Publications by authors named "David Buss"

Evidence is abundant that evolution by selection has produced sex differences in the design of adaptations to solve the problems surrounding reproduction. A prime example is the design of human jealousy, which research suggests is triggered by distinct evoking acts that are specific challenges for women and men in their exclusive reproductive bond. It follows that jealousy would be directed toward driving away interlopers who could potentially threaten the bond with the romantic partner or increase mate retention efforts in response to sex-specific threats.

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Article Synopsis
  • A proteomic analysis of C. papaya infected by the papaya meleira virus complex (PMeV-complex) revealed significant changes in protein levels linked to photosynthesis and cell wall dynamics during the plant's development.
  • The study identified 345 proteins with altered accumulation across different growth stages, indicating that the plant undergoes various responses to the infection, especially during the juvenile and transition phases.
  • Results showed that younger infected plants had enhanced photosynthetic protein levels and energy efficiency, but struggled with maintaining cell wall integrity over time, leading to latex loss and suggesting a need for genetic improvements for better resistance to the virus.
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At least 20,000 plant species produce latex, a capacity that appears to have evolved independently on numerous occasions. With a few exceptions, latex is stored under pressure in specialized cells known as laticifers and is exuded upon injury, leading to the assumption that it has a role in securing the plant after mechanical injury. In addition, a defensive effect against insect herbivores and fungal infections has been well established.

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Science is among humanity's greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance.

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Status hierarchies are ubiquitous across cultures and have been over deep time. Position in hierarchies shows important links with fitness outcomes. Consequently, humans should possess psychological adaptations for navigating the adaptive challenges posed by living in hierarchically organised groups.

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Touch is the primary way people communicate intimacy in romantic relationships, and affectionate touch behaviors such as stroking, hugging and kissing are universally observed in partnerships all over the world. Here, we explored the association of love and affectionate touch behaviors in romantic partnerships in two studies comprising 7880 participants. In the first study, we used a cross-cultural survey conducted in 37 countries to test whether love was universally associated with affectionate touch behaviors.

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Sexual double standards are social norms that impose greater social opprobrium on women versus men or that permit one sex greater sexual freedom than the other. This study examined sexual double standards when choosing a mate based on their sexual history. Using a novel approach, participants (N = 923, 64% women) were randomly assigned to make evaluations in long-term or short-term mating contexts and asked how a prospective partner's sexual history would influence their own likelihood of having sex (short-term) or entering a relationship (long-term) with them.

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Recent cross-cultural and neuro-hormonal investigations have suggested that love is a near universal phenomenon that has a biological background. Therefore, the remaining important question is not whether love exists worldwide but which cultural, social, or environmental factors influence experiences and expressions of love. In the present study, we explored whether countries' modernization indexes are related to love experiences measured by three subscales (passion, intimacy, commitment) of the Triangular Love Scale.

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Despite progress in attractiveness research, we have yet to identify many fitness-relevant cues in the human phenotype or humans' psychology for responding to them. Here, we test hypotheses about psychological systems that may have evolved to process distinct cues in the female lumbar region. The Fetal Load Hypothesis proposes a male preference for a morphological cue: lumbar curvature.

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The present study developed a brief version of the Hungarian Why Sex? questionnaire (Meskó et al., 2022). The study was in part based on previously reported data obtained from several samples (N = 6193; 1976 men, 4217 women).

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Benenson et al. (2022) amass impressive evidence of robust sex differences as support for expanding "staying alive" theory. We argue for a broader and more domain-specific conceptualization focusing on life history tradeoffs between survival and mating success.

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The niche-diversity hypothesis proposes that personality structure arises from the affordances of unique trait combinations within a society. It predicts that personality traits will be both more variable and differentiated in populations with more distinct social and ecological niches. Prior tests of this hypothesis in 55 nations suffered from potential confounds associated with differences in the measurement properties of personality scales across groups.

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Using the same methodology as Meston and Buss (2007), three studies were conducted on a Hungarian sample (total N = 4913) which corroborate previous findings on the universal diversity of sexual motivation. Study 1 (N = 2728; 1069 women and 1659 men) identified 197 reasons for having sex based on participants' free responses. In Study 2 (N = 1161; 820 women and 341 men), participants indicated the extent to which each of the 197 reasons had led them to have sexual intercourse.

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A wide range of literature connects sex ratio and mating behaviours in non-human animals. However, research examining sex ratio and human mating is limited in scope. Prior work has examined the relationship between sex ratio and desire for short-term, uncommitted mating as well as outcomes such as marriage and divorce rates.

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Objective: One of the factors that sexual disgust should be calibrated to is the size of the mating pool. This study tested this hypothesis by examining whether perceptions of mate availability explain variance in levels of sexual disgust towards potential mates.

Methods: Participants ( = 853; 373 women) rated how sexually disgusting they found 60 potential mates that have previously been rated on attractiveness by a separate group of raters.

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Interpersonal touch behavior differs across cultures, yet no study to date has systematically tested for cultural variation in affective touch, nor examined the factors that might account for this variability. Here, over 14,000 individuals from 45 countries were asked whether they embraced, stroked, kissed, or hugged their partner, friends, and youngest child during the week preceding the study. We then examined a range of hypothesized individual-level factors (sex, age, parasitic history, conservatism, religiosity, and preferred interpersonal distance) and cultural-level factors (regional temperature, parasite stress, regional conservatism, collectivism, and religiosity) in predicting these affective-touching behaviors.

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Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic-across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died.

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Reports an error in "Human status criteria: Sex differences and similarities across 14 nations" by David M. Buss, Patrick K. Durkee, Todd K.

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Competing theories of status allocation posit divergent conceptual foundations upon which human status hierarchies are built. We argue that the three prominent theories of status allocation-competence-based models, conflict-based models, and dual-pathway models-can be distinguished by the importance that they place on four key affordance dimensions: benefit-generation ability, benefit-generation willingness, cost-infliction ability, and cost-infliction willingness. In the current study, we test competing theoretical predictions about the relative centrality of each affordance dimension to clarify the foundations of human status allocation.

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The Triangular Theory of Love (measured with Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale - STLS) is a prominent theoretical concept in empirical research on love. To expand the culturally homogeneous body of previous psychometric research regarding the STLS, we conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study with the use of this scale. In total, we examined more than 11,000 respondents, but as a result of applied exclusion criteria, the final analyses were based on a sample of 7332 participants from 25 countries (from all inhabited continents).

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[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in on Sep 7 2020 (see record 2020-68801-001). In the original article, the third sentence in the Content level subsection in the Status Criteria More Central to Women section of the Results should appear instead as , and increase women's status more than men's. A coding error in Figure 7 for Dishonoring Family appeared.

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