Two main ways to enter a marriage are through free choice and through an arrangement between families, known as an arranged marriage. In this study, we compared differences in three dimensions of love (Intimacy, Passion, and Commitment) between spouses in love-based marriages and arranged marriages among five non-Western societies: Bhotiya from the Himalayas, Igbo from Nigeria, Kimeru from Kenya, Meru from Tanzania, and Tsimane' from Bolivia. When considering all data gathered from the five cultures, free choice and arranged marriages did not differ significantly in average love scores.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhat makes an odour pleasant or unpleasant? The inherent properties of the constituent chemical compounds, or the nose of the beholder, driven by idiosyncratic differences and culture-specific learning? Here, 582 individuals, including Tanzanian Hadza hunter-gatherers, Amazonian Tsimane' horticulturalists, Yali from the Papuan highlands and two industrialized populations (Poles, Malaysians), rated the pleasantness of 15 odour samples. We find considerable similarities in odour assessments across cultures, but our data do not fully support a claim regarding the universality of smell preferences. Despite cross-cultural similarities in olfactory assessments, probably driven by odour properties, we suggest that odour availability in ecological and cultural niches bears an undeniable effect on human odour preferences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Digit ratio (2D:4D) - the relative lengths of the index and ring finger - is sexually dimorphic (male < female), possibly because of the sex-differentiated impact of prenatal androgenization on fetal development in the 1st trimester. The sex difference remains stable with age and has been reported in children, adolescents, and adults from industrialized and non-industrialized societies. Handgrip strength (HGS) also is sexually dimorphic (males > females) and correlates negatively with 2D:4D.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research has demonstrated that Maasai and Europeans tend to align in their ratings of the physical strength and aggressiveness of Maasai male faces, calibrated to hand grip strength (HGS). However, perceptions of attractiveness of these faces differed among populations. In this study, three morphs of young Maasai men created by means of geometric morphometrics, and depicting the average sample and two extrema (± 4 SD of HGS), were assessed by men and women from Tanzania, Czech Republic, Russia, Pakistan, China, and Mexico (total sample = 1540).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHumans readily cooperate, even with strangers and without prospects of reciprocation. Despite thousands of studies, this finding is not well understood. Most studies focussed on a single aspect of cooperation and were conducted under anonymous conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The aim of our study was to compare morphometric patterns of facial sexual dimorphism with strength-face relationship in members of two distinct populations of European and Central Asian origin: Russians and Tuvans.
Methods: Handgrip strength (HGS) measures and facial photographs were collected from Russian (n = 233) and Tuvan (n = 187) men and women. We digitized 70 landmarks and semilandmarks on full-face and 54 landmarks and semilandmarks on profile photos.
Background: In Mongolian-origin ethnic groups digit ratio (2D:4D; a proxy for prenatal sex-steroids) is sexually dimorphic (males < females), as reported for other ethnicities. Most studies measured 2D:4D from soft tissue (directly from the digits, or indirectly from hand scans), or from radiographs. Evidence on the correspondence of 2D:4D measurements from soft tissue with measurements from radiographic images is scarce and has not been reported for a Mongolian-origin sample.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTouch 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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Previous research showed that male and female members of the Maasai from Northern Tanzania judge images of facial morphs calibrated to greater handgrip strength (HGS) higher on strength and attractiveness, but lower on aggressiveness than those calibrated to lower HGS. The accurate assessment of male physical strength from facial information may be adaptive as suggested by the evidence on health and fitness-related benefits linked to high muscular strength.
Methods: This study extends previous work by obtaining European female (n = 220) and male (n = 51) assessments of HGS-calibrated Maasai male faces.
The ability to trust others, including strangers, is a prerequisite for human cooperation. Economically it is not rational to trust strangers, as trust can be easily exploited. Still, generally, the level of trust toward strangers is relatively high.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent 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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFood sharing behavior is a widely observed phenomenon, and it draws attention of scholars interested in finding both proximate and ultimate explanations of such practices. In the current study, we focused on possible socio-economic and environmental food-sharing predictors: type of economy (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe COVID-19 restrictions have impacted people's lifestyles in all spheres (social, psychological, political, economic, and others). This study explored which factors affected the level of anxiety during the time of the first wave of COVID-19 and subsequent quarantine in a substantial proportion of 23 countries, included in this study. The data was collected from May to August 2020 (5 June 2020).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe aim of the present study was to investigate whether neutral faces of individuals with different propensities for leadership may convey information about their personal qualities, and are there impacts of sex, population and social environment on the facial perception. This study is based on a previous experiment ( Rostovtseva et al., 2022), where emergent leadership in the context of male group cooperation was investigated in Buryats (Mongolian population of Siberia).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Physiol Anthropol
January 2022
Background: In this paper, we investigate facial sexual dimorphism and its' association with body dimorphism in Maasai, the traditional seminomadic population of Tanzania. We discuss findings on other human populations and possible factors affecting the developmental processes in Maasai.
Methods: Full-face anthropological photographs were obtained from 305 Maasai (185 men, 120 women) aged 17-90 years.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
December 2021
The human voice carries information about a vocalizer's physical strength that listeners can perceive and that may influence mate choice and intrasexual competition. Yet, reliable acoustic correlates of strength in human speech remain unclear. Compared to speech, aggressive nonverbal vocalizations (roars) may function to maximize perceived strength, suggesting that their acoustic structure has been selected to communicate formidability, similar to the vocal threat displays of other animals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA 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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
April 2021
Testing individual motivations for social activity in violation of the mandated lockdown regime is a challenging research topic for evolutionary psychology. To this purpose, we analyzed twenty popular weekly routes and the potential impact of sex and relationship status (single versus coupled) on the reported level of spatial-social activity during the quarantine in Russia between March and June 2020 ( = 492). Our study revealed a significant difference between men's and women's mobility: men, in general, tend to exhibit substantially higher spatial activity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecently, a number of authors have claimed that sexual dimorphism in the second-to-fourth digit ratio (2D:4D) is simply dependent on digit length and is an artifact of allometry. The goal of our study is to verify the validity of these assumptions. The study sample comprised 7,582 individuals (3,802 men and 3,780 women) from three large world populations: Europeans (n = 3043), East Africans (n = 2844), and Central Asians (n = 1695).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInterpersonal 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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNumerous factors, including family planning and modern contraception, disturb the potential associations between the number of children born and genetic factors in modern Western societies. The current progress of medicine and a relatively high level of well-being make it hard to test the association between children's survival rates and genetic factors in Western societies either. The goal of the current study was to reveal the possible associations between the number of children born and the number of children survived till the age of 5 y.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch on attractiveness assessments of men's dance has shown that raters derive and integrate information about male mating-related qualities into their attractiveness assessments, but prior studies have focused on lay assessors (i.e., individuals with no professional dance background) rather than dance experts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
September 2020
Despite relatively clear physiological indicators of old age, little is known about cross-cultural differences in psychological perceptions of the transition to old age. Although recent studies suggest consistency between modern countries, the subjective perception of old age onset in traditional societies remains poorly explored. Therefore, we compared the perception of timing of old age between a traditional tribe of hunter-gatherers (the Hadza) and a Polish sample representing a modern, industrialized population.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF