How cooking makes you a man

Anthropologist Richard Wrangham has a provocative theory on human evolution. It starts with food and an open flame
By Sarah Karnasiewicz

http://www.salon.com/mwt/food/eat_drink/2009/07/29/catching_fire/index.html

July 29, 2009 Animals of the genus Homo are defined by their little mouths, large guts, big brains -- and appetite for bratwurst. This, at least, is the provocative theory of evolution put forth by Dr. Richard Wrangham in his fascinating new book, "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human."
Wrangham, the Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, began his career studying chimpanzees alongside Jane Goodall, and rose to academic acclaim as a primatologist specializing in the roots of male aggression. Naturally, he tends to think of most scientific questions in relation to chimps. And so it was that a few years ago, while sitting in front of his fireplace preparing a lecture on human evolution, he wondered, "What would it take to turn a chimpanzee-like animal into a human?" The answer, he decided, was in front of him: fire to cook food.
For years, accepted wisdom has held that it was a transition to meat eating that prompted human evolution -- which makes Wrangham's hypothesis a radical departure. Yet, the more he tested his theory, the more he found the science to back it up: Cooked food is universally easier to process and more nutritionally dense than raw food, which means adopting a cooked diet would have given man a biological advantage. The energy he once spent consuming and digesting raw food could be diverted to other physiological functions, leading to the development of bigger bodies and brains. And Wrangham's "cooking hypothesis" not only explains the physical changes that humans underwent but also the social ones: Cooking created a sexual division of labor that informs our ideas of gender, love, family and marriage even to this day. "Humans are adapted to eating cooked food in the same essential way as cows adapted to eating grass, or fleas to sucking blood," Wrangham concludes. "And the results pervade our lives, from our bodies to our minds. We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame."


Salon spoke with Wrangham, 60, by telephone from his research station in Uganda, about the dangers of strictly raw-food diets, why women are the ones who cook and the tricky business of calorie counting.
For years scientists have suggested that the making of tools, and then using tools for hunting and meat-eating, were factors that prompted the evolution of man as we know him. You push that theory farther to say that it was not eating meat, but cooking it and eating it, that's responsible for the transformation. How did you make that leap?


In the very beginning, I wasn't even thinking about human evolution. In fact, the basic idea came to me after long days of following chimpanzees, when -- because I was hungry, and sometimes I didn't take my food with me -- I tried to eat what they ate. I assumed that since I was a member of a species that was so closely related to chimps -- different only in terms of bodies and brains -- I would be able to eat anything that they could. But in actuality, though I could force it down, I quickly realized that I could not eat enough of what they ate to satisfy my hunger.
That started me subconsciously wondering about the question of food's role in human evolution. But it wasn't until some years later -- when I was sitting in front of my fireplace one night, thinking how nice and comforting a fire is, and how long ago back it would have been that our ancestors had been doing the same thing -- that I went further back in time in my mind, and realized it was very difficult to imagine our ancestors having fire and not cooking. And from there, I began to find it very hard to imagine any creature with the basic human shape surviving on raw food.
Still, when I started my research, I was amazed to discover how little investigation had been done into the nutritional and biological aspects of cooking. In particular, I was amazed by how many people thought that humans could live perfectly well on raw food.
Yes, you do quite a convincing job of arguing that a purely raw diet cannot sustain an active human. Do you believe that we have evolved to a point where a raw diet is fundamentally against our biology?
Yes, I suppose I do. If I hesitate, it is because I certainly recognize that raw foodists who live in an urban area of a well-to-do nation can make it work, so it's not that much against our biology. But I do feel very confident now that going off into the wild and living like a hunter-gatherer on raw food is not possible. People who switch to a raw diet report feeling constant hunger and lose large amounts of weight, even when they are careful to take in at least the nutritionally suggested number of calories a day for an adult. Basically, all the studies show that over the long term, a strictly raw diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply for our bodies. In other words, raw foodism is against our biology in a state of nature.
How do you respond to raw foodists who say a raw diet makes them feel healthier than they ever have before?



My response is that under modern conditions, living in places where you have money and grocery stores that make a super abundance of high-class domesticated foods accessible, I think it probably can be a healthy way of eating. Don't get me wrong: I have tremendous admiration for raw food devotees because it is a very hard life to resist the temptations of cooked food, and they must build their whole life around it. And of course, because they build their lives around it, they are very, very committed to the idea that it is a valuable diet. That makes them feel some resentment toward me, I guess. But the irony is that these days, very often, cooked food can be unhealthy, too. The most obvious way is that people eat too much of it.
But raw foodism seems like a pretty extreme response to the problem of obesity, doesn't it? And from what I can tell, most people don't eat raw food just to lose weight -- there seems to be a philosophical element to it, an idea that as though by choosing a raw diet, they can get back to a pure state.
Yes, of course, raw foodists argue quite strongly that it is our natural diet. My response to them is to say that yes it is, in a way. But it was natural 2 million years ago, not a few thousand years ago.
You write that cooked foods give our bodies more energy than raw foods. Can you explain that, because it seems somewhat counterintuitive. Even when you're not adding anything -- oils or fats -- the caloric value goes up?
It's really very simple. Cooking doesn't change the actual number of calories in food -- meaning that, if you take two portions of raw vegetable or animal product and cook one of them, when you blow it up in a bomb calorimeter and compare the two, you'd get the same number of calories. But there are two big things that cooking does. One is that it increases the proportion of the nutrients that our bodies digest, and from the data I reviewed -- for instance, in the case of egg protein it goes from 50 percent to 90 percent -- it looks as though that effect can make an enormous difference. And the second thing it does is that cooking reduces the costs we pay to digest our food.
So, eating cooked food conserves our energy?
That's right. We all fall asleep after a heavy meal, but if you eat a large meal of raw food, you'll fall asleep faster, because your body is working harder. More oxygen will be leaving your peripheral tissues and going to your intestinal organs.
Basically, cooking makes the food we eat more nutritionally efficient?
Yes. And that's why in my last chapter, I take on the issue of our food labeling system. When you treat food through processing or grinding, you're not actually creating more calories -- so technically, the food labeling system we have now is correct. But, if we want to be realistic about the caloric value we actually get from a food, we need to modify our labels to reflect more subtle measurements -- something like: "This item has been given a level 2 processing, which has increased its nutritional value by 50 percent."
You argue that cooking not only shaped our bodies, but it also shaped our households and our most basic ideas of gender. How so?
Well, without language, we can't be absolutely sure about what happened right in the beginning. But with what knowledge we have, I do think that cooking has this huge impact on households and our system of gender as we see it today -- and I've been trying to figure out where my thinking on this began. I've been fascinated for a long time by the idea that cooking basically produces a lump of food -- yet unlike any other primate, we humans have an extraordinary degree of respect for women who make it. Other men -- bachelors, children -- almost never take food from them. And the more I thought about this, I concluded that it looked to me like a system in which women cook for their husbands to earn the social protections that only men can give them through their membership in the male community.


