Recent studies investigating the relationship between self-reported sexual desire and attraction to same- and opposite-sex individuals have found that homosexual men's sexual desire is positively correlated with their self-reported attraction to own-sex individuals only, while homosexual women's sexual desire is positively correlated with their self-reported attraction to both men and women. Th...

Women who are regularly cycling exhibit different partner preferences than those who use hormonal contraception. Preliminary evidence appears to suggest that during pregnancy women's partner preferences also diverge from those prevalent while regularly cycling. This is consistent with the general assertion that women's mate preferences are impacted by hormonal variation. During pregnancy, women...

a r t i c l e i n f o Previous studies show that parasite prevalence and mortality/health are related to cultural variation in women's preferences for attractive and masculine traits in men. Other studies have suggested that both male– male competition and wealth may also be important correlates of cross-cultural variation in women's masculinity preferences. Here we examined whether exposure to...

Ecological speciation can be driven by divergent natural and/or sexual selection. The relative contribution of these processes to species divergence, however, is unknown. Here, we investigate how sexual selection in the form of male and female mate preferences contributes to divergence of body size. This trait is known be under divergent natural selection and also contributes to sexual isolatio...

Animals choose reproductive partners based on their sexual preferences which are established at a certain time point before, during, or after sexual maturation. The preferences are often divergent within a species, which suppresses gene flow between populations and may promote speciation. There are two strains of medaka (Oryzias latipes) that differ by a single transgene and mate assortatively ...

In the pantheon of evolutionary forces, the optimizing Apollonian powers of natural selection are generally assumed to dominate the dark Dionysian dynamics of sexual selection. But this need not be the case, particularly with a class of selective mating mechanisms called ‘directional mate preferences’ (Kirkpatrick, 1987). In previous simulation research, we showed that nondirectional assortativ...

Research has demonstrated that the sexual role preferences of gay men can be perceived with accuracies that exceed chance guessing from viewing photos of their faces. This research was conducted with only heterosexual perceivers making the categorizations. We therefore examined whether men who have sex with men (N = 121) were able to perceive sexual role preferences from faces and, critically, ...

Preferences for mates that possess genes dissimilar to one's own at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a polymorphic group of loci associated with the immune system, have been found in mice, birds, fish, and humans. These preferences may help individuals choose genetically compatible mates and may adaptively function to prevent inbreeding or to increase heterozygosity and thereby immun...

EXAMINING THE FACTORS REALTED TO BISEXUAL INDIVIDUALS’ PREFERENCE FOR FUTURE PARENTING PARTNER Laurin B. Roberts Old Dominion University, 2015 Director: Dr. James F. Paulson Although a notable amount of research has examined sexual minority parents and their families over the last decade, very little literature has focused on bisexual parents. Most of the research emphasis has been placed on pa...