternative view: feminine honor norms may serve as a form of “ideological mate guarding.” Because humans evolved in environments where paternity uncertainty was a reproductive risk for men, men developed adaptations to guard their mates. By promoting cultural norms that restrict female sexuality, individuals can deter infidelity without relying solely on direct, physical mate-guarding tactics.
“The common explanations people are usually aware of, such as cultural explanations, social learning, or accounts framed purely in terms of patriarchy and male power, aren’t the only way to understand why some people support feminine honor norms, and why some support them more than others,” Gul explained.
Gul and her main collaborator, Tom Kupfer, an associate professor of psychology at Nottingham Trent University, hypothesized that higher levels of sexual jealousy, elicited via exposure to a threat of infidelity, would increase support for feminine honor norms. They also wanted to know whether individuals with a more restricted mating strategy would show greater endorsement of feminine honor norms.
These researchers conducted two experiments. Participants in the first experiment were 388 men recruited via an online research platform. Their average age was 33 years. About 44% were married.
Participants were randomly assigned into two groups. Participants in the jealousy induction group were instructed to think of their romantic partner or someone towards whom they have strong romantic feelings, and then imagine that person flirting and being intimate with another person at a party. While imagining this scene, they paused and wrote about how they imagined it at specific points. The other group was a control group tasked to imagine an anxiety-producing scenario in which they took an important academic exam and failed.
As a check of the effect of the experimental scenario, participants completed an assessment of jealousy, which doubled as an indicator of participants’ subjective experience of jealousy. They also completed an assessment of support for feminine and other honor norms.
The second experiment aimed to test whether women also support feminine honor norms when they are induced to feel sexual jealousy. Participants were 551 U.S. adults. Among them, 264 were women. Participants’ average age was 33 years. The experimental procedure was identical to the one used in the first experiment.
Results of the first experiment showed that participants in the jealousy group felt much more jealous than participants in the control group, indicating that the experimental manipulation worked as intended. However, the support for feminine honor norms did not differ between the two groups.
In spite of that, participants who reported feeling greater jealousy tended to report stronger support for feminine honor norms. A more restricted mating strategy was also associated with stronger support for feminine honor norms. A more restricted mating strategy means that an individual is more selective about their romantic partners, has stronger preferences for long-term commitment and exclusivity in a relationship, and is less willing to engage in casual or short-term sexual relationships.
“A relatively monogamous or sociosexually restricted mating strategy is associated with greater support for feminine honor norms among both women and men, equally,” Gul said of the findings. “This is surprising because feminine honor norms are typically thought of as something promoted and enforced by men, particularly in patriarchal societies. Interestingly, though, the underlying psychology suggests these norms can also be motivated by women’s own restricted sociosexuality. This doesn’t rule out that men may have more opportunities to promote and enforce feminine honor norms in practice, but at the psychological level, it appears that both men and women can be motivated to support them.”
“This may be surprising from a traditional social science perspective, which often frames men as the hegemonic, patriarchal sex enforcing restrictions on a lower-power gender,” she continued. “From an evolutionary perspective, however, it’s less puzzling: women pursuing a restricted mating strategy — trying to maintain a stable, monogamous relationship — may benefit strategically from discouraging unrestricted mating behavior in other women, since that behavior increases the risk of losing their own mate to a rival. In that sense, it’s not surprising that individuals with a more restricted mating strategy (lower sociosexuality) would be more supportive of restrictive norms such as feminine honor.”
Results of the second experiment confirmed that individuals feeling greater jealousy tended to show higher support for feminine honor norms. Interestingly, men—but not women—in the jealousy group tended to report somewhat greater support for feminine honor norms compared to the control group, indicating that the experimental induction of jealousy likely increased their support for feminine honor norms. The association between jealousy and support for feminine sexual norms was also stronger among men than among women.
The researchers note that these associations persisted even after controlling for state masculinity threat, religiosity, political conservatism, age, and other types of honor norms, such as masculine and family honor.