So the concept of marriage began fundamentally not as about power or sex, but food?
Yes, though that would mean that women always do the cooking, and when I first started down this path, I wasn't at all sure that was the case. So, I went to the anthropological literature, and sure enough, I found reports of societies where men did the cooking. But then I dug into it more carefully -- and I discovered that, in the cases where the anthropologists claimed the men had done the cooking, the scientists had been wrong. In every single society women cook for men. And, what's more fascinating, in many societies you can really say that food or domestic promiscuity is far more serious than sexual promiscuity. In other words, it's more of a breach of social convention for a woman to feed the wrong man than it is for her to have sex with him.
Why do you think societies have evolved that way?
Because it is, and has always been, so critical for a man to be able to know that someone is going to give him a meal in the evening – because this enables him to spend the whole day doing what he wants -- doing, as it were, manly things. It's very clear from the literature on small-scale societies – and probably true even in our society today – that bachelors have a very hard time of it. They are thin, they are looked down upon by married men, they deeply desire to have a wife in order to be able to join the ranks of the elders. The problem that bachelors face is that they have to spend time during the day not simply doing things that will bring them glory -- like hunting -- but making sure they have a way of feeding themselves in the evening. And it uses up a lot of energy and time to take care of yourself.
A lot of my book has been challenging to people, but because the male-female relationship is so central to the way we think about humans, and because for so long people have tended to think about pair bonding as being about mating competition and choice of a sexual partner, this in particular has been quite a difficult theory for people to chew over.
Does that mean that, evolutionarily, men should focus on finding a wife who can cook instead of a beauty?
Yes, essentially. I know that from our perspective in the West, where we tend to focus even more than other societies on questions of sexual morality, it's rather an immoral suggestion that I'm making -- basically that men set themselves up with wives in order to have the freedom to be men, as it were -- and then go ahead and design their sexual strategy from that point on.
Now, in modern Western societies, that strategy is usually to stay with one's wife -- but not always, as we know! From the woman's point of view, the wife wants the security of knowing that she has her husband to protect her from the scrounging "others." It's not a notion of a love relationship. That's less common and more nakedly economic in many societies than in our own.


Haven't we evolved an emotional attachment to cooked food as well as a physical one? It didn't occur to me until I was reading your book, but raw foods have little scent -- yet the sense of smell is one of our most powerful senses. And elemental smells like warm vanilla or baked apples or grilled meat -- all cooked foods -- are ones that humans seem to respond to positively and universally across age and culture and place.
Absolutely, and as Proust says, smells definitely have an immense effect on our memory and our biology. But it's a complex question. When I was working on the book, I tested apes on a diet of cooked food, and they liked it spontaneously. You can understand why: The physical characteristics of cooked food have commonalities with other foods that are good for them in the wild. But the smells of cooked food are not like anything you'd find in the wild. They're really totally different -- though I admit I have no chemical data to support that. So, you might think that we have adapted to appreciating and enjoying cooked food as a result of our evolutionary history of exposure to it. But, in that case, other animals should not be adapted to like the smell of cooked food. And we simply have no data to reflect that at the moment.
Did your your studies change the way you thought about the way we should be eating?
Not really. I'd like people to be aware of how easy it is to overeat in today's world. But personally I've always been on a quasi-Mediterranean diet: lots of vegetables, some oil, not too much of anything and not much red meat. I don't think this experience changed the way I choose to eat, though frankly, if I had the courage, I might try a raw diet for a bit -- just to see how it is.
You haven't ever gone on a completely raw diet?
No, I haven't. It just seems such a social inconvenience. But maybe that's just an excuse.

Study: Women look away more from abnormal babies

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jr3ugkDMltCdofzIv9kTb2egDhUgD990MQC00

By LAURAN NEERGAARD – Jun 23, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — Puzzling new research suggests women have a harder time than men looking at babies with facial birth defects. It's a surprise finding. Psychiatrists from the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, who were studying perceptions of beauty, had expected women to spend more time than men cooing over pictures of extra-cute babies. Nope.
Instead, the small study being published Wednesday raises more questions than it can answer.
First the background: The McLean team already had studied men and women looking at photos of adults' faces on a computer screen. They rated facial beauty, and could do various keystrokes to watch the photos longer. A keystroke count showed men put three times more effort into watching beautiful women as women put into watching handsome men.
Lead researcher Dr. Igor Elman wondered what else might motivate women. Enter the new baby study.
This time 13 men and 14 women were shown 80 photos of babies, 30 of whom had abnormal facial features such as a cleft palate, Down syndrome or crossed eyes. Participants rated each baby's attractiveness on a scale of zero to 100, and used keystrokes to make the photo stay on the screen longer or disappear faster.
Women pressed the keys 2.5 times more than men to make photos of babies with the facial abnormalities disappear, researchers reported in PLoS One, a journal of the Public Library of Science. That's even though they rated those babies no less attractive than the men had.
"They had this subliminal motivation to get rid of the faces," said Elman, who questions whether "we're designed by nature to invest all the resources into healthy-looking kids."
Both genders spent equal time and effort looking at photos of the normal babies.
The study couldn't explain the gender disparity. Elman noted that previous work has linked child abandonment and neglect to abnormal appearance, and even asked if the finding might challenge the concept of unconditional maternal love.
That's too far-reaching a conclusion, cautioned Dr. Steven Grant of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which funded the study.
The work is part of broader research into how we normally form attachments and what can make those attachments go awry, work that tests if what people say matches what they do.
"Common sense would tell you one thing," Grant said. "This doesn't fit with common sense. It raises a question."

