Ovulatory cycle shifts in human motivational prioritisation of sex and food.

Previous research on the endogenous effects of ovarian hormones on motivational states in women has focused on sexual motivation. The Motivational Priority Shifts Hypothesis has a broader scope. It predicts a shift from somatic to reproductive motivation when fertile. In a highly powered preregistered online diary study across 40 days, we tested whether 390 women report such an ovulatory shift in sexual and eating motivation and behaviour. We compared 209 naturally cycling women to 181 women taking hormonal contraceptives (HC) to rule out non-ovulatory changes across the cycle as confounders. We found robust ovulatory decreases in food intake and increases in general sexual desire, in-pair sexual desire and initiation of dyadic sexual behaviour. Extra-pair sexual desire increased mid-cycle, but the effect did not differ significantly in HC women, questioning an ovulatory effect. Descriptively, solitary sexual desire and behaviour, dyadic sexual behaviour, appetite, and satiety showed expected mid-cycle changes that were diminished in HC women, but these failed to reach our strict preregistered significance level. Our results provide insight into current theoretical debates about ovulatory cycle shifts while calling for future research to determine motivational mechanisms behind ovulatory changes in food intake and considering romantic partners' motivational states to explain the occurrence of dyadic sexual behaviour.

Stability and Change of Individual Differences in Ideal Partner Preferences Over 13 Years.

Ideal partner preferences for traits in a partner are said to be stable cognitive constructs. However, longitudinal studies investigating the same participants' ideals repeatedly have so far been limited to relatively short retest intervals of a maximum of 3 years. Here, we investigate the stability and change of ideals across 13 years and participants' insight into how ideals have changed. A total of 204 participants (M = 46.2 years, SD = 7.4, 104 women) reported their ideals at two time points. We found a mean rank-order stability of r = .42 and an overall profile stability of r = .73 (distinctive r = .53). Some ideals changed over time, for example, increased for status-resources in relation to age and parenthood. We found some but varying insight into how ideals had changed (mean r = .20). Results support the idea of ideals being stable cognitive constructs but suggest some variability related to the demands of different life stages.

Men are not aware of and do not respond to their female partner's fertility status: Evidence from a dyadic diary study of 384 couples.

Understanding how human mating psychology is affected by changes in female cyclic fertility is informative for comprehending the evolution of human reproductive behavior. Based on differential selection pressures between the sexes, men are assumed to have evolved adaptations to notice women's within-cycle cues to fertility and show corresponding mate retention tactics to secure access to their female partners when fertile. However, previous studies suffered from methodological shortcomings and yielded inconsistent results. In a large, preregistered online dyadic diary study (384 heterosexual couples), we found no compelling evidence that men notice women's fertility status (as potentially reflected in women's attractiveness, sexual desire, or wish for contact with others) or display mid-cycle increases in mate retention tactics (jealousy, attention, wish for contact or sexual desire towards female partners). These results extend our current understanding of the evolution of women's concealed ovulation and oestrus, and suggest that both might have evolved independently.

No increased inbreeding avoidance during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle.

Mate preferences and mating-related behaviours are hypothesised to change over the menstrual cycle to increase reproductive fitness. Recent large-scale studies suggest that previously reported hormone-linked behavioural changes are not robust. The proposal that women's preference for associating with male kin is down-regulated during the ovulatory (high-fertility) phase of the menstrual cycle to reduce inbreeding has not been tested in large samples. Consequently, we investigated the relationship between longitudinal changes in women's steroid hormone levels and their perceptions of faces experimentally manipulated to possess kinship cues (Study 1). Women viewed faces displaying kinship cues as more attractive and trustworthy, but this effect was not related to hormonal proxies of conception risk. Study 2 employed a daily diary approach and found no evidence that women spent less time with kin generally or with male kin specifically during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Thus, neither study found evidence that inbreeding avoidance is up-regulated during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle.

The evidence for good genes ovulatory shifts in Arslan et al. (2018) is mixed and uncertain.

In Arslan et al. (2018), we reported ovulatory increases in extra-pair sexual desire, in-pair sexual desire, and self-perceived desirability, as well as several moderator analyses related to the good genes ovulatory shift hypothesis, which predicts attenuated ovulatory increases in extra-pair desire for women with attractive partners. Gangestad and Dinh (2021) identified errors in how we aggregated two of the four main moderator variables. We are grateful that their scrutiny uncovered these errors. After corrections, our moderation results are more mixed than we previously reported and depend on the moderator specification. However, we disagree that the evidence for moderation is robust and compelling, as Gangestad and Dinh (2021) claim. Our data are consistent with some previously reported effect sizes, but also with negligible moderator effects. We also show that what Gangestad and Dinh (2021) call an "a priori[…]more comprehensive and valid composite" is poorly justifiable on a priori grounds, and follow-up analyses they report are not robust to a composite specification that we consider at least as reasonable. Psychologists have to become acquainted with techniques such as cross-validation or training and test sets to manage the risks of data-dependent analyses. In doing so, we might learn that we need new data more often than we intuit and should remain uncertain far more often. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Routinely randomize potential sources of measurement reactivity to estimate and adjust for biases in subjective reports.

With the advent of online and app-based studies, researchers in psychology are making increasing use of repeated subjective reports. The new methods open up opportunities to study behavior in the field and to map causal processes, but they also pose new challenges. Recent work has added initial elevation bias to the list of common pitfalls; here, higher negative states (i.e., thoughts and feelings) are reported on the first day of assessment than on later days. This article showcases a new approach to addressing this and other measurement reactivity biases. Specifically, we employed a planned missingness design in a daily diary study of more than 1,300 individuals who were assessed over a period of up to 70 days to estimate and adjust for measurement reactivity biases. We found that day of first item presentation, item order, and item number were associated with only negligible bias: Items were not answered differently depending on when and where they were shown. Initial elevation bias may thus be more limited than has previously been reported or it may act only at the level of the survey, not at the item level. We encourage researchers to make design choices that will allow them to routinely assess measurement reactivity biases in their studies. Specifically, we advocate the routine randomization of item display and order, as well as of the timing and frequency of measurement. Randomized planned missingness makes it possible to empirically gauge how fatigue, familiarity, and learning interact to bias responses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Women feel more attractive before ovulation: evidence from a large-scale online diary study.

How attractive we find ourselves decides who we target as potential partners and influences our reproductive fitness. Self-perceptions on women's fertile days could be particularly important. However, results on how self-perceived attractiveness changes across women's ovulatory cycles are inconsistent and research has seldomly assessed multiple attractiveness-related constructs simultaneously. Here, we give an overview of ovulatory cycle shifts in self-perceived attractiveness, sexual desirability, grooming, self-esteem and positive mood. We addressed previous methodological shortcomings by conducting a large, preregistered online diary study of 872 women (580 naturally cycling) across 70 consecutive days, applying several robustness analyses and comparing naturally cycling women with women using hormonal contraceptives. As expected, we found robust evidence for ovulatory increases in self-perceived attractiveness and sexual desirability in naturally cycling women. Unexpectedly, we found moderately robust evidence for smaller ovulatory increases in self-esteem and positive mood. Although grooming showed an ovulatory increase descriptively, the effect was small, failed to reach our strict significance level of .01 and was not robust to model variations. We discuss how these results could follow an ovulatory increase in sexual motivation while calling for more theoretical and causally informative research to uncover the nature of ovulatory cycle shifts in the future.