An open-access journal for Valentine's Day

An item in the Journal of Irreproducible Results's email newsletter called my attention to the Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, which publishes many papers related to romantic love, which are all open-access.

- Attractive Women Want it All: Good Genes, Economic Investment, Parenting Proclivities, and Emotional Commitment. I have noticed this paper's result that attractive women can have higher standards than less attractive women, but find it profoundly depressing.

Attractiveness as the major factor in women's ability to attract a "high value" mate is not a main finding of the paper, but it is apparently well-founded in the literature. Traits like education really do seem to be much less important in whom women can attract, and that's related to why successful men have an easier time marrying than successful women. In reproductive fitness terms, women's time might be better spent exercising and primping than working, especially if work contributes to women being less attractive (e.g., travel = worse diet, less exercise, sleep loss). Men's incentives align more directly: working in itself helps men attract mates, though exercise also does (and another paper found men who played team sports were more attractive). As has been noted umpteen times, women have a much harder time finding men of comparable education/income levels: women's education isn't as much of an asset to them on the dating market as it is for men.

Also, from my read, it looks like they could have rated the women's husband's mating values directly and chose only to look at the women's self-reported standards for a mate; I wonder why they didn't look at the empirical results of the women's actual mate choices; or perhaps I have misread.

-Likewise, women put more emphasis on character in mate selection, while men don't.

- Sex Differences in Everyday Risk-Taking Behavior in Humans: Males take more risks than females do, and more risks when females are around. They don't talk about whether risk-taking behavior has any effect on female attractiveness, but that would be interesting as well.

- Sex Differences in Romantic Kissing Among College Students: An Evolutionary Perspective finds that men use kissing primarily to get laid, and don't mind its absence in short-term partner selection as much as women do. An interesting thing that I hadn't realized was that they hypothesize that kissing allows substances to be exchanged that make women more interested in sex.

Fascinating, yet depressing, to see human behavior reduced to such basic terms. I'm going to the gym.