When Young Men Are Scarce, They're More Likely To Play The Field Than To Propose

When Young Men Are Scarce, They're More Likely To Play The Field Than To Propose

ScienceDaily (June 10, 2009) — In places where young women outnumber young men, research shows the hemlines rise but the marriage rates don't because the young men feel less pressure to settle down as more women compete for their affections.
But when those men reach their 30s, the reverse is true and proportionately more older men are married in areas where women outnumber men.
Daniel Kruger, a University of Michigan researcher who studies evolution and how it relates to contemporary behavior, looked at the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States to test his hypothesis on how the balance between women and men affects marital patterns. Results showed that men aged 20-24 are more likely to cruise than to commit if they live in an area with more women than men.
One would think that rationally, fewer young men than women would naturally lead to proportionately more young men getting married, but that's not the case.
"Marriage patterns aren't rational because men and women have somewhat different reproductive strategies," Kruger said. "Men have a greater reproductive benefit than women from having a greater quantity of relationships. If they can leverage their scarcity into attracting multiple short-term partners, they will not have as much of an incentive to settle down."
There are about nine unmarried men for every 10 unmarried women in Birmingham, Memphis, New Orleans, and Richmond-Petersburg, Virginia, Kruger says. Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Baltimore, and New York metropolitan areas are tied for the next region where women are relatively most plentiful. In these areas, about 84 percent of the men aged 20-24 are unmarried. In Las Vegas, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Austin, and Phoenix, there are about nine unmarried women for every 10 unmarried men. In these areas, about 77 percent of the men aged 20-24 are unmarried.
Once those young men hit their 30s, they tend to shift from seeking short-term relationships to entering into committed relationships. That's because when women evaluate partners for short-term relationships they value physical features signaling the kind of genes that would be passed on to potential offspring, which may be the only legacy of men who don't stick around for child rearing. These physical features decline as men age, making it more difficult to lure women into uncommitted relationships.
"You see a complete reversal in the pattern," Kruger said, and thus, proportionately more older men are married when women outnumber men.
So, does this mean that middle aged women in these cities get a break? Not really, Kruger says. The higher marital rates for older men likely benefit women who are substantially younger than their husbands, because older men still prefer partners with higher reproductive potential.
The ratio of men to women has other aspects, as well. For instance, studies have shown that when women outnumber men, hemlines actually rise, overall, as women to do more to physically attract men. Also, the rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births are higher, and interests in women's rights increases. Surpluses of men tend to be associated with more conservative social norms and restricted roles for women.

Risky Business: Stressed Men, But Not Stressed Women, More Likely To Gamble And Takes Risks

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630202123.htm

ScienceDaily (July 1, 2009) — Stressed out, dude? Don't go to Vegas.

New research, to be published July 1 in the journal PLoS One, shows that men under stress may be more likely to take risks, correlating to such real-life behavior as gambling, smoking, unsafe sex and illegal drug use.
In contrast, stressed women moderate their behavior and may be less likely to make risky choices, the study found.
"Evolutionarily speaking, it's perhaps more beneficial for men to be aggressive in stressful, high-arousal situations when risk and reward are involved," said Nichole Lighthall of the University of Southern California Davis School of Gerontology and lead author of the paper. "Applied to financial risk taking, it's akin to competition for territory or other valuable resources."
The researchers asked participants to play a game called the Balloon Analogue Risk Task in which inflating a balloon earns money (five cents per pump). Participants were told that they could cash out their earnings by clicking a "Collect $$$" button at any point in the game.
However, the balloon would explode if it was inflated beyond its randomly determined breakpoint. All winnings for exploded balloons would be lost.
"One valuable aspect of the [balloon task] is its predictive validity for real-world impulsivity," Lighthall explained. "Some risk taking was necessary to make gains, but excessive risk was associated with diminishing returns. If you always clicked and never cashed out, you would lose every time."
The balloon task has been previously used to assess tolerance for risky behavior among inner-city adolescents and substance abusers, among others.
"Obviously, there are situations in the real world where risky behavior would not be beneficial," Lighthall said. "Sometimes being conservative, thoughtful and taking it slow are good things."
In the control group, men and women displayed statistically similar levels of risk taking, inflating the balloon about 40 times on average.
However, women in the stressed group only inflated the balloon an average of 32 times – more than 30 percent less often than their stressed male counterparts, who inflated the balloon an average of 48 times.
"Men seem to enter more risky financial situations than women, which was part of the impetus for our study," Lighthall said. "But only in the stressed condition did we see any statistical differences in risky behavior between men and women."
Stressful experiences have been shown to stimulate the release of cortisol, commonly known as the "stress hormone." Participants randomly assigned to the stress group held a hand in ice-cold water, which raised cortisol levels, particularly among female participants. No participants were using hormone birth control.
According to Lighthall, future research might use neuroimaging to explore how the brain processes stress or examine whether psychological stress, such as anticipating giving a speech, would yield similar results as the physical stress manipulation used in this study.
Mara Mather, director of the Emotion and Cognition Lab at USC and associate professor of psychology and gerontology at the USC Davis School of Gerontology, and Marissa Gorlick, also of the USC Davis School of Gerontology, were co-authors of the study.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Southern California, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Rating Attractiveness: Consensus Among Men, Not Women, Study Finds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090626153511.htm

Rating Attractiveness: Consensus Among Men, Not Women, Study Finds
ScienceDaily (June 27, 2009) — Hot or not? Men agree on the answer. Women don't.

