Human motivational systems are designed to promote organismic reactions that facilitate survival and reproduction. Recent research suggests that there are individual differences in human motivation across evolutionarily salient domains, such as self-protection threat, status, mateseeking and mate retention, and that these individual differences are distinct from other dimensions of personality ...

Using questionnaire data completed by 170 men, we examine variation in paternal investment in relation to the trade-off between mating and parenting. We found that as men's self-perceived mate value increases, so does their mating effort, and in turn, as mating effort increases, paternal investment decreases. This study also simultaneously examined the influence on parental investment of men's ...

In the beetle Diaprepes abbreviatus (L.) females are larger on average than males, as indicated by elytra length. Size-assortative matings were observed in wild populations in Florida and in laboratory mating experiments. We tested three mechanisms for this size-assortative mating: (1) mate availability; (2) mating constraints; and (3) mate choice. We found that mate choice influenced size-asso...

Mate choice behavior reflects the likelihood of an individual choosing to mate with a particular individual and not another. In the guppy, Poecillia reticulata, mate choice studies have revealed that males have a preference for large females. In this study we assessed if mate choice in male guppies was affected by competition from other males. We predicted that males would court smaller females...

Female mate choice copying is a socially mediated mate choice behaviour, in which a male's attractiveness to females increases if he was previously chosen by another female as a mate. Although copying has been demonstrated in numerous species, little is known about the specific benefits it confers to copying females. Here we demonstrate that the mate choice behaviour of female sailfin mollies (...

On a sample of 191 romantic couples the relations between mate retention strategies of one partner in the pair and sociosexuality of the other was examined. Mate retention strategies were measured by using self-reports, while sociosexuality was measured by self-report, as well as partner’s report. The results show that mate retention tactics, categories and domains are mainly positively related...

Article history: Initial receipt 24 August 2016 Final revision received 13 April 2017 We tested the ability of a Euclidean algorithm to predict attraction to potential mates—a relatively upstream domain in the temporal sequence of the mating process. Participants in two studies reported their ideal mate preferences using a 23-item preference instrument. Separately, they rated their attraction t...

Pheromone cues are an important component of intersexual communication, particularly in regards to mate choice. Caenorhabditis nematodes predominant rely on pheromone production for mate finding and mate choice. Here we describe a new microfluidic paradigm for studying mate choice in nematodes. Specifically, the Pheromone Arena allows for a constant flow of odorants, including pheromones and ot...

According to rational choice theory, beneficial preferences should lead individuals to sort available options into linear, transitive hierarchies, although the extent to which non-human animals behave rationally is unclear. Here we demonstrate that mate choice in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster results in the linear sorting of a set of diverse isogenic female lines, unambiguously demonstr...

Aspects of the environment, including the social environment, can contribute to intrapopulation variation in mating preferences. One example of the effect of social environment on mate preferences is mate choice copying; however, other types of socially influenced (nonindependent) choice might exist. We develop a list of such alternatives based on possible physiological or psychological mechani...