Ovulatory cycle shifts in human motivational prioritisation of sex and food.

Previous research on the endogenous effects of ovarian hormones on motivational states in women has focused on sexual motivation. The Motivational Priority Shifts Hypothesis has a broader scope. It predicts a shift from somatic to reproductive motivation when fertile. In a highly powered preregistered online diary study across 40 days, we tested whether 390 women report such an ovulatory shift in sexual and eating motivation and behaviour. We compared 209 naturally cycling women to 181 women taking hormonal contraceptives (HC) to rule out non-ovulatory changes across the cycle as confounders. We found robust ovulatory decreases in food intake and increases in general sexual desire, in-pair sexual desire and initiation of dyadic sexual behaviour. Extra-pair sexual desire increased mid-cycle, but the effect did not differ significantly in HC women, questioning an ovulatory effect. Descriptively, solitary sexual desire and behaviour, dyadic sexual behaviour, appetite, and satiety showed expected mid-cycle changes that were diminished in HC women, but these failed to reach our strict preregistered significance level. Our results provide insight into current theoretical debates about ovulatory cycle shifts while calling for future research to determine motivational mechanisms behind ovulatory changes in food intake and considering romantic partners' motivational states to explain the occurrence of dyadic sexual behaviour.

The Link Between Age and Partner Preferences in a Large, International Sample of Single Women.

Women's capacity to reproduce varies over the life span, and developmental goals such as family formation are age-graded and shaped by social norms about the appropriate age for completing specific developmental tasks. Thus, a woman's age may be linked to her ideas about what an ideal partner should be like. With the goals of replicating and extending prior research, in this study we examined the role of age in women's partner preferences across the globe. We investigated associations of age with ideal long-term partner preferences in a cross-cultural sample of 17,254 single (i.e., unpartnered) heterosexual women, ages 18 to 67, from 147 countries. Data were collected via an online questionnaire, the Ideal Partner Survey. Confirming our preregistered hypotheses, we found no or only negligible age effects on preferences for kindness-supportiveness, attractiveness, financial security-successfulness, or education-intelligence. Age was, however, positively associated with preferences for confidence-assertiveness. Consistent with family formation goals, age was associated with an ideal partner's parenting intentions (high until approximately age 30, then decreasing afterward). Age range deemed acceptable (and in particular, the discrepancy between one's own age and the minimum ideal age of a partner) increased with age. This latter pattern also replicated in exploratory analyses based on subsamples of lesbian and bisexual women. In summary, age has a limited impact on partner preferences. Of the attributes investigated, only preference for confidence-assertiveness was linked with age. However, age range deemed acceptable and an ideal partner's parenting intention, a dimension mostly neglected in earlier research, substantially vary with age.

Age and gender differences in narcissism: A comprehensive study across eight measures and over 250,000 participants.

Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across eight widely used narcissism instruments (i.e., Narcissistic Personality Inventory, Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale, Dirty Dozen, Psychological Entitlement Scale, Narcissistic Personality Disorder Symptoms from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Version IV, Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire-Short Form, Single-Item Narcissism Scale, and brief version of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory). The findings of Study 1 (N = 5,736) revealed heterogeneity in how strongly the measures are correlated. Some instruments loaded clearly on one of the three factors proposed by previous research (i.e., Neuroticism, Extraversion, Antagonism), while others cross-loaded across factors and in distinct ways. Cross-sectional analyses using each measure and meta-analytic results across all measures (Study 2) with a total sample of 270,029 participants suggest consistent linear age effects (random effects meta-analytic effect of r = -.104), with narcissism being highest in young adulthood. Consistent gender differences also emerged (random effects meta-analytic effect was -.079), such that men scored higher in narcissism than women. Quadratic age effects and Age × Gender effects were generally very small and inconsistent. We conclude that despite the various conceptualizations of narcissism, age and gender differences are generalizable across the eight measures used in the present study. However, their size varied based on the instrument used. We discuss the sources of this heterogeneity and the potential mechanisms for age and gender differences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Stability and Change of Individual Differences in Ideal Partner Preferences Over 13 Years.

Ideal partner preferences for traits in a partner are said to be stable cognitive constructs. However, longitudinal studies investigating the same participants' ideals repeatedly have so far been limited to relatively short retest intervals of a maximum of 3 years. Here, we investigate the stability and change of ideals across 13 years and participants' insight into how ideals have changed. A total of 204 participants (M = 46.2 years, SD = 7.4, 104 women) reported their ideals at two time points. We found a mean rank-order stability of r = .42 and an overall profile stability of r = .73 (distinctive r = .53). Some ideals changed over time, for example, increased for status-resources in relation to age and parenthood. We found some but varying insight into how ideals had changed (mean r = .20). Results support the idea of ideals being stable cognitive constructs but suggest some variability related to the demands of different life stages.

"Using 26,000 diary entries to show ovulatory changes in sexual desire and behavior": Correction to Arslan et al. (2018).