There is much more consensus among men about whom they find attractive than there is among women, according to a new study by Wake Forest University psychologist Dustin Wood.
The study, co-authored by Claudia Brumbaugh of Queens College, appears in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"Men agree a lot more about who they find attractive and unattractive than women agree about who they find attractive and unattractive," says Wood, assistant professor of psychology. "This study shows we can quantify the extent to which men agree about which women are attractive and vice versa."
More than 4,000 participants in the study rated photographs of men and women (ages 18-25) for attractiveness on a 10-point scale ranging from "not at all" to "very." In exchange for their participation, raters were told what characteristics they found attractive compared with the average person. The raters ranged in age from 18 to more than 70.
Before the participants judged the photographs for attractiveness, the members of the research team rated the images for how seductive, confident, thin, sensitive, stylish, curvaceous (women), muscular (men), traditional, masculine/feminine, classy, well-groomed, or upbeat the people looked.
Breaking out these factors helped the researchers figure out what common characteristics appealed most to women and men.
Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.
"As far as we know, this is the first study to investigate whether there are differences in the level of consensus male and female raters have in their attractiveness judgments," Wood says. "These differences have implications for the different experiences and strategies that could be expected for men and women in the dating marketplace."
For example, women may encounter less competition from other women for the men they find attractive, he says. Men may need to invest more time and energy in attracting and then guarding their mates from other potential suitors, given that the mates they judge attractive are likely to be found attractive by many other men.
Wood says the study results have implications for eating disorders and how expectations regarding attractiveness affect behavior.
"The study helps explain why women experience stronger norms than men to obtain or maintain certain physical characteristics," he says. "Women who are trying to impress men are likely to be found much more attractive if they meet certain physical standards, and much less if they don't. Although men are rated as more attractive by women when they meet these physical appearance standards too, their overall judged attractiveness isn't as tightly linked to their physical features."
The age of the participants also played a role in attractiveness ratings. Older participants were more likely to find people attractive if they were smiling.

NO-FATHERS DAY: Remote Group Has No Dads, And Never Did

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090619-fathers-day-2009-no-fathers.html


NO-FATHERS DAY: Remote Group Has No Dads, And Never Did
Brian Handwerkfor National Geographic News
June 18, 2009

What would Father's Day—and every other day—be like without fathers? Maybe not so bad, according to experts on the Mosuo culture of the Chinese Himalaya.

The women of this matrilineal society shun marriage and raise their kids in homes with their entire extended families—but no dads.
By most accounts, children seem to do just fine under the arrangement.
"They are a society that we know hasn't had marriage for a thousand years, and they've been able to raise kids successfully," said Stephanie Coontz, family studies professor at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington.

No Fathers: It Makes Genetic Sense?
Men of the Mosuo, who live around Lugu Lake on the border between Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces, do help to raise kids—just not their own, with whom the men typically have only limited relationships.
Instead the men help look after all the children born to their own sisters, aunts, and other women of the family.
Rather than "one father with a kid, it will be four or five uncles. That [father] role is shared among a number of people, and these are very large extended families," explained John Lombard, director of the Lugu Lake Mosuo Cultural Development Association.
The unusual parenting arrangement makes genetic sense, in terms of extending the family line—and many Mosuo men actually think of it that way, Lombard said.
"If you [father] a child with another woman, you can never be absolutely sure that the child really shares your genes," he said. "But if your sister has a child, you can be 100 percent sure that the kid shares some of your genes."

The women of the Mosuo's agricultural villages head the households, make business decisions, and own property, which they pass on to their matrilineal heirs.

In the unique Mosuo tradition called the walking marriage, women invite men to visit their rooms at night—and to leave in the morning.
Women may also change partners as often as they like, and promiscuity carries no social stigma. The practice has made the Mosuo famous, particularly to male Chinese tourists, many of whom see the walking marriages as evidence of sexual liberation and wanton lust, experts say. Though there are tourist-oriented brothels in Mosuo villages, most are staffed with non-Mosuo women and are considered shameful by the Mosuo, according to the the Lugu Lake Mosuo Cultural Development Association Web site.
"I think sometimes the media gets carried away with the possibility that the women can have all these husbands," said filmmaker Xiaoli Zhou, who produced and reported the 2006 documentary on the Mosuo, The Women's Kingdom.
In fact, most Mosuo women don't change walking-marriage partners very frequently. And they rarely carry on more than one romantic relationship at a time.
"Many of the women I interviewed had only had one or two relationships in their lives," Zhou said.

Family First
The lack of live-in fathers shouldn't be taken as evidence that the Mosuo don't value family life, said Lombard, of the Lugu Lake Mosuo Cultural Development Association.
In fact, they value it above all other relationships—particularly those founded on the sometimes fickle feelings of male-female amour, he said.
Extended families of siblings, uncles, aunts, and others are said to be extremely stable, Lombard added.
For example, there are no divorces to destablize the families. And even the death of a child's biological father has little effect on the family, given the father's distance from the family and the extensive support network in the household.
Brent Huffman, co-producer of The Women's Kingdom, said, "The society does kind of create this question: Are fathers really necessary?
"It's hard to think of in Western society, but there, it works."

Why Do We Choose Our Mates? Ask Charles Darwin, Prof Says

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090615185428.htm

ScienceDaily (June 17, 2009) — Charles Darwin wrote about it 150 years ago: animals don't pick their mates by pure chance – it's a process that is deliberate and involves numerous factors. After decades of examining his work, experts agree that he pretty much scored a scientific bullseye, but a very big question is, "What have we learned since then?" asks a Texas A&M University biologist who has studied Darwin's theories.

Adam Jones, an evolutional biologist who has studied Darwin's work for years, says that Darwin's beliefs about the choice of mates and sexual selection being beyond mere chance have been proven correct, as stated in Darwin's landmark book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.
Bottom line: It's no accident that certain peahens submit to gloriously-colored male peacocks, that lions get the females of their choice or that humans spend hours primping to catch the perfect spouses – it's a condition that is ingrained into all creatures and a conscious "choice" is made between the two so the romantic fireworks can begin.
Jones says Darwin set the standard for original thinking about animal reproduction and was first scientist to propose plausible mechanisms of evolution, and from there he took it one step further – he confirmed that animals' mating choices can drive evolutionary change.
"He noticed that birds, especially, seemed to be a bit picky about who they mated with," Jones explains. "He discovered that birds – especially females – had preferences and that they did not just choose a mate randomly. He believed this is due to beauty of the plumage, that females usually selected the most colorful males.
"That was an important first step, and it's given us models to work from to try to answer other big questions."
Those include determining methods to find out the actual criteria used in choosing a mate, what methods work and which do not, and the passing of genes on to the next generation, a field of study Jones says gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s.
"Another big recent advance was the development of molecular markers, which allow us to perform paternity testing," Jones adds.
"These markers can be applied to animal populations, and they give us a definitive record of who is mating with whom and what offspring resulted from the mating events. And also, what is the driving force behind sexual selection? We have an unprecedented ability to document mating patterns but we still don't completely understand why some populations experience strong sexual selection and others don't."
Jones notes that other key questions Darwin's work uncovered but has not yet answered include the role of population characteristics and the environment and how they work together to produce strong sexual selection, and also what determines whether or not female choice will evolve in a particular species.
And perhaps the biggest question of all: How does all of this pertain to humans?
"Darwin concluded that sexual selection existed in the animal world and that humans definitely followed a similar process," Jones confirms.
"But he realized he had to explain it first as it related to animals. Darwin thought that sexual selection was an important process in humans, both for males and females. But how much has sexual selection acted on males versus females in humans? Today, while we are celebrating the 200th year of the birth of Charles Darwin, we know sexual selection occurs and is very important but there are still many unanswered questions about precisely why and how it works, especially in humans."
Journal reference:
. Mate Choice and Sexual Selection: What Have We Learned Since Darwin? Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 16, 2009
Adapted from materials provided by Texas A&M University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Same-sex Behavior Seen In Nearly All Animals, Review Finds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616122106.htm

