Anthony Little | University of Stirling (original) (raw)
Papers by Anthony Little
Evolution and Human Behavior, Nov 30, 2005
Physical condition (eg, health, fertility) influences female mate preferences in many species, wi... more Physical condition (eg, health, fertility) influences female mate preferences in many species, with females in good condition preferring" higher quality"(eg, healthier) mates. In humans, condition may comprise both physical (eg, health and fertility) and psychological factors (eg, stress, anxiety, and depression). We found that women with low waist-to-hip ratios (indicating health and fertility) or who scored low on anxiety, depression, and stress measures expressed greater attraction to composite male (but not female) faces with color ...
Because women's preferences for male masculinity reflect tradeoffs between the benefits of greate... more Because women's preferences for male masculinity reflect tradeoffs between the benefits of greater genetic health and the costs of lower paternal investment, variables that affect the importance of these costs and benefits also affect masculinity preferences. Concern about disease and pathogens may be one such variable. Here we show that disgust sensitivity in the pathogen domain is positively correlated with facial masculinity preferences, but disgust sensitivity in the moral and sexual domains is not. Our findings present novel evidence that systematic variation in women's preferences for masculine men reflects factors that influence how women resolve the tradeoff between the benefits and costs associated with choosing a masculine partner.
Social Cognition, 2006
... male, whereas the average of older females looks older and fe-maleyet neither image bears gr... more ... male, whereas the average of older females looks older and fe-maleyet neither image bears great resemblance to any of ... From the delineation data of all the faces in the set, the aver-age position of each feature point on ... PERSONALITY JUDGMENTS FROM FACIAL IMAGES ...
Evolution and Human …, 2003
Research has shown that human partners are more similar than expected by chance on a variety of t... more Research has shown that human partners are more similar than expected by chance on a variety of traits. Studies examining hair and eye colour show some evidence of positive assortment. Positive assortment may reflect attraction to self-similar characteristics but is also consistent with attraction to parental traits. Here, we examine self-reported partner hair and eye colour and the influence that own and parental colour characteristics have on these variables. Parental characteristics were found to correlate positively with actual partner characteristics for both men and women. Regression analysis predicting partner characteristics from maternal and paternal traits (which controls for own traits) revealed the greater importance of the opposite-sex parent over the same-sex parent in predicting both hair and eye colour of actual partners. The findings may reflect an influence of parental colour characteristics on human partner choice. Attraction to opposite-sex parental characteristics is seen in a wide variety of animals where it is usually attributed to imprinting processes in infancy. Although the mechanism is unclear and not necessarily confined to infancy, the data reported here are consistent with a somewhat analogous process to imprinting occurring in humans. D
Infant behavior & development, 2014
Human preferences for facial attractiveness appear to emerge at an early stage during infant deve... more Human preferences for facial attractiveness appear to emerge at an early stage during infant development. A number of studies have demonstrated that infants display a robust preference for facial attractiveness, preferring to look at physically attractive faces versus less attractive faces as judged by adults. However, to-date, relatively little is known about which traits of the face infants use to base these preferences upon. In contrast, a large number of studies conducted with human adults have identified that preference for attractive faces can be attributed to a number of specific facial traits. The purpose of the experiments here was to measure and assess infant's visual preference via eye-tracker technology for faces manipulated for one of three traits known to effect attractiveness judgments in adult preference tests: symmetry, averageness, and sexually dimorphic traits. Sixty-four infants (28 female and 36 male) aged between 12 and 24 months old each completed a visual...
Although strong cross-sensory interactions between visual, tactile and auditory modalities have a... more Although strong cross-sensory interactions between visual, tactile and auditory modalities have already been shown, we know little about how chemosensory information a¡ects processing in other sensory modalities. We studied whether smelling gender-speci¢c odorous sex hormone-like steroids: 5-a-androgenst-16 -en-3-one (androgen) or oestra-1, 3, 5 (10),16 -tetraen-3-ol (estrogen) can bias face gender discrimination. We found that, as a result of inhalation of
Biological psychology, 2015
Here, we investigate changes in women's facial masculinity preferences across pregnancy and t... more Here, we investigate changes in women's facial masculinity preferences across pregnancy and the post-partum period. The majority of previous research demonstrating changes in women's masculinity preferences has examined the impact of hormonal variation across the female menstrual cycle. Hormonal changes experienced during pregnancy and the post-partum period, critical periods in women's reproductive life histories, are considerably more extreme than the variation that occurs across the menstrual cycle, suggesting that differences in preferences may also be displayed during these times. We find that women's preference for masculinity in men's faces, but not women's faces, decreases in the post-partum period relative to pregnancy. Furthermore, when compared to a sample of nulliparous control participants, post-partum participants showed different masculinity preferences compared with women who were using hormonal contraception, with the direction of this differ...