“Our findings point to a psychological factor, namely, jealousy, which is an evolved emotion that all humans share to some degree, but that some people experience more intensely than others. When people experience heightened jealousy, this can make them more supportive of norms, values, and practices that reduce the likelihood of unfaithful or ‘impure’ types of behavior. We argue that, over large groups of people and across time, this is partly how strong cultural value systems, such as feminine honor, can take hold.”
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of jealousy and human mate retention strategies. However, it should be noted that all assessments were based on self-reports leaving room for reporting bias to have affected the results. The study also focused exclusively on heterosexual participants, and the findings may not generalize to other sexual orientations or non-Western cultures with different honor traditions.
“This is one of the first lines of research examining whether jealousy is associated with support for norms and values that restrict sexual behavior in society,” Gul pointed out. “So far, these studies have been conducted with Western participants, primarily from the U.S., to establish the basic findings. It remains to be seen whether the same patterns hold in societies that are more strongly honor-based, such as those in the Middle East.”
Future research will look to expand the scope of these findings globally.
“We aim to build a fuller understanding of the psychology underlying support for these norms, particularly the roles of mating strategy and jealousy,” Gul said. “We believe these patterns are likely to generalize across cultures, since mating strategy, mate guarding, and jealousy are species-typical adaptations that humans share, so we’d expect these findings to apply in many cultures, not just in Western samples. Along with this, our next steps are to extend and replicate these findings cross-culturally in more traditional honor cultures, such as Iran and Turkey. We also want to investigate whether ideological mate guarding predicts not just attitudes, but actual enforcement, including real-world punishment and other behaviors people engage in to uphold feminine honor norms.”
The paper, “Effects of experimentally induced jealousy on support for feminine honor,” was authored by Pelin Gul, Stephen Foster, Sajad Sojoudi, and Tom R. Kupfer.
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Jealousy #FeminineHonor #HonorNorms #GenderRoles #MatingStrategy #Sociosexuality #Patriarchy #EvolutionaryPsychology #RelationshipJealousy #CognitionAndEmotion
-
DATE: July 21, 2026 at 10:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Jealousy increases men’s support for feminine honor norms, study finds
A recent study found that men become somewhat more supportive of feminine honor norms when they feel jealous. This was not the case with women. Additionally, individuals with a more restricted mating orientation also showed greater support for feminine honor norms. The paper was published in Cognition and Emotion.
Feminine honor norms are cultural expectations about how women should behave to be regarded as respectable and honorable. They typically require women to uphold a reputation for sexual purity through behaviors such as dressing modestly or maintaining virginity before marriage. A woman’s behavior may be seen as reflecting not only on herself but also on her family or wider social group.
These norms can therefore encourage women to avoid actions that might attract gossip, criticism, or accusations of impropriety. They may also prescribe traditional gender roles, such as being caring, loyal, obedient, and devoted to family responsibilities.
Feminine honor norms are often reinforced by relatives, peers, religious teachings, and community expectations. In many cultures, it is considered that a woman abiding by feminine honor norms also protects the honor of her partner. Feminine honor norms can sometimes provide women with a valued social identity, but they can also restrict autonomy and justify unequal monitoring or control.
“I wanted to understand the psychological roots of feminine honor norms — the expectation that women be sexually pure, chaste, and loyal to their husbands and family,” said study author Pelin Gul, an assistant professor of social psychology in the Department of Sustainability and Well-Being at the University of Groningen’s Campus Fryslan.
“These norms underpin the social control and restriction of women’s access to work, education, and health, and they underlie many harmful practices, such as honor-based violence, forced marriage, and virginity testing. So, understanding support for feminine honor norms felt like a natural first step toward understanding these broader harmful practices against women,” Gul told PsyPost. “I also have a personal connection to this question. As a woman from Turkey, a so-called honor culture, I’ve long wondered why some people endorse these norms while others don’t, and I wanted to know whether there’s a deeper psychological explanation behind that variation.”
While researchers often cite protecting the honor of male partners or upholding patriarchal dominance as explanations for these norms, some scientists suggest an alternative view: feminine honor norms may serve as a form of “ideological mate guarding.” Because humans evolved in environments where paternity uncertainty was a reproductive risk for men, men developed adaptations to guard their mates. By promoting cultural norms that restrict female sexuality, individuals can deter infidelity without relying solely on direct, physical mate-guarding tactics.
“The common explanations people are usually aware of, such as cultural explanations, social learning, or accounts framed purely in terms of patriarchy and male power, aren’t the only way to understand why some people support feminine honor norms, and why some support them more than others,” Gul explained.
Gul and her main collaborator, Tom Kupfer, an associate professor of psychology at Nottingham Trent University, hypothesized that higher levels of sexual jealousy, elicited via exposure to a threat of infidelity, would increase support for feminine honor norms. They also wanted to know whether individuals with a more restricted mating strategy would show greater endorsement of feminine honor norms.
These researchers conducted two experiments. Participants in the first experiment were 388 men recruited via an online research platform. Their average age was 33 years. About 44% were married.
Participants were randomly assigned into two groups. Participants in the jealousy induction group were instructed to think of their romantic partner or someone towards whom they have strong romantic feelings, and then imagine that person flirting and being intimate with another person at a party. While imagining this scene, they paused and wrote about how they imagined it at specific points. The other group was a control group tasked to imagine an anxiety-producing scenario in which they took an important academic exam and failed.
As a check of the effect of the experimental scenario, participants completed an assessment of jealousy, which doubled as an indicator of participants’ subjective experience of jealousy. They also completed an assessment of support for feminine and other honor norms.
The second experiment aimed to test whether women also support feminine honor norms when they are induced to feel sexual jealousy. Participants were 551 U.S. adults. Among them, 264 were women. Participants’ average age was 33 years. The experimental procedure was identical to the one used in the first experiment.
Results of the first experiment showed that participants in the jealousy group felt much more jealous than participants in the control group, indicating that the experimental manipulation worked as intended. However, the support for feminine honor norms did not differ between the two groups.
In spite of that, participants who reported feeling greater jealousy tended to report stronger support for feminine honor norms. A more restricted mating strategy was also associated with stronger support for feminine honor norms. A more restricted mating strategy means that an individual is more selective about their romantic partners, has stronger preferences for long-term commitment and exclusivity in a relationship, and is less willing to engage in casual or short-term sexual relationships.
“A relatively monogamous or sociosexually restricted mating strategy is associated with greater support for feminine honor norms among both women and men, equally,” Gul said of the findings. “This is surprising because feminine honor norms are typically thought of as something promoted and enforced by men, particularly in patriarchal societies. Interestingly, though, the underlying psychology suggests these norms can also be motivated by women’s own restricted sociosexuality. This doesn’t rule out that men may have more opportunities to promote and enforce feminine honor norms in practice, but at the psychological level, it appears that both men and women can be motivated to support them.”
“This may be surprising from a traditional social science perspective, which often frames men as the hegemonic, patriarchal sex enforcing restrictions on a lower-power gender,” she continued. “From an evolutionary perspective, however, it’s less puzzling: women pursuing a restricted mating strategy — trying to maintain a stable, monogamous relationship — may benefit strategically from discouraging unrestricted mating behavior in other women, since that behavior increases the risk of losing their own mate to a rival. In that sense, it’s not surprising that individuals with a more restricted mating strategy (lower sociosexuality) would be more supportive of restrictive norms such as feminine honor.”
Results of the second experiment confirmed that individuals feeling greater jealousy tended to show higher support for feminine honor norms. Interestingly, men—but not women—in the jealousy group tended to report somewhat greater support for feminine honor norms compared to the control group, indicating that the experimental induction of jealousy likely increased their support for feminine honor norms. The association between jealousy and support for feminine sexual norms was also stronger among men than among women.