ScienceDaily (June 17, 2009) — Same-sex behavior is a nearly universal phenomenon in the animal kingdom, common across species, from worms to frogs to birds, concludes a new review of existing research.
"It's clear that same-sex sexual behavior extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies," said Nathan Bailey, the first author of the review paper and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology at UC Riverside.
There is a caveat, however. The review also reports that same-sex behaviors are not the same across species, and that researchers may be calling qualitatively different phenomena by the same name.
"For example, male fruit flies may court other males because they are lacking a gene that enables them to discriminate between the sexes," Bailey said. "But that is very different from male bottlenose dolphins, who engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding, or female Laysan Albatross that can remain pair-bonded for life and cooperatively rear young."
Published June 16 in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, the review by Bailey and Marlene Zuk, a professor of biology at UCR, also finds that although many studies are performed in the context of understanding the evolutionary origins of same-sex sexual behavior, almost none have considered its evolutionary consequences.
"Same-sex behaviors—courtship, mounting or parenting—are traits that may have been shaped by natural selection, a basic mechanism of evolution that occurs over successive generations," Bailey said. "But our review of studies also suggests that these same-sex behaviors might act as selective forces in and of themselves."
A selective force, which is a sudden or gradual stress placed on a population, affects the reproductive success of individuals in the population.
"When we think of selective forces, we tend to think of things like weather, temperature, or geographic features, but we can think of the social circumstances in a population of animals as a selective force, too," Bailey said. "Same-sex behavior radically changes those social circumstances, for example, by removing some individuals from the pool of animals available for mating."
Bailey, who works in Zuk's lab, noted that researchers in the field have made significant strides in the past two and a half decades studying the genetic and neural mechanisms that produce same-sex behaviors in individuals, and the ultimate reasons for their existence in populations.
"But like any other behavior that doesn't lead directly to reproduction—such as aggression or altruism—same-sex behavior can have evolutionary consequences that are just now beginning to be considered," he said. "For example, male-male copulations in locusts can be costly for the mounted male, and this cost may in turn increase selection pressure for males' tendency to release a chemical called panacetylnitrile, which dissuades other males from mounting them."
The review paper:
Examines work done to test hypotheses about the origins of same-sex behavior in animals.
Provides a framework for categorizing same-sex behavior, for example, is it adaptive, not adaptive, occurs often, infrequently?
Discusses what has been discovered about the genetics of same-sex behavior, especially in the model organism, the fruit fly Drosophila, and in human beings.
Examines connections between human sexual orientation research, and research on non-human animals, and highlights promising avenues of research in non-human systems.
The reviewers expected the research papers they read for their article would give them a better understanding of the degree to which same-sex behaviors are heritable in animals.
"How important are genes to the expression of these behaviors, compared to environmental factors?" Bailey said. "This is still unknown. Knowing this information would help us better understand how the behaviors evolve, and how they affect the evolution of other traits. It could also help us understand whether they are something that all individuals of a species are capable of, but only some actually express."
Bailey recommends that fellow evolutionary biologists studying same-sex behavior in animals adopt some of the research approaches that have been successful in human studies.
"We have estimates, for example, of the heritability of sexual orientation in humans, but none that I know of in other animals," he said. "Scientists have also targeted locations on the human genome that may contribute to sexual orientation, but aside from the fruit fly, we have no such detailed knowledge of the genetic architecture of same-sex behavior in other animals."
Next in their research, Bailey and Zuk plan to begin experimentally addressing some of the many issues raised in their review.
Said Bailey, "We want to get at this question: what are the evolutionary consequences of these behaviors? Are they important in the evolution of mating behavior, or do they just add extra 'background noise'? We are pursuing work on the Laysan Albatross, in which females form same-sex pairs and rear young together. Same-sex behavior in this species may not be aberrant, but instead can arise as an alternative reproductive strategy."
The UCR Academic Senate funded the one-year study.

Close Social Ties Make Baboons Better Mothers, Study Finds

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610091429.htm
ScienceDaily (June 11, 2009) — Baboons whose mothers have strong relationships with other females are much more likely to survive to adulthood than baboons reared by less social mothers, according to a new study by researchers at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania and other institutions.