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 2012
Visual characteristics, including facial appearance, are thought to play an important role in a v... more Visual characteristics, including facial appearance, are thought to play an important role in a variety of judgments and decisions that have real occupational outcomes in many settings. Indeed, there is growing evidence suggesting that appearance influences hiring decisions and even election results. For example, attractive individuals are more likely to be hired, taller men earn more, and the facial appearance of candidates has been linked to real election outcomes. In this article, we review evidence linking physical appearance to occupational success and evaluate the hypothesis that appearance based biases are consistent with predictions based on evolutionary theories of coalition formation and leadership choice. We discuss why appearance based effects are so pervasive, addressing ideas about a "kernel of truth" in attributions and about coalitional psychology. We additionally highlight that appearance may be differently related to success at work according to the types...
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 2010
Sexually dimorphic physical traits are important for mate choice and mate preference in many spec... more Sexually dimorphic physical traits are important for mate choice and mate preference in many species, including humans. Several previous studies have observed that women's preferences for physical cues of male masculinity in different domains (e.g., visual and vocal) are correlated. These correlations demonstrate systematic, rather than arbitrary, variation in women's preferences for masculine men and are consistent with the proposal that sexually dimorphic cues in different domains reflect a common underlying aspect of male quality. Here we present evidence for a similar correlation between men's preferences for different cues of femininity in women; although men generally preferred feminized to masculinized versions of both women's faces and voices, the strength of men's preferences for feminized versions of female faces was positively and significantly correlated with the strength of their preferences for feminized versions of women's voices. In a second s...
British Journal of Psychology, 2014
Being paired with an attractive partner increases perceptual judgements of attractiveness in huma... more Being paired with an attractive partner increases perceptual judgements of attractiveness in humans. We tested experimentally for prestige bias, whereby individuals follow the choices of prestigious others. Women rated the attractiveness of photographs of target males which were paired with either popular or less popular model female partners. We found that pairing a photo of a man with a woman presented as his partner positively influenced the attractiveness of the man when the woman was presented as more popular (Experiment 1). Further, this effect was stronger in younger participants compared to older participants (Experiment 1). Reversing the target and model such that women were asked to rate women paired with popular and less popular men revealed no effect of model popularity and this effect was unrelated to participant age (Experiment 2). An additional experiment confirmed that participant age and not stimulus age primarily influenced the tendency to follow others' preferences in Experiment 1 (Experiment 3). We also confirmed that our manipulations of popularity lead to variation in rated prestige (Experiment 4). These results suggest a sophisticated model-based bias in social learning whereby individuals are most influenced by the choices of those who have high popularity/prestige. Furthermore, older individuals moderate their use of such social information and so this form of social learning appears strongest in younger women.
Archives of Scientific Psychology, 2014
Behavioral ecology and sociobiology, 2012
The face is an important visual trait in social communication across many species. In evolutionar... more The face is an important visual trait in social communication across many species. In evolutionary terms there are large and obvious selective advantages in detecting healthy partners, both in terms of avoiding individuals with poor health to minimise contagion and in mating with individuals with high health to help ensure healthy offspring. Many models of sexual selection suggest that an individual's phenotype provides cues to their quality. Fluctuating asymmetry is a trait that is proposed to be an honest indicator of quality and previous studies have demonstrated that rhesus monkeys gaze longer at symmetric faces, suggesting preferences for such faces. The current study examined the relationship between measured facial symmetry and measures of health in a captive population of female rhesus macaque monkeys. We measured asymmetry from landmarks marked on front-on facial photographs and computed measures of health based on veterinary health and condition ratings, number of mino...
Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2015
PLOS ONE, 2015
Androphilia refers to attraction to adult males, whereas gynephilia refers to attraction to adult... more Androphilia refers to attraction to adult males, whereas gynephilia refers to attraction to adult females. The current study employed self-report and viewing time (response time latency) measures of sexual attraction to determine the sexual orientation of Samoan cisgender men (i.e., males whose gender presentation and identity is concordant with their biological sex) who engage in sexual interactions with transgender male androphiles (known locally as fa'afafine) compared to: (1) Samoan cisgender men who only engage in sexual interactions with women, and (2) fa'afafine. As expected, both measures indicated that cisgender men who only engaged in sexual interactions with women exhibited a gynephilic pattern of sexual attraction, whereas fa'afafine exhibited an androphilic one. In contrast, both measures indicated that cisgender men who engaged in sexual interactions with fa'afafine demonstrated a bisexual pattern of sexual attraction. Most of the cisgender men who exhibited bisexual viewing times did not engage in sexual activity with both men and women indicating that the manner in which bisexual patterns of sexual attraction manifest behaviorally vary from one culture to the next.
![Research paper thumbnail of Female Preferences for Male Vocal and Facial Masculinity in Videos [2012]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/45376446/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Vocal and facial masculinity are cues to underlying testosterone in men and influence women's mat... more Vocal and facial masculinity are cues to underlying testosterone in men and influence women's mate preferences. Consistent with the proposal that facial and vocal masculinity signal common information about men, prior work has revealed correlated female preferences for male facial and vocal masculinity. Previous studies have assessed women's preferences for male facial and vocal masculinity by presenting faces and voices independently and using static face stimuli. By contrast, here we presented women with short video clips in which male faces and voices were simultaneously manipulated in masculinity. We found that women who preferred masculine faces also preferred masculine voices. Furthermore, women whose faces were rated as relatively more attractive preferred both facial and vocal masculinity more than did women whose faces were rated as less attractive. These findings complement other evidence for cross-modal masculinity preferences among women and demonstrate that preferences observed in studies using still images and ⁄ or independently presented vocal stimuli are also observed when dynamic faces and voices are displayed simultaneously in video format.
Evolution and Human Behavior, Nov 30, 2005
Physical condition (eg, health, fertility) influences female mate preferences in many species, wi... more Physical condition (eg, health, fertility) influences female mate preferences in many species, with females in good condition preferring" higher quality"(eg, healthier) mates. In humans, condition may comprise both physical (eg, health and fertility) and psychological factors (eg, stress, anxiety, and depression). We found that women with low waist-to-hip ratios (indicating health and fertility) or who scored low on anxiety, depression, and stress measures expressed greater attraction to composite male (but not female) faces with color ...
Because women's preferences for male masculinity reflect tradeoffs between the benefits of greate... more Because women's preferences for male masculinity reflect tradeoffs between the benefits of greater genetic health and the costs of lower paternal investment, variables that affect the importance of these costs and benefits also affect masculinity preferences. Concern about disease and pathogens may be one such variable. Here we show that disgust sensitivity in the pathogen domain is positively correlated with facial masculinity preferences, but disgust sensitivity in the moral and sexual domains is not. Our findings present novel evidence that systematic variation in women's preferences for masculine men reflects factors that influence how women resolve the tradeoff between the benefits and costs associated with choosing a masculine partner.
Social Cognition, 2006
... male, whereas the average of older females looks older and fe-maleyet neither image bears gr... more ... male, whereas the average of older females looks older and fe-maleyet neither image bears great resemblance to any of ... From the delineation data of all the faces in the set, the aver-age position of each feature point on ... PERSONALITY JUDGMENTS FROM FACIAL IMAGES ...