The researchers note that these associations persisted even after controlling for state masculinity threat, religiosity, political conservatism, age, and other types of honor norms, such as masculine and family honor.
“Our findings point to a psychological factor, namely, jealousy, which is an evolved emotion that all humans share to some degree, but that some people experience more intensely than others. When people experience heightened jealousy, this can make them more supportive of norms, values, and practices that reduce the likelihood of unfaithful or ‘impure’ types of behavior. We argue that, over large groups of people and across time, this is partly how strong cultural value systems, such as feminine honor, can take hold.”
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of jealousy and human mate retention strategies. However, it should be noted that all assessments were based on self-reports leaving room for reporting bias to have affected the results. The study also focused exclusively on heterosexual participants, and the findings may not generalize to other sexual orientations or non-Western cultures with different honor traditions.
“This is one of the first lines of research examining whether jealousy is associated with support for norms and values that restrict sexual behavior in society,” Gul pointed out. “So far, these studies have been conducted with Western participants, primarily from the U.S., to establish the basic findings. It remains to be seen whether the same patterns hold in societies that are more strongly honor-based, such as those in the Middle East.”
Future research will look to expand the scope of these findings globally.
“We aim to build a fuller understanding of the psychology underlying support for these norms, particularly the roles of mating strategy and jealousy,” Gul said. “We believe these patterns are likely to generalize across cultures, since mating strategy, mate guarding, and jealousy are species-typical adaptations that humans share, so we’d expect these findings to apply in many cultures, not just in Western samples. Along with this, our next steps are to extend and replicate these findings cross-culturally in more traditional honor cultures, such as Iran and Turkey. We also want to investigate whether ideological mate guarding predicts not just attitudes, but actual enforcement, including real-world punishment and other behaviors people engage in to uphold feminine honor norms.”
The paper, “Effects of experimentally induced jealousy on support for feminine honor,” was authored by Pelin Gul, Stephen Foster, Sajad Sojoudi, and Tom R. Kupfer.
-------------------------------------------------
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-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Jealousy #FeminineHonor #HonorNorms #GenderRoles #MatingStrategy #Sociosexuality #Patriarchy #EvolutionaryPsychology #RelationshipJealousy #CognitionAndEmotion
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It’s not just a sentiment; it’s biology. The intensity of a mother’s love for her children is evolutionary, hardwired into almost every species to guarantee the survival of the next generation. While fatherhood is vital, the biological drive behind maternal protection is truly unmatched. 🌍✨
#Science #Biology #Motherhood #EvolutionaryPsychology #FamilyDynamics
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It’s not just a sentiment; it’s biology. The intensity of a mother’s love for her children is evolutionary, hardwired into almost every species to guarantee the survival of the next generation. While fatherhood is vital, the biological drive behind maternal protection is truly unmatched. 🌍✨
#Science #Biology #Motherhood #EvolutionaryPsychology #FamilyDynamics
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New research suggests we still pick friends using criteria built for hunter-gatherer life: strength, perceived hunting skill, cooperativeness. Even when it has nothing to do with our actual goals. #HumanEvolution #EvolutionaryPsychology #Anthropology https://www.anthropology.net/p/why-your-brain-still-wants-a-hunting
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New research suggests we still pick friends using criteria built for hunter-gatherer life: strength, perceived hunting skill, cooperativeness. Even when it has nothing to do with our actual goals. #HumanEvolution #EvolutionaryPsychology #Anthropology https://www.anthropology.net/p/why-your-brain-still-wants-a-hunting
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DATE: July 13, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: The evolutionary reasons behind who we choose as friends
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-evolutionary-reasons-behind-who-we-choose-as-friends/
People may choose same-sex friends partly based on traits that would have made someone a valuable cooperative partner in ancestral environments, according to research published in Evolution Human Behavior.
Friendship is often explained through present-day usefulness. According to this view, people are drawn to potential friends who help them pursue current goals, whether by offering kindness, intelligence, support, shared interests, or practical benefits. But this explanation leaves open whether people’s friend preferences are shaped only by what is useful now, or whether some preferences reflect older social pressures from environments in which choosing the right cooperative partners mattered for survival and reproduction.