"If you're a baboon, the strength of your mother's relationship with other females is the best predictor of whether you'll live to have children yourself," said Joan Silk, the study's lead author and a UCLA professor of anthropology. "The study adds to mounting evidence of the biological benefits of close relationships among females."
The findings are significant because "survivorship to reproduction is the gold standard in evolutionary biology," said co-author Dorothy Cheney, a professor of biology at the University of Pennsylvania. "Females who raise offspring to a reproductive age are more likely see their genes pass along, so these findings demonstrate an evolutionary advantage to strong relationships with other females. In evolutionary terms, social moms are the fittest moms — at least when it comes to baboons."
The study appears online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a peer-reviewed journal published by the national academy of science of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.
Silk, Cheney and seven other researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan and the University of St. Andrews in Kenya analyzed 17 years worth of records on more than 66 adult female baboons in the Moremi Game Reserve, a 2,000-square-mile national park in Botswana that teems with wildlife.
Collected on the ground by primatologists who tracked the baboons six days a week, 12 months a year, the records reflected the sex and survival rates of baboon offspring, as well as telling details of the mothers' social lives, including their ranking within the group, as measured by the direction of approach/retreat interactions, and the amount of social interactions they had with each of the group's other females.
In addition to showing how often one animal approached another, the records of social interactions included details of grooming, which is known to be the primary form of social interaction in Old World monkeys. The researchers noted how much time — frequency and duration — the females spent grooming each other and how often they solicited grooming from other females.
Of all the factors studied, the strength of a mother's social bonds with another female had the most significant effect on the survival rates of offspring. A mother's dominance rank proved to have no affect on the survival rate of her offspring.
"We really expected dominance status to be more influential than it proved to be," Silk said.
Offspring from the most social mothers turned out to be about one-and-a-half times more likely to survive to adulthood than offspring from the least social mothers.
The strongest social bonds were measured between mothers and adult daughters, followed by sisters and all other potential relationships, including aunts, nieces, cousins and baboons with no familial ties. Bonds between mothers and adult daughters proved to be three times stronger than those between sisters and 10 times stronger than relationships with other females.
"What really matter to these girls are mother-daughter bonds," Silk said. "They're really strong, and they last forever. If your mom is alive, she's one of your top partners, always. But more importantly, it's the strength of these bonds, because females whose bonds with their mothers and daughters were strong had higher offspring survival than females whose bonds with these relatives were weak."
Silk's past research with Jeanne Altmann, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, and Susan C. Alberts, a professor of biology at Duke University, on baboons in the Amboseli Basin of Kenya had found a higher survival rate for baboons with social mothers, but the research only tracked offspring through the first year of life.
For the new study, researchers followed offspring from 1 year of age through sexual maturity — roughly 5 years of age. The new study also differs from past baboon research by focusing on the strength and duration of relationships between pairs of females rather than on the amount of social interactions in general.
"The benefit comes not from being wildly social — it's about having close social bonds," said Cheney, who runs the Moremi baboon-tracking project with University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Robert M. Seyfarth.
"These females form strong relationships with particular partners," Silk said. "They don't treat everyone the same. They spend a lot more time with — and a lot more time grooming — some females than others, and these relationships tend to be very long-lasting."
Additional research is needed to determine how the female bonds improve infant survival, but it may have to do with such stress hormones as cortisol, Silk said. Research has shown that prolonged elevations of stress hormones in primates can lead to cardiovascular disease and other serious health problems. Research has also shown that grooming tends to lower these stress hormones in baboons.
"Our research suggests that somehow there is a link between the kind of social relationships you form and the natural, normal stresses that occur in everyday life, and that seems to have — at least in baboons — a long-term effect on reproductive success," Silk said.
Said to share 92 percent of their DNA with humans, baboons are close relatives of humans. Baboons and humans last shared a common ancestor about 18 million years ago. The new findings on social interactions among mothers parallel recent research that has shown health benefits for humans who enjoy particularly close social networks.
"Our findings suggest benefits from forming close relationships are built into us from a long way back," Silk said.
The research received funding from the National Geographic Foundation, the Research Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Males, females swap sex-role stereotypes

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/43212/title/Males%2C_females_swap_sex-role_stereotypes

Analysis finds that mating strategies are not universal
By Bruce Bower
May 23rd, 2009; Vol.175 #11 (p. 5)


SEX ROLES IN SOCIETIES A new cross-cultural study finds that men and women in monogamous societies, such as Pitcairn Islanders (left), and some polygynous societies, including the Aka in the Central African Republic (right), have overlapping ranges of number of offspring. Luis Marden/National Geographic/Getty; Barry Hewlett

Chuck that nonsense about “men are from Mars, women are from Venus.” Here on Earth, the sexes play the mating game with a flexible set of rules. A new study suggests that scientists should abandon the idea that males evolved to be promiscuous and females to be selective. Combined data from 18 modern and traditional societies show greater overall variation in reproductive success for men than for women — with some men producing lots of children with multiple partners and other men conceiving few or no children, say psychologist Gillian Brown of the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, and her colleagues. Women tend to have a handful of children.
In the past, researchers have treated this pattern as a sign of universal mating tendencies, with women limiting how many children they bear and men conceiving as many children as possible.
Yet the same pattern of distinctive male and female sex roles doesn’t appear when many of these same 18 societies are examined individually, Brown’s group reports in the June Trends in Ecology & Evolution. In monogamous societies and even in some polygynous ones, where men can have more than one wife or mate, men and women can have similar variation in the number of children they produce, the scientists find.

