I was on Fark’s website and chanced upon this article.
The gist of the article is that a study has shown that when women are ovulating, their sexual partners (the study involved hetero relationships) start acting very possessive, checking in with them by telephone more often than usual and trying to monopolize their time. Women in the study report that during ovulation, they tend to fantasize more about men other than their primary sexual partner.
The study was conducted on only 31 female students, which makes the study immediately suspect to me. I’d like to know if anyone out there has ever experienced the effects described in the study. Would you say this study is valid in real life?
I recall seeing something (on PBS?) that supported the idea that women seek genetic diversity/purity when they ovulate, but I can’t remember the program or source. I just remember researchers testing women’s reactions to photos of men’s faces.
Sorry I’m so muddle headed about this.
I had a couple of ex-boyfriends who started doing this 24/7. They are now ex.
it’s a valid study. gangestad is a pretty good evolutionary psychologist…i like the work that he’s done before with symmetry-signalling mediated through scent. i have a copy of this particular study sitting on my shelf at home…it just came out recently and my advisor left a copy of it in my mailbox to look over. his results are particularly pathbreaking or startling…he’s just stating in a more direct way something that other researchers have been touching on for years. even so, it’s often useful to have such results generated as a separate study rather than latched on to something bigger or (much worse) simply presumed. (the time-monopolization effect has been shown in other species frequently…it’s a form of mate guarding. it hadn’t discretely been evidenced in humans, largely because no one had before invested the effort in trying to establish it. the element that women teeter towards extrapair copulations around the time of ovulation is nothing new, however, and has been shown in research on masculinity/femininity of facial features, fluctuating asymmetry, and sperm competition).
most of the work on the evolution of human mate choice exclusively collects data from heterosexually-identified individuals and generally only examines one gender at a time. i’ve got a number of issues with that approach and i’m planning on addressing it in my own research.
a larger sample for that study would be nice, but you can get statistically significant results from 31 participants. it’s often difficult to get a higher level of informant compliance in this form of research.
Human sexuality - the irony never stops.