scholarly journals Cues of upper body strength account for most of the variance in men's bodily attractiveness

2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1869) ◽  
pp. 20171819 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Sell ◽  
Aaron W. Lukazsweski ◽  
Michael Townsley
Keyword(s):  
Mate Choice ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Genetic Quality ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
Fighting Ability ◽  
Resource Holding Power ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
Body Strength ◽  
Upper Body Strength ◽  
Reproductive Consequences

Evolution equips sexually reproducing species with mate choice mechanisms that function to evaluate the reproductive consequences of mating with different individuals. Indeed, evolutionary psychologists have shown that women's mate choice mechanisms track many cues of men's genetic quality and ability to invest resources in the woman and her offspring. One variable that predicted both a man's genetic quality and his ability to invest is the man's formidability (i.e. fighting ability or resource holding power/potential). Modern women, therefore, should have mate choice mechanisms that respond to ancestral cues of a man's fighting ability. One crucial component of a man's ability to fight is his upper body strength. Here, we test how important physical strength is to men's bodily attractiveness. Three sets of photographs of men's bodies were shown to raters who estimated either their physical strength or their attractiveness. Estimates of physical strength determined over 70% of men's bodily attractiveness. Additional analyses showed that tallness and leanness were also favoured, and, along with estimates of physical strength, accounted for 80% of men's bodily attractiveness. Contrary to popular theories of men's physical attractiveness, there was no evidence of a nonlinear effect; the strongest men were the most attractive in all samples.

scholarly journals Adaptations in humans for assessing physical strength from the voice

2010 ◽  
Vol 277 (1699) ◽  
pp. 3509-3518 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Sell ◽  
Gregory A. Bryant ◽  
Leda Cosmides ◽  
John Tooby ◽  
Daniel Sznycer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Cues ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
Fighting Ability ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Body Strength ◽  
Upper Body Strength ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
The Voice

Recent research has shown that humans, like many other animals, have a specialization for assessing fighting ability from visual cues. Because it is probable that the voice contains cues of strength and formidability that are not available visually, we predicted that selection has also equipped humans with the ability to estimate physical strength from the voice. We found that subjects accurately assessed upper-body strength in voices taken from eight samples across four distinct populations and language groups: the Tsimane of Bolivia, Andean herder-horticulturalists and United States and Romanian college students. Regardless of whether raters were told to assess height, weight, strength or fighting ability, they produced similar ratings that tracked upper-body strength independent of height and weight. Male voices were more accurately assessed than female voices, which is consistent with ethnographic data showing a greater tendency among males to engage in violent aggression. Raters extracted information about strength from the voice that was not supplied from visual cues, and were accurate with both familiar and unfamiliar languages. These results provide, to our knowledge, the first direct evidence that both men and women can accurately assess men's physical strength from the voice, and suggest that estimates of strength are used to assess fighting ability.

scholarly journals Human adaptations for the visual assessment of strength and fighting ability from the body and face

2008 ◽  
Vol 276 (1656) ◽  
pp. 575-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Sell ◽  
Leda Cosmides ◽  
John Tooby ◽  
Daniel Sznycer ◽  
Christopher von Rueden ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Architecture ◽  
Visual Assessment ◽  
The Body ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
Fighting Ability ◽  
Body Strength ◽  
The Face ◽  
Upper Body Strength

Selection in species with aggressive social interactions favours the evolution of cognitive mechanisms for assessing physical formidability (fighting ability or resource-holding potential). The ability to accurately assess formidability in conspecifics has been documented in a number of non-human species, but has not been demonstrated in humans. Here, we report tests supporting the hypothesis that the human cognitive architecture includes mechanisms that assess fighting ability—mechanisms that focus on correlates of upper-body strength. Across diverse samples of targets that included US college students, Bolivian horticulturalists and Andean pastoralists, subjects in the US were able to accurately estimate the physical strength of male targets from photos of their bodies and faces. Hierarchical linear modelling shows that subjects were extracting cues of strength that were largely independent of height, weight and age, and that corresponded most strongly to objective measures of upper-body strength—even when the face was all that was available for inspection. Estimates of women's strength were less accurate, but still significant. These studies are the first empirical demonstration that, for humans, judgements of strength and judgements of fighting ability not only track each other, but accurately track actual upper-body strength.