Adar B. Eisenbruch and colleagues examined the possibility that same-sex friendship preferences partly reflect evolved cooperative partner choice. Because ancestral humans depended on long-term cooperation for tasks such as foraging, childcare, social support, and conflict management, people may have come to value friends who seemed able and willing to create and share benefits. From this perspective, traits such as prosociality, social status, physical attractiveness, and perceived survival-related skill may be appealing not only because they are useful for people’s current goals, but also because they historically signaled a valuable cooperative partner.
In Study 1, the researchers recruited 156 students from a public university in the United States for a lab-based interaction study. Participants were paired with an unfamiliar same-sex partner and completed a structured 30-minute face-to-face conversation. Afterward, they privately rated how desirable their partner was as a potential friend and evaluated the partner on traits thought to matter for friendship, including ancestral productivity, prosociality, dominance, social status, attractiveness to the other sex, nurturance, and academic success.
The researchers also separately measured participants’ physical strength using bicep circumference, grip strength, and chest strength. As a behavioral indicator of friendship interest, participants could choose whether to share their email address with their partner, but contact information was exchanged only if both members of the pair agreed.
In Study 2, 444 U.S. participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk first described their most important current goal. They then rated photographs of unfamiliar same-sex faces based on how much they would want to be friends with each person. Afterward, they judged how helpful or harmful different traits in a new friend would be for achieving their stated goal.
A separate group of raters evaluated the same faces on traits such as Big Five personality characteristics, attractiveness, intelligence, trustworthiness, aggressiveness, competence, and ancestral productivity. This allowed the researchers to compare whether the traits that made faces seem desirable as friends were simply the same traits participants saw as useful for their current goals.
In Study 1, participants were more interested in friendship with partners who appeared higher in ancestral productivity, prosociality, dominance, social status, attractiveness, and nurturance. When the researchers considered the traits together, attractiveness, prosociality, and dominance emerged as the strongest unique predictors of friend desirability. Men were also more likely than women to offer their contact information, even though they did not rate their partners as more desirable overall.
Study 2 showed that friend preferences were not fully explained by current goal pursuit. In particular, attractiveness and ancestral productivity predicted friend desirability more strongly than would be expected based on how relevant those traits were to participants’ goals. This suggests that people’s same-sex friend preferences may be shaped not only by present-day usefulness, but also by preferences for traits that historically signaled a valuable cooperative partner.
The authors note that Study 1 was limited by its sample size, especially for testing sex differences, and that Study 2 cannot fully rule out the possibility that friend preferences are shaped by multiple or less consciously accessible current goals.
Together, the findings suggest that friendship choices may be shaped not only by who is useful to us now, but also by evolved preferences for people who seem like valuable, cooperative partners.
The research, “What do people want in a friend? Cues of ancestral cooperative partner value predict same-sex friend preferences,” was authored by Adar B. Eisenbruch, Rachel L. Grillot, and James R. Roney.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-evolutionary-reasons-behind-who-we-choose-as-friends/
-------------------------------------------------
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #evolutionarypsychology #friendshippreferences #cooperativepartners #ancestralfitness #prosocialtraits #socialstatus #attractiveness #same sexfriendships #friendshipresearch #evolhumbehav
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DATE: July 13, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: The evolutionary reasons behind who we choose as friends
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-evolutionary-reasons-behind-who-we-choose-as-friends/
People may choose same-sex friends partly based on traits that would have made someone a valuable cooperative partner in ancestral environments, according to research published in Evolution Human Behavior.
Friendship is often explained through present-day usefulness. According to this view, people are drawn to potential friends who help them pursue current goals, whether by offering kindness, intelligence, support, shared interests, or practical benefits. But this explanation leaves open whether people’s friend preferences are shaped only by what is useful now, or whether some preferences reflect older social pressures from environments in which choosing the right cooperative partners mattered for survival and reproduction.
