Question: Do elevational range size, abundance, and body size patterns mirror those documented for geographic ranges? Data studied: Local and regional elevational ranges, abundances, and body sizes of Costa Rican rodents. Hypotheses: (1) Plotting elevational range against abundance will reveal a negative sloped, concave-upward relationship (hollow curve). (2) Elevational range sizes and geograp...

This study examined the influence of personality information on perceptions of the physical attractiveness of a range of female body sizes. A sample of 2,157 male university students were randomly assigned to one of 10 groups in which they received personality information about women they were rating, or a control group in which they received no personality information. Controlling for particip...

Question: Can intrasexual selection on male size and natural selection on female size in the shell-brooding cichlid Lamprologus callipterus explain the greatest male/female sexual size dimorphism (SSD) reported to date among animals? Mathematical methods: (1) Mortality model to predict male and female body sizes. (2) Gain rate maximization and (3) combined mortality/gain rate maximization model...

Cardiac myocytes are presumed to enlarge with left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH). This study correlates histologically measured myocytes with lean and fat body mass. Cases of LVH without coronary heart disease and normal controls came from forensic autopsies. The cross-sectional widths of myocytes in H&E-stained paraffin sections followed log normal distributions almost to perfection in all 104...

The diversity of body sizes of organisms has traditionally been explained in terms of microevolutionary processes: natural selection owing to differential fitness of individual organisms, or to macroevolutionary processes: species selection owing to the differential proliferation of phylogenetic lineages. Data for terrestrial mammals and birds indicate that even on a logarithmic scale frequency...

Research suggests that exposure to mass media depicting the thin-ideal body may be linked to body image disturbance in women. This meta-analysis examined experimental and correlational studies testing the links between media exposure to women's body dissatisfaction, internalization of the thin ideal, and eating behaviors and beliefs with a sample of 77 studies that yielded 141 effect sizes. The...