scholarly journals No clear evidence for correlations between handgrip strength and sexually dimorphic acoustic properties of voices

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengyang Han ◽  
Hongyi Wang ◽  
Vanessa Fasolt ◽  
Amanda C Hahn ◽  
Iris J Holzleitner ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Standard Deviation ◽  
Vocal Tract ◽  
Handgrip Strength ◽  
Acoustic Properties ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Sexually Dimorphic ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
Signal Value ◽  
Body Strength ◽  
Upper Body Strength

AbstractObjectivesRecent research on the signal value of masculine physical characteristics in men has focused on the possibility that such characteristics are valid cues of physical strength. However, evidence that sexually dimorphic vocal characteristics are correlated with physical strength is equivocal. Consequently, we undertook a further test for possible relationships between physical strength and masculine vocal characteristics.MethodsWe tested the putative relationships between White UK (N=115) and Chinese (N=106) participants’ handgrip strength (a widely used proxy for general upper-body strength) and five sexually dimorphic acoustic properties of voices: fundamental frequency (F0), fundamental frequency’s standard deviation (F0-SD), formant dispersion (Df), formant position (Pf), and estimated vocal-tract length (VTL).ResultsAnalyses revealed no clear evidence that stronger individuals had more masculine voices.ConclusionsOur results do not support the hypothesis that masculine vocal characteristics are a valid cue of physical strength.

scholarly journals Disgust, Anger, and Aggression: Further Tests of the Equivalence of Moral Emotions

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua M. Tybur ◽  
Catherine Molho ◽  
Begum Cakmak ◽  
Terence Dores Cruz ◽  
Gaurav Deep Singh ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Physical Attractiveness ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Moral Emotions ◽  
The Self ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Indirect Aggression ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
Body Strength ◽  
Upper Body Strength

People often report disgust toward moral violations. Some perspectives posit that this disgust is indistinct from anger. Here, we replicate and extend recent work suggesting that disgust and anger toward moral violations are in fact distinct in terms of the situations in which they are activated and their correspondence with aggressive sentiments. We tested three hypotheses concerning emotional responses to moral violations: (1) disgust is associated with lower-cost, indirectly aggressive motives (e.g., gossip and social exclusion), whereas anger is associated with higher-cost, directly aggressive motives (e.g., physical violence); (2) disgust is higher toward violations affecting others than it is toward violations affecting the self, and anger is higher toward violations affecting the self than it is toward violations affecting others; and (3) abilities to inflict costs on or withhold benefits from others (measured via physical strength and physical attractiveness, respectively) relate to anger, but not to disgust. These hypotheses were tested in a within-subjects study in which 233 participants came to the lab twice and reported their emotional responses and aggressive sentiments toward self-targeting and other-targeting moral violations. Participants’ upper body strength and physical attractiveness were also measured with a dynamometer and photograph ratings, respectively. The first two hypotheses were supported – disgust (but not anger) was related to indirect aggression whereas anger (but not disgust) was related to direct aggression, and disgust was higher toward other-targeting violations whereas anger was higher toward self-targeting violations. However, physical strength and physical attractiveness were unrelated to anger or disgust or to endorsements of direct or indirect aggression.

scholarly journals Upper-body Strength and Conflict Resolution in Human Males

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Nguyen ◽  
Michael Bang Petersen ◽  
Julia Nafziger ◽  
Alexander K. Koch
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Conflict Behavior ◽  
Physical Factors ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
War Of Attrition ◽  
Conflict Situations ◽  
Body Strength ◽  
Upper Body Strength ◽  
Do So