Adar B. Eisenbruch and colleagues examined the possibility that same-sex friendship preferences partly reflect evolved cooperative partner choice. Because ancestral humans depended on long-term cooperation for tasks such as foraging, childcare, social support, and conflict management, people may have come to value friends who seemed able and willing to create and share benefits. From this perspective, traits such as prosociality, social status, physical attractiveness, and perceived survival-related skill may be appealing not only because they are useful for people’s current goals, but also because they historically signaled a valuable cooperative partner.
In Study 1, the researchers recruited 156 students from a public university in the United States for a lab-based interaction study. Participants were paired with an unfamiliar same-sex partner and completed a structured 30-minute face-to-face conversation. Afterward, they privately rated how desirable their partner was as a potential friend and evaluated the partner on traits thought to matter for friendship, including ancestral productivity, prosociality, dominance, social status, attractiveness to the other sex, nurturance, and academic success.
The researchers also separately measured participants’ physical strength using bicep circumference, grip strength, and chest strength. As a behavioral indicator of friendship interest, participants could choose whether to share their email address with their partner, but contact information was exchanged only if both members of the pair agreed.
In Study 2, 444 U.S. participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk first described their most important current goal. They then rated photographs of unfamiliar same-sex faces based on how much they would want to be friends with each person. Afterward, they judged how helpful or harmful different traits in a new friend would be for achieving their stated goal.
A separate group of raters evaluated the same faces on traits such as Big Five personality characteristics, attractiveness, intelligence, trustworthiness, aggressiveness, competence, and ancestral productivity. This allowed the researchers to compare whether the traits that made faces seem desirable as friends were simply the same traits participants saw as useful for their current goals.
In Study 1, participants were more interested in friendship with partners who appeared higher in ancestral productivity, prosociality, dominance, social status, attractiveness, and nurturance. When the researchers considered the traits together, attractiveness, prosociality, and dominance emerged as the strongest unique predictors of friend desirability. Men were also more likely than women to offer their contact information, even though they did not rate their partners as more desirable overall.
Study 2 showed that friend preferences were not fully explained by current goal pursuit. In particular, attractiveness and ancestral productivity predicted friend desirability more strongly than would be expected based on how relevant those traits were to participants’ goals. This suggests that people’s same-sex friend preferences may be shaped not only by present-day usefulness, but also by preferences for traits that historically signaled a valuable cooperative partner.
The authors note that Study 1 was limited by its sample size, especially for testing sex differences, and that Study 2 cannot fully rule out the possibility that friend preferences are shaped by multiple or less consciously accessible current goals.
Together, the findings suggest that friendship choices may be shaped not only by who is useful to us now, but also by evolved preferences for people who seem like valuable, cooperative partners.
The research, “What do people want in a friend? Cues of ancestral cooperative partner value predict same-sex friend preferences,” was authored by Adar B. Eisenbruch, Rachel L. Grillot, and James R. Roney.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/the-evolutionary-reasons-behind-who-we-choose-as-friends/
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Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #evolutionarypsychology #friendshippreferences #cooperativepartners #ancestralfitness #prosocialtraits #socialstatus #attractiveness #same sexfriendships #friendshipresearch #evolhumbehav
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Why Buddhism is True "The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the world clearly" Sale: $12.99 to $1.99 by Robert Wright Rating: 4.5/5 (2,297 Reviews) #Buddhism #Mindfulness #Meditation #Psychology #EvolutionaryPsychology #Wellness #SelfHelp #BookSky
Why Buddhism is True -
Why Buddhism is True "The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the world clearly" Sale: $12.99 to $1.99 by Robert Wright Rating: 4.5/5 (2,297 Reviews) #Buddhism #Mindfulness #Meditation #Psychology #EvolutionaryPsychology #Wellness #SelfHelp #BookSky
Why Buddhism is True -
Therapist shares 3 life-changing quotes she uses ‘almost daily’ with her patients
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Therapist shares 3 life-changing quotes she uses ‘almost daily’ with her patients
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Left-Handed People Are More Competitive, Says Science
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Left-Handed People Are More Competitive, Says Science
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"Edge - Jeffrey Epstein's favourite intellectual salon - was sold to me as a gathering of the world's finest minds, writes Virginia Heffernan. The files reveal it was something far darker: a decades-long project that cloaked eugenics, race science and sexual misconduct in Ivy League respectability"
#epstein #highereducation #evolutionarypsychology
https://www.thenerve.news/p/epstein-billionaires-eugenics-project-harvard-academia-john-brockman
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I recently finished reading Richard Wollheim's "Painting As An Art".