Evolution and Human …, 2003
Research has shown that human partners are more similar than expected by chance on a variety of t... more Research has shown that human partners are more similar than expected by chance on a variety of traits. Studies examining hair and eye colour show some evidence of positive assortment. Positive assortment may reflect attraction to self-similar characteristics but is also consistent with attraction to parental traits. Here, we examine self-reported partner hair and eye colour and the influence that own and parental colour characteristics have on these variables. Parental characteristics were found to correlate positively with actual partner characteristics for both men and women. Regression analysis predicting partner characteristics from maternal and paternal traits (which controls for own traits) revealed the greater importance of the opposite-sex parent over the same-sex parent in predicting both hair and eye colour of actual partners. The findings may reflect an influence of parental colour characteristics on human partner choice. Attraction to opposite-sex parental characteristics is seen in a wide variety of animals where it is usually attributed to imprinting processes in infancy. Although the mechanism is unclear and not necessarily confined to infancy, the data reported here are consistent with a somewhat analogous process to imprinting occurring in humans. D
Infant behavior & development, 2014
Human preferences for facial attractiveness appear to emerge at an early stage during infant deve... more Human preferences for facial attractiveness appear to emerge at an early stage during infant development. A number of studies have demonstrated that infants display a robust preference for facial attractiveness, preferring to look at physically attractive faces versus less attractive faces as judged by adults. However, to-date, relatively little is known about which traits of the face infants use to base these preferences upon. In contrast, a large number of studies conducted with human adults have identified that preference for attractive faces can be attributed to a number of specific facial traits. The purpose of the experiments here was to measure and assess infant's visual preference via eye-tracker technology for faces manipulated for one of three traits known to effect attractiveness judgments in adult preference tests: symmetry, averageness, and sexually dimorphic traits. Sixty-four infants (28 female and 36 male) aged between 12 and 24 months old each completed a visual...
Although strong cross-sensory interactions between visual, tactile and auditory modalities have a... more Although strong cross-sensory interactions between visual, tactile and auditory modalities have already been shown, we know little about how chemosensory information a¡ects processing in other sensory modalities. We studied whether smelling gender-speci¢c odorous sex hormone-like steroids: 5-a-androgenst-16 -en-3-one (androgen) or oestra-1, 3, 5 (10),16 -tetraen-3-ol (estrogen) can bias face gender discrimination. We found that, as a result of inhalation of
Biological psychology, 2015
Here, we investigate changes in women's facial masculinity preferences across pregnancy and t... more Here, we investigate changes in women's facial masculinity preferences across pregnancy and the post-partum period. The majority of previous research demonstrating changes in women's masculinity preferences has examined the impact of hormonal variation across the female menstrual cycle. Hormonal changes experienced during pregnancy and the post-partum period, critical periods in women's reproductive life histories, are considerably more extreme than the variation that occurs across the menstrual cycle, suggesting that differences in preferences may also be displayed during these times. We find that women's preference for masculinity in men's faces, but not women's faces, decreases in the post-partum period relative to pregnancy. Furthermore, when compared to a sample of nulliparous control participants, post-partum participants showed different masculinity preferences compared with women who were using hormonal contraception, with the direction of this differ...
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 2012
Visual characteristics, including facial appearance, are thought to play an important role in a v... more Visual characteristics, including facial appearance, are thought to play an important role in a variety of judgments and decisions that have real occupational outcomes in many settings. Indeed, there is growing evidence suggesting that appearance influences hiring decisions and even election results. For example, attractive individuals are more likely to be hired, taller men earn more, and the facial appearance of candidates has been linked to real election outcomes. In this article, we review evidence linking physical appearance to occupational success and evaluate the hypothesis that appearance based biases are consistent with predictions based on evolutionary theories of coalition formation and leadership choice. We discuss why appearance based effects are so pervasive, addressing ideas about a "kernel of truth" in attributions and about coalitional psychology. We additionally highlight that appearance may be differently related to success at work according to the types...
Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 2010
Sexually dimorphic physical traits are important for mate choice and mate preference in many spec... more Sexually dimorphic physical traits are important for mate choice and mate preference in many species, including humans. Several previous studies have observed that women's preferences for physical cues of male masculinity in different domains (e.g., visual and vocal) are correlated. These correlations demonstrate systematic, rather than arbitrary, variation in women's preferences for masculine men and are consistent with the proposal that sexually dimorphic cues in different domains reflect a common underlying aspect of male quality. Here we present evidence for a similar correlation between men's preferences for different cues of femininity in women; although men generally preferred feminized to masculinized versions of both women's faces and voices, the strength of men's preferences for feminized versions of female faces was positively and significantly correlated with the strength of their preferences for feminized versions of women's voices. In a second s...