Among non-human animals, a key strategy to resolve conflicts without fighting relies on assessing relative fighting ability on the basis of physical cues such as size and strength. Recent studies suggest that the human mind too contains mechanisms for spontaneously coordinating conflict behavior on the basis of difference in physical strength, even if strength is not rationally relevant to the conflict. We provide the first direct, experimental test of the existence of such mechanisms. We do so by applying a non-physical, anonymous, economic game - the war-of-attrition - in which male contestants compete by means of perseverance to win a monetary prize. While three initial studies provided some support for the prediction, the final well-powered and pre-registered study failed to support the prediction. We interpret our findings as suggestive evidence that in conflict situations the human mind does not attribute relevance to physical factors that are irrelevant for the conflict.

scholarly journals Tybur et al. Disgust Anger Aggression

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua M. Tybur ◽  
Catherine Molho ◽  
Terence Daniel Dores Cruz ◽  
Begum Cakmak ◽  
Gaurav Deep Singh ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Physical Attractiveness ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
The Self ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Indirect Aggression ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
Body Strength ◽  
Upper Body Strength ◽  
Within Subjects

People often report disgust toward moral violations. Some perspectives posit that this disgust is indistinct from anger. Here, we test an alternative perspective: that disgust corresponds with condemnation strategies that are less costly – but also less effective at deterrence – than those corresponding with anger. We tested three hypotheses concerning emotional responses to moral violations: (1) disgust is associated with lower-cost, indirectly aggressive motives (e.g., gossip and social exclusion), whereas anger is associated with higher-cost, directly aggressive motives (e.g., physical violence); (2) disgust is higher toward violations affecting others than it is toward violations affecting the self, and anger is higher toward violations affecting the self than it is toward violations affecting others; and (3) abilities to inflict costs on or withhold benefits from others (measured via physical strength and physical attractiveness, respectively) relate to anger, but not to disgust. These hypotheses were tested in a within-subjects study in which 233 participants came to the lab twice and reported their emotional responses and aggressive sentiments toward self-targeting and other-targeting moral violations. Participants’ upper body strength and physical attractiveness were also measured with a dynamometer and photograph ratings, respectively. The first two hypotheses were supported – disgust (but not anger) was related to indirect aggression whereas anger (but not disgust) was related to direct aggression, and disgust was higher toward other-targeting violations whereas anger was higher toward self-targeting violations. However, physical strength and physical attractiveness were unrelated to anger or disgust or to endorsements of direct or indirect aggression.

scholarly journals Influences of Differing Menarche Status on Motor Capabilities of Girls, 13 To 16 Years: A Two-Year Follow-Up Study

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 5539
Author(s):  
Barry Gerber ◽  
Anita E. Pienaar ◽  
Ankebe Kruger
Keyword(s):  
Repeated Measures ◽  
Statistical Significance ◽  
Upper Body ◽  
Convenience Sample ◽  
Motor Fitness ◽  
Body Strength ◽  
The Status ◽  
Hand Eye Coordination ◽  
Upper Body Strength ◽  
D Values

Puberty and the onset of menarche influences the motor performance of girls. However, the magnitude of these influences during varying maturity status, is not clear. This longitudinal study over two years aimed to investigate differences in motor fitness between early and late developing girls based on pre- and post-menarche status. A convenience sample (n = 58) of girls aged 13.51 ± 3.51, divided by means of the Status Quo method into pre (n = 13) and post-menarche (n = 45) groups, was used. Motor fitness was tested once annually by standardized protocols. Basic statistics, independent t-testing and a repeated measures ANOVA with a post hoc Bonferonni correction were used (p < 0.05 = statistical significance). Effect sizes were determined by Cohen’s d-values. Only explosive upper body strength differed significantly between groups during baseline, favoring post-menarche girls. Initially, post-menarche girls showed advantages in hand-eye coordination and speed (p > 0.05) with pre-menarche girls performing better in agility and explosive leg strength (p > 0.05). At 15.51 years, no significant, between-group differences were found. Pre-menarche girls surpassed post-menarche girls in hand-eye coordination and 0–40 m speed and post-menarche girls displayed higher explosive leg and upper body strength scores (p > 0.05). Our data show that the potential to excel in sport based on motor capabilities can only be accurately estimated 1–2 years after reaching menarche.

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