I found much of it stimulating in the close attention paid to particular pictures and thought provoking with regard to his theory of "seeing in" as the way to understand our perception of paintings.
On the other hand, his use of psychoanalytic theory left me with questions.
Surprisingly, his use of this theory reminded of some recent reading of mine in evolutionary psychology. Both Wollheim and the evolutionary psychologists stress the significance of a common human nature and are inclined to downplay the importance of systems of symbols or culture in general.
I do think that a substantive concept of human nature makes sense, and I am open to the possibility of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalytical theory contributing to an understanding of of human nature.
Altogether less agreeable to me is the tendency of these theories to smuggle in a social ontology in which culture is merely the creation of atomized individuals. One can believe in the evolved nature of the mind and allow for the possibility of certain kinds of psychic forces at work in the individual without denying the importance, still less the existence, of social facts. Thinking about languages as at once learned and used by individuals but also existing as entities external to those individuals is helpful here.
Image: The Construction of the Tower of Babel -- Folio xvii, The Bedford Book of Hours -- 1423 - 30 - The British Library.
#Wollheim #RichardWollheim #PaintingAsAnArt #EvolutionaryPsychology #Psychoanalysis #SocialOntology #Art #Philosophy #IlluminatedManuscript #BookOfHours #BedfordBBookOfHours #15thCenturyArt #TowerOfBabel
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I recently finished reading Richard Wollheim's "Painting As An Art".
I found much of it stimulating in the close attention paid to particular pictures and thought provoking with regard to his theory of "seeing in" as the way to understand our perception of paintings.
On the other hand, his use of psychoanalytic theory left me with questions.
Surprisingly, his use of this theory reminded of some recent reading of mine in evolutionary psychology. Both Wollheim and the evolutionary psychologists stress the significance of a common human nature and are inclined to downplay the importance of systems of symbols or culture in general.
I do think that a substantive concept of human nature makes sense, and I am open to the possibility of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalytical theory contributing to an understanding of of human nature.
Altogether less agreeable to me is the tendency of these theories to smuggle in a social ontology in which culture is merely the creation of atomized individuals. One can believe in the evolved nature of the mind and allow for the possibility of certain kinds of psychic forces at work in the individual without denying the importance, still less the existence, of social facts. Thinking about languages as at once learned and used by individuals but also existing as entities external to those individuals is helpful here.
Image: The Construction of the Tower of Babel -- Folio xvii, The Bedford Book of Hours -- 1423 - 30 - The British Library.
#Wollheim #RichardWollheim #PaintingAsAnArt #EvolutionaryPsychology #Psychoanalysis #SocialOntology #Art #Philosophy #IlluminatedManuscript #BookOfHours #BedfordBBookOfHours #15thCenturyArt #TowerOfBabel
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Reciprocal altruism (Evolutionary biology 🧬)
In evolutionary biology, reciprocal altruism is a behaviour whereby an organism acts in a manner that temporarily reduces its fitness while increasing another organism's fitness, with the expectation that the other organism will act in a similar manner at a later time. The concept was initially developed by Rob...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_altruism
#ReciprocalAltruism #Altruism #Symbiosis #EvolutionaryBiology #EvolutionaryPsychology
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Therapist shares 3 life-changing quotes she uses 'almost daily' with her patients
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/therapist-3-life-changing-quotes
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The Mind as Semi-Solid Smoke
This post continues the series on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity.
