Saturday, December 2, 2017

Women's attractiveness is linked to expected age at menopause

Bovet, J., Barkat-Defradas, M., Durand, V., Faurie, C. and Raymond, M. (), Women's attractiveness is linked to expected age at menopause. J. Evol. Biol. Accepted Author Manuscript. doi:10.1111/jeb.13214

Abstract: A great number of studies have shown that features linked to immediate fertility explain a large part of the variance in female attractiveness. This is consistent with an evolutionary perspective, as men are expected to prefer females at the age at which fertility peaks (at least for short-term relationships) in order to increase their reproductive success. However, for long-term relationships, a high residual reproductive value (the expected future reproductive output, linked to age at menopause) becomes relevant as well. In that case, young age AND late menopause are expected to be preferred by men. However, the extent to which facial features provide cues to the likely age at menopause has never been investigated so far. Here, we show that expected age at menopause is linked to facial attractiveness of young women. As age at menopause is heritable, we used the mother's age at menopause as a proxy for her daughter's expected age of menopause. We found that men judged faces of women with a later expected age at menopause as more attractive than those of women with an earlier expected age at menopause. This result holds when age, cues of immediate fertility and facial ageing were controlled for. Additionally, we found that the expected age at menopause was not correlated with any of the other variables considered (including immediate fertility cues and facial ageing). Our results show the existence of a new correlate of women's facial attractiveness, expected age at menopause, which is independent from immediate fertility cues and facial ageing.

Expressions of disgust serve to signal one's own moral intentions even when a different emotion is felt internally on the basis of appraisal

What Makes Moral Disgust Special? An Integrative Functional Review. Roger Giner-Sorolla, , Tom Kupfer, John Sabo. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2017.10.001

Abstract: The role of disgust in moral psychology has been a matter of much controversy and experimentation over the past 20 or so years. We present here an integrative look at the literature, organized according to the four functions of emotion proposed by integrative functional theory: appraisal, associative, self-regulation, and communicative. Regarding appraisals, we review experimental, personality, and neuroscientific work that has shown differences between elicitors of disgust and anger in moral contexts, with disgust responding more to bodily moral violations such as incest, and anger responding more to sociomoral violations such as theft. We also present new evidence for interpreting the phenomenon of sociomoral disgust as an appraisal of bad character in a person. The associative nature of disgust is shown by evidence for “unreasoning disgust,” in which associations to bodily moral violations are not accompanied by elaborated reasons, and not modified by appraisals such as harm or intent. We also critically examine the literature about the ability of incidental disgust to intensify moral judgments associatively. For disgust's self-regulation function, we consider the possibility that disgust serves as an existential defense, regulating avoidance of thoughts that might threaten our basic self-image as living humans. Finally, we discuss new evidence from our lab that moral disgust serves a communicative function, implying that expressions of disgust serve to signal one's own moral intentions even when a different emotion is felt internally on the basis of appraisal. Within the scope of the literature, there is evidence that all four functions of Giner-Sorolla’s (2012) integrative functional theory of emotion may be operating, and that their variety can help explain some of the paradoxes of disgust.

Keywords: Disgust; Anger; Morality; Emotions; Communication; Functionality