British Journal of Psychology, 2014
Being paired with an attractive partner increases perceptual judgements of attractiveness in huma... more Being paired with an attractive partner increases perceptual judgements of attractiveness in humans. We tested experimentally for prestige bias, whereby individuals follow the choices of prestigious others. Women rated the attractiveness of photographs of target males which were paired with either popular or less popular model female partners. We found that pairing a photo of a man with a woman presented as his partner positively influenced the attractiveness of the man when the woman was presented as more popular (Experiment 1). Further, this effect was stronger in younger participants compared to older participants (Experiment 1). Reversing the target and model such that women were asked to rate women paired with popular and less popular men revealed no effect of model popularity and this effect was unrelated to participant age (Experiment 2). An additional experiment confirmed that participant age and not stimulus age primarily influenced the tendency to follow others' preferences in Experiment 1 (Experiment 3). We also confirmed that our manipulations of popularity lead to variation in rated prestige (Experiment 4). These results suggest a sophisticated model-based bias in social learning whereby individuals are most influenced by the choices of those who have high popularity/prestige. Furthermore, older individuals moderate their use of such social information and so this form of social learning appears strongest in younger women.
Archives of Scientific Psychology, 2014
Behavioral ecology and sociobiology, 2012
The face is an important visual trait in social communication across many species. In evolutionar... more The face is an important visual trait in social communication across many species. In evolutionary terms there are large and obvious selective advantages in detecting healthy partners, both in terms of avoiding individuals with poor health to minimise contagion and in mating with individuals with high health to help ensure healthy offspring. Many models of sexual selection suggest that an individual's phenotype provides cues to their quality. Fluctuating asymmetry is a trait that is proposed to be an honest indicator of quality and previous studies have demonstrated that rhesus monkeys gaze longer at symmetric faces, suggesting preferences for such faces. The current study examined the relationship between measured facial symmetry and measures of health in a captive population of female rhesus macaque monkeys. We measured asymmetry from landmarks marked on front-on facial photographs and computed measures of health based on veterinary health and condition ratings, number of mino...
Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2015
PLOS ONE, 2015
Androphilia refers to attraction to adult males, whereas gynephilia refers to attraction to adult... more Androphilia refers to attraction to adult males, whereas gynephilia refers to attraction to adult females. The current study employed self-report and viewing time (response time latency) measures of sexual attraction to determine the sexual orientation of Samoan cisgender men (i.e., males whose gender presentation and identity is concordant with their biological sex) who engage in sexual interactions with transgender male androphiles (known locally as fa'afafine) compared to: (1) Samoan cisgender men who only engage in sexual interactions with women, and (2) fa'afafine. As expected, both measures indicated that cisgender men who only engaged in sexual interactions with women exhibited a gynephilic pattern of sexual attraction, whereas fa'afafine exhibited an androphilic one. In contrast, both measures indicated that cisgender men who engaged in sexual interactions with fa'afafine demonstrated a bisexual pattern of sexual attraction. Most of the cisgender men who exhibited bisexual viewing times did not engage in sexual activity with both men and women indicating that the manner in which bisexual patterns of sexual attraction manifest behaviorally vary from one culture to the next.
Vocal and facial masculinity are cues to underlying testosterone in men and influence women's mat... more Vocal and facial masculinity are cues to underlying testosterone in men and influence women's mate preferences. Consistent with the proposal that facial and vocal masculinity signal common information about men, prior work has revealed correlated female preferences for male facial and vocal masculinity. Previous studies have assessed women's preferences for male facial and vocal masculinity by presenting faces and voices independently and using static face stimuli. By contrast, here we presented women with short video clips in which male faces and voices were simultaneously manipulated in masculinity. We found that women who preferred masculine faces also preferred masculine voices. Furthermore, women whose faces were rated as relatively more attractive preferred both facial and vocal masculinity more than did women whose faces were rated as less attractive. These findings complement other evidence for cross-modal masculinity preferences among women and demonstrate that preferences observed in studies using still images and ⁄ or independently presented vocal stimuli are also observed when dynamic faces and voices are displayed simultaneously in video format.