On the Trail (1889) by Winslow Homer. Original from The National Gallery of Art. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 . Even the simplest of life performing chemotaxis uses the signal-field of food to navigate.
When you’re microscopic, the territory is the map; at human scale, we externalise those cues as landmarks—then mirror the process inside our heads. Just as cells follow chemical gradients, our thoughts follow self-made landmarks, yet these landmarks are vaporous.
From the outside our mind is a single place, it is our identity. Probe closer and our identity is nebulous and dissolves the way a city dissolves into smaller and smaller places the closer you look. We use our identity to create the first stable place in the world and then use other places to navigate life. However, these places come from unreliable sources, our internal and external environments. How do we know the places are even real, and do we have the knowledge to trust their reality? Well, we don’t. We can’t judge our mental landmarks false. Callard calls this normative self-blindness: the built-in refusal to saw off the branch we stand on.
Normative self-blindness is a trick to gloss over details and keep moving. Insta-places are conjured from our experience and are treated as solid no matter how poorly they are tied down by actual knowledge. We can accept that a place was loosely formed in the past, an error, or is not yet well defined in the future, is unknown. However, in the moment, the places exist and we use them to see.
Understanding and accepting that our minds work this way is a key tenet of Socratic Thinking. It makes adopting the posture of inquiry much easier. Socratic inquiry begins by admitting that everyone’s guiding landmarks may be made of semi-solid smoke.
1Chan, Edgar, Oliver Baumann, Mark A. Bellgrove, and Jason B. Mattingley. “From Objects to Landmarks: The Function of Visual Location Information in Spatial Navigation.” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00304
2Freas, Cody A., and Ken Cheng. “The Basis of Navigation Across Species.” Annual Review of Psychology 73, no. 1 (January 4, 2022): 217–41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-111311.
#AgnesCallard #cognitiveBiases #cognitiveScience #criticalThinking #decisionMaking #epistemology #evolutionaryPsychology #humanPsychology #identity #introspection #mentalModels #metacognition #mindset #navigation #neuroscience #normativeSelfBlindness #personalDevelopment #philosophy #sensemaking #socraticThinking #spaceAndPlace
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Scientists investigating human sperm competition stumble upon an intriguing paradox
#health #reproductivehealth #evolutionarybiology #evolutionarypsychology #menshealth
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Scientists investigating human sperm competition stumble upon an intriguing paradox
#health #reproductivehealth #evolutionarybiology #evolutionarypsychology #menshealth
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Evolutionary ethics (Evolution 🧬)
Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality. The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have argued that it has important implications in the fields of descri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_ethics
#EvolutionaryEthics #Bioethics #Evolution #Sociobiology #DescriptiveEthics #EvolutionaryPsychology
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Inspired in part by @siin on another platform… There’s plenty of documentation about why we like (or hate) certain things, experiences, sensations (#biology, #EvolutionaryPsychology #biochemistry etc ) not so much about why we CARE so much about our own likes & hates… it’s the caring that causes the upset & anxiety, that causes all the awful SHOULDs & imperatives to enter our lives.
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Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, Fifth Edition by David Buss, 2014
Provides students with the conceptual tools of evolutionary psychology, and applies them to empirical research on the human mind. Content topics are logically arrayed, starting with challenges of survival, mating, parenting, and kinship; and then progressing to challenges of group living...
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Why #obesity is not well-explained by #evolutionaryPsychology, according to Daniel Nettle.
Perhaps you've heard we evolved to cherish sweet, calories-dense foods and [blah blah] therefore overconsumption of sugar explained the obesity epidemic.
Daniel distills the premises of this argument and rebuts each of them: https://www.danielnettle.eu/2024/07/24/sweet-nothings/
#science #health #nutrition #evolution #psychology #history #PhilosophyOfScience #logic #epistemology