Monogamous societies in the new study included Pitcairn Islanders in the South Pacific, Dobe !Kung hunter-gatherers in southern Africa and 19th century Swedes. Polygynous societies displaying comparable or only slightly unequal patterns of reproductive success for men and women included Aka hunter-gatherers in central Africa, Hadza hunter-gatherers in southern Africa and nomadic Yomut Turkmen in Iran.
Looking at the data all together, patterns of reproductive success were skewed by data from a few polygynous societies in which small numbers of men conceived the bulk of the offspring, the researchers contend. Examples of this pattern came from the Dogon and Kipsigis, both in Africa.
“Half of the populations we studied had similar variations in male and female reproductive success, which is inconsistent with universal stereotypes of passive, discriminating females and promiscuous males,” Brown says.
These scientific generalizations originated with fruit fly studies conducted by English geneticist Angus Bateman in 1948. He reported that male flies exhibited greater variation than females in numbers of sexual partners and offspring. Females mating with several males showed less of an increase in the number of offspring than males mating with many females.
Bateman concluded that it was more costly for females to produce a single egg than for males to produce a single sperm, leading to “discriminating passivity” among female flies and “undiscriminating eagerness” among male flies.
But in the past decade or so, studies of fruit flies and other animals have documented considerable variation in numbers of sexual partners and offspring for both sexes. Situational factors shape animals’ mating decisions, Brown asserts. Investigations suggest that females often get choosy when outnumbered by males or required to raise offspring alone. Males become picky when outnumbered by females or when required to help raise offspring. In small, spread out populations with roughly equal numbers of males and females, both sexes tend to mate indiscriminately.
Brown and her colleagues provide initial evidence that the “astonishing flexibility” of mating strategies also applies to people, remarks behavioral ecologist Stephen Emlen of Cornell University.
“A lot of nonhuman animals that are thought of as innately controlled robots actually perform sophisticated cost-benefit analyses of different choices and adjust their behavior based on flexible rules of thumb,” asserts Emlen, who studies mating decisions in birds. Emlen says it would be surprising if people didn’t have even more variable mating strategies than other animals.
Anthropologist Lee Cronk of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., says that he hopes the study “will have a major impact on future evolutionary work on human mating patterns.”
Cronk still thinks that universal mating strategies exist for men and women and were genetically ingrained during the Stone Age. But these strategies can play out in a variety of ways depending on the cultural, social and demographic features of modern societies.
Brown sees the situation differently. Disparities in learned mating strategies and cultural beliefs that have developed among groups over the past 50,000 years or so have also led to genetic differences among those populations, not to universal mating tendencies, she suspects.
Brown’s group analyzed information on reproduction and mating in hunter-gatherer, farming and industrialized societies from already published studies. Although these studies depended on women’s reports of who fathered their children, Brown regards the reliability of such evidence as comparable between monogamous and polygynous societies.
Scientists must now try to estimate and compare numbers of sexual partners, as well as offspring, for individuals in different societies, she says. Doing so will be challenging, since attempts to establish the numbers of sexual partners for men and women have relied on self-reports that are unreliable, Brown asserts.
She and her colleagues remain cautious about assuming that men always have more sexual partners than women in polygynous societies. In about half of polygynous societies, most men still take no more than one wife, they note. In others, women as well as men conceive children with two or more partners.
Thorough cross-cultural studies would likely reveal a great variety of mating strategies that respond to local conditions, predicts behavioral ecologist Mhairi Gibson of the University of Bristol in England. “Unfortunately, few anthropologists continue to collect such quantitative data on human behavior,” she says.
Source: Adapted from Brown et al.

Women May Not Be So Picky After All About Choosing A Mate

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090603101406.htm

ScienceDaily (June 2, 2009) — Men and women may not be from two different planets after all when it comes to choosiness in mate selection, according to new research from Northwestern University.

When women were assigned to the traditionally male role of approaching potential romantic partners, they were not any pickier than men in choosing that special someone to date, according to the speed dating study.

That finding, of course, is contrary to well established evolutionary explanations about mate selection. An abundance of such research suggests that women are influenced by higher reproductive costs (bearing and raising children) than men and thus are much choosier when it comes to love interests.
The new study is the latest research of two Northwestern psychologists whose well-reported work on speed dating offers unparalleled opportunities for studying romantic attraction in action.
Deviating from standard speed-dating experiments – and from the typical conventions at professional speed-dating events -- women in the study were required to go from man to man during their four-minute speed dates half the time, rather than always staying put. In most speed-dating events, the women stay in one place as the men circulate.
"The mere act of physically approaching a potential partner, versus being approached, seemed to increase desire for that partner," said Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern and co-investigator of the study.
Regardless of gender, those who rotated experienced greater romantic desire for their partners, compared to those who sat throughout the event. The rotators, compared to the sitters, tended to have a greater interest in seeing their speed-dating partners again.
"Given that men generally are expected -- and sometimes required – to approach a potential love interest, the implications are intriguing," Finkel said.
"Let's face it, even today, there is a huge difference in terms of who is expected to walk across the bar to say 'hi,'" added Northwestern's Paul Eastwick, the study's other co-investigator.
Three hundred fifty undergraduates were recruited for the study's speed-dating events. In half of the events, the men rotated while the women sat. In the remaining events, the women rotated. Following each four-minute "date," the participants indicated their romantic desire in that partner and how self-confident they felt. Following the event, the students indicated on a Website whether they would or would not be interested in seeing each partner again.
When the men rotated, the results supported the long-held notion of men being less selective. When the women rotated, this robust sex difference disappeared.
The study draws upon embodiment research that suggests that physical actions alter perception. In one such study, for example, participants who were told to pull an unrelated object toward themselves while evaluating Chinese ideographs rated them as prettier than participants who pushed an unrelated object away from themselves while viewing the symbols.
"The embodiment research shows that our physical activity and psychological processes interface in ways that are outside our conscious awareness," Finkel said. "In conjunction with this previous embodiment research, our speed-dating results strongly suggest that the mere act of approaching a potential love interest can boost desire."
The researchers suggest that confidence also may have affected the results. Approaching a potential date increases confidence, which in turn makes the approacher less selective.
The study presents a clear example of how inconspicuous gender norms (having men rotate and women sit) can not only affect the outcome of a study, but also skew the chances of a speed dater walking away with a potential match.
"Our society is structured in gendered ways that can be subtle but very powerful," Eastwick concluded. The study has implications both for companies that capitalize on the business of dating and for researchers concerned with how social norms may affect research.

Myth About 'Dirty Old Men' Supported By Science

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081204074654.htm
ScienceDaily (Dec. 4, 2008) — Middle-aged men want younger women, often touting their intelligence and their high income. This is shown in research at Gothenburg University and Oxford University that studied 400 lonely hearts ads to see how men and women choose partners.

Research in the theory of evolution includes a number of accepted theories about how men and women choose their partners. Among the more established ones is that men place more emphasis on attractive appearance, whereas resources and social status are more important to women.
By examining lonely hearts advertisements, researchers at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford have now tested how valid these presumed preferences are when modern individuals choose partners.
In the study, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, the researchers looked at 400 lonely hearts ads in the Swedish newspapers Göteborgs-Posten and Aftonbladet and on the Websites Spraydate and match.com.
To some extent, the findings support established theories:
Women, more than men, look for solid resources and social status. As a result men also offer this in their ads, through formulations like ‘large house’ and ‘economically independent.’
Men in all categories prefer younger partners. Of a total of 97 men who mentioned age in their ads, only three were looking for an older partner – among men aged 40 to 59, only one out of 67.
Younger women, on the other hand, prefer older men: fully 14 of 16 women aged 20-39 were looking for an older partner. Among women over 60, however, the majority were looking for a younger man.
Another point of departure for the study was that men are more fixated on appearance than women are. This turned out not to be the case.
“When it comes to physical characteristics, it turned out that men and women were the same. Both used words like, ‘athletic,’ ‘beautiful,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘tall,’ ‘handsome,’ and ‘trim’ to the same extent, and this goes both for their descriptions of themselves and for the characteristics they were looking for in a partner,” says Jörgen Johnsson at the Department of Zoology, University of Gothenburg, one of the researchers behind the study.
“This might indicate that men have learned to respond to women’s interest in looks, therefore stressing to the same extent their attractiveness in the ads. The fact that both sexes focus on looks may also be influenced by our times, with the great fixation on appearance in the media.”
The study is an elaboration of an undergraduate paper at the Department of Zoology, written by Linda Gustavsson. The associate at the University of Oxford is Tobias Uller.

Sexual Partner Status Affects A Woman's, But Not A Man's, Interest In The Opposite Sex

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090528120657.htm ScienceDaily (June 3, 2009) — A study by Indiana University neuroscientist Heather Rupp found that a woman's partner status influenced her interest in the opposite sex. In the study, women both with and without sexual partners showed little difference in their subjective ratings of photos of men when considering such measures as masculinity and attractiveness. However, the women who did not have sexual partners spent more time evaluating photos of men, demonstrating a greater interest in the photos.
No such difference was found between men who had sexual partners and those who did not. "These findings may reflect sex differences in reproductive strategies that may act early in the cognitive processing of potential partners and contribute to sex differences in sexual attraction and behavior," said Rupp, assistant scientist at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.
For the study, 59 men and 56 women rated 510 photos of opposite-sex faces for realism, masculinity/femininity, attractiveness, or affect. Participants were instructed to give their "gut" reaction and to rate the pictures as quickly as possible. The men and women ranged in age from 17 to 26, were heterosexual, from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and were not using hormonal contraception. Of the women, 21 reported they had a current sexual partner; 25 of the men reported having a sexual partner. This is the first study to report whether having a current sexual partner influences interest in the opposite sex. Other studies have demonstrated that hormones, relationship goals and social context influence such interest.
"That there were no detectable effects of sexual partner status on women's subjective ratings of male faces, but there were on response times, which emphasizes the subtlety of this effect and introduces the possibility that sexual partner status impacts women's cognitive processing of novel male faces but not necessarily their conscious subjective appraisal," the authors wrote in the journal article. The researchers also note that influence of partner status in women could reflect that women, on average, are relatively committed in their romantic relationships, "which possibly suppresses their attention to and appraisal of alternative partners."

Male Or Female? Coloring Provides Gender Cues

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090527121049.htm

ScienceDaily (May 28, 2009) — Our brain is wired to identify gender based on facial cues and coloring, according to a new study published in the Journal of Vision. Psychology Professor Frédéric Gosselin and his Université de Montréal team found the luminescence of the eyebrow and mouth region is vital in rapid gender discrimination.

"As teenagers, dimorphism (systematic difference between sexes) increases in the nose, chin, mouth, jaw, eyes and general shape of faces," says Nicolas Dupuis-Roy, lead author of the study. "Yet we aren't conscious of how our brain recognizes those differences."
To discover those reference points, Dupuis-Roy and colleagues showed photos of 300 Caucasian faces to some 30 participants. Subjects were asked to identify gender based on images where parts of faces were concealed using a technology called Bubbles.
The investigation found that eyes and mouths, specifically their subtle shading or luminance, are paramount in identifying gender. Unlike previous studies, which found the gap between the eyelid and eyebrow as essential in gender ID, this investigation found the shades of reds and greens around mouths and eyes led to faster gender discrimination.
"Studies have shown that an androgynous face is considered male if the skin complexion is redder, and considered female if the complexion is greener," says Dupuis-Roy. "However, it is the opposite for the mouth. A woman's mouth is usually redder. Our brain interprets this characteristic as female."
"A man's face usually reflects less light around the eyebrows. This is because they are usually thicker. The same applies to the upper lip and chin, which are hairier areas," he adds, noting people clearly use colour to rapidly identify gender.
This research was supported by the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la nature et les technologies and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. PhD student Isabelle Fortin and Professor Daniel Fiset also participated in the study.

Money Worries Make Women Spend More

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090521084834.htm

Money Worries Make Women Spend More
ScienceDaily (May 23, 2009) — At times of crisis women are more inclined to spend themselves out of misery than at stable times, a new survey suggests. Psychologists say that the recession could force more women to overspend or increase their risk of mental illness.

A survey conducted by Professor Karen Pine, from the University of Hertfordshire and author of Sheconomics, to be released on 21 May 2009 found that 79% of women said they would go on a spending spree to cheer themselves up. Professor Pine’s research concludes that some women use shopping as an emotion regulator, a way of anesthetising themselves to negative feelings or dissatisfaction with life. So worrying about money could, paradoxically, lead women to spend more.
Of the 700 women surveyed, four out of ten named ‘depression’, and six out of ten named ‘feeling a bit low’, as reasons to go on a spending spree and overspend. Women commonly expressed the view that shopping has the power to make them feel better.
Professor Pine’s research found that an intense emotional state, high or low, could send women to the shops. “This type of spending, or compensatory consumption, serves as a way of regulating intense emotions,” she said.
This ability to regulate emotions is crucial for mental and physical wellbeing and humans adopt a variety of means of doing so, including drugs and alcohol. Shopping is one method increasingly adopted by women.
“If shopping is an emotional habit for women they may feel the need to keep spending despite the economic downturn,” said Professor Pine. “Or, perhaps worse still, if they can’t spend we might see an increase in mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.”
Not all the women in the survey felt cheered up by the shopping experience. One in four had experienced feelings of regret, guilt or shame after buying something in the week prior to the survey. And seven out of ten women had worried about money during the same period. Yet if these women shop when feeling down they risk getting trapped in a vicious cycle of highs and lows akin to that found in other addictions.


I don't have strong feelings about this either way, what is it about spending that helps women regulate negative emotions? Perhaps the short term joy from new objects is enough to regular superficial emotions. If worrying causes depression which says something in your environment is off, then buying something to fix your environment could help. What would be the evolutionary equivalent of shopping?