Publications by authors named "Melissa Fales"

Although many emerging adults struggle to gain status and develop social relationships, particularly during the college transition, it remains unclear whether certain personality traits facilitate this transition. Using a longitudinal design, we investigated whether status-related traits-namely, entitlement, intrasexual competitiveness, and dominance-related to the development of status in 91 first-year college students ( =18.15, =0.

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Hierarchies naturally emerge in social species, and judgments of status in these hierarchies have consequences for social relationships and health. Although judgments of social status are shaped by appearance, the physical cues that inform judgments of status remain unclear. The transition to college presents an opportunity to examine judgments of social status in a newly developing social hierarchy.

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After half a century of debate and few empirical tests, there remains no consensus concerning why ovulation in human females is considered concealed. The predominant male investment hypothesis states that females were better able to obtain material investment from male partners across those females' ovulatory cycles by concealing ovulation. We build on recent work on female competition to propose and investigate an alternative-the female rivalry hypothesis-that concealed ovulation benefited females by allowing them to avoid aggression from other females.

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Both lower subjective social status (SSS)-or viewing oneself as having lower status relative to others-and greater early life stress consistently relate to poorer health in adolescence. Early life stress can also negatively influence one's social relationships and may thereby shape social status. The present studies investigated how early life stress relates to the development of SSS and how SSS relates to health across the transition to college.

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Objective: There exists a well-established link between low perceived social status and poorer health outcomes. However, the molecular mechanisms associated with this link remain unclear. This study begins to fill this gap by investigating the effects of low perceived subjective social status on health-related gene expression.

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Although falling in love is one of the most important and psychologically potent events in human life, the somatic implications of new romantic love remain poorly understood. Psychological, immunological, and reproductive perspectives offer competing predictions of the specific transcriptional regulatory shifts that might accompany the experience of falling in love. To characterize the impact of romantic love on human genome function, we conducted genome-wide transcriptome profiling of 115 circulating immune cell samples collected from 47 young women over the course of a 2-year longitudinal study.

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Given that prior research implicates smoking abstinence in increased premenstrual symptoms, tobacco withdrawal, and smoking behaviors, it is possible that women with more severe premenstrual symptoms have stronger expectancies about the effects of smoking and abstaining from smoking on mood and withdrawal. However, such relations have not been previously explored. This study examined relations between premenstrual symptoms experienced in the last month and expectancies that abstaining from smoking results in withdrawal (i.

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One hypothesis derived from evolutionary perspectives is that men are more upset than women by sexual infidelity and women are more upset than men by emotional infidelity. The proposed explanation is that men, in contrast to women, face the risk of unwittingly investing in genetically unrelated offspring. Most studies, however, have relied on small college or community samples of heterosexual participants.

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Two meta-analyses evaluated shifts across the ovulatory cycle in women's mate preferences but reported very different findings. In this journal, we reported robust evidence for the pattern of cycle shifts predicted by the ovulatory shift hypothesis (Gildersleeve, Haselton, & Fales, 2014). However, Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie (2014) claimed an absence of compelling support for this hypothesis and asserted that the few significant cycle shifts they observed were false positives resulting from publication bias, p-hacking, or other research artifacts.

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The challenge hypothesis posits that male testosterone levels increase in the presence of fertile females to facilitate mating and increase further in the presence of male rivals to facilitate male-male competition. This hypothesis has been supported in a number of nonhuman animal species. We conducted an experiment to test the challenge hypothesis in men.

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Scientific interest in whether women experience changes across the ovulatory cycle in mating-related motivations, preferences, cognitions, and behaviors has surged in the past 2 decades. A prominent hypothesis in this area, the ovulatory shift hypothesis, posits that women experience elevated immediate sexual attraction on high- relative to low-fertility days of the cycle to men with characteristics that reflected genetic quality ancestrally. Dozens of published studies have aimed to test this hypothesis, with some reporting null effects.

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