Reports an error in "Using 26,000 diary entries to show ovulatory changes in sexual desire and behavior" by Ruben C. Arslan, Katharina M. Schilling, Tanja M. Gerlach and Lars Penke (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, Aug 27, 2018, np). In the original article the number of participants available for robustness checks should have been 1,054, not 1,043; this applies to the third sentence in the abstract, the first sentence of the second paragraph in the Participants section, the first sentence of the second paragraph in the Robustness Checks section, and the subsample size of women in Table 3. The correct number of naturally cycling usable data should have been 429, not 421. The correct number of diary days should have been 26,680, not 25,948. The correct percentage of diary days in the fourth sentence in the Exclusion Criteria section should have been 5%. Figure 1 should have included guessing hypotheses (n 40) and long diary interruptions (n 41) as further reasons for exclusion, and an error in the effsize R package led to the reporting of inflated effect sizes for the differences between hormonal contraceptive users and non-users in Table 1. Figure 1, Table 1, and Table 3 have been corrected. All versions of this article have been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2018-41799-001.) Previous research reported ovulatory changes in women's appearance, mate preferences, extra- and in-pair sexual desire, and behavior, but has been criticized for small sample sizes, inappropriate designs, and undisclosed flexibility in analyses. In the present study, we sought to address these criticisms by preregistering our hypotheses and analysis plan and by collecting a large diary sample. We gathered more than 26,000 usable online self-reports in a diary format from 1,054 women, of which 429 were naturally cycling. We inferred the fertile period from menstrual onset reports. We used hormonal contraceptive users as a quasi-control group, as they experience menstruation, but not ovulation. We probed our results for robustness to different approaches (including different fertility estimates, different exclusion criteria, adjusting for potential confounds, moderation by methodological factors). We found robust evidence supporting previously reported ovulatory increases in extra-pair desire and behavior, in-pair desire, and self-perceived desirability, as well as no unexpected associations. Yet, we did not find predicted effects on partner mate retention behavior, clothing choices, or narcissism. Contrary to some of the earlier literature, partners' sexual attractiveness did not moderate the cycle shifts. Taken together, the replicability of the existing literature on ovulatory changes was mixed. We conclude with simulation-based recommendations for reading the past literature and for designing future large-scale preregistered within-subject studies to understand ovulatory cycle changes and the effects of hormonal contraception. Interindividual differences in the size of ovulatory changes emerge as an important area for further study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Men are not aware of and do not respond to their female partner's fertility status: Evidence from a dyadic diary study of 384 couples.

Understanding how human mating psychology is affected by changes in female cyclic fertility is informative for comprehending the evolution of human reproductive behavior. Based on differential selection pressures between the sexes, men are assumed to have evolved adaptations to notice women's within-cycle cues to fertility and show corresponding mate retention tactics to secure access to their female partners when fertile. However, previous studies suffered from methodological shortcomings and yielded inconsistent results. In a large, preregistered online dyadic diary study (384 heterosexual couples), we found no compelling evidence that men notice women's fertility status (as potentially reflected in women's attractiveness, sexual desire, or wish for contact with others) or display mid-cycle increases in mate retention tactics (jealousy, attention, wish for contact or sexual desire towards female partners). These results extend our current understanding of the evolution of women's concealed ovulation and oestrus, and suggest that both might have evolved independently.

No increased inbreeding avoidance during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle.

Mate preferences and mating-related behaviours are hypothesised to change over the menstrual cycle to increase reproductive fitness. Recent large-scale studies suggest that previously reported hormone-linked behavioural changes are not robust. The proposal that women's preference for associating with male kin is down-regulated during the ovulatory (high-fertility) phase of the menstrual cycle to reduce inbreeding has not been tested in large samples. Consequently, we investigated the relationship between longitudinal changes in women's steroid hormone levels and their perceptions of faces experimentally manipulated to possess kinship cues (Study 1). Women viewed faces displaying kinship cues as more attractive and trustworthy, but this effect was not related to hormonal proxies of conception risk. Study 2 employed a daily diary approach and found no evidence that women spent less time with kin generally or with male kin specifically during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Thus, neither study found evidence that inbreeding avoidance is up-regulated during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle.

A Process × Domain Assessment of Narcissism: The Domain-Specific Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire.

Research on grandiose narcissism distinguishes between self-promotional processes (i.e., narcissistic admiration) and other-derogative processes (i.e., narcissistic rivalry; Back et al., 2013). Moreover, research has begun to assess and investigate narcissistic manifestations in different domains (e.g., communal narcissism). To integrate these two lines of research, we developed the Domain-Specific Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (D-NARQ), a 72-item narcissism questionnaire that contains a self-promotional process scale (narcissistic admiration) and an other-derogatory process scale (narcissistic rivalry) for four domains: intellectual ability, social dominance, communal care, and physical attractiveness. We investigated the psychometric properties of the D-NARQ in a large online study (N = 1,635). Model fit statistics were largely in line with the theorized factor structure. The D-NARQ scales had good to very good measurement precision, and their correlations with established narcissism scales, the Big Five personality traits, and comparative self-evaluations largely supported their convergent and discriminant validity.

The evidence for good genes ovulatory shifts in Arslan et al. (2018) is mixed and uncertain.

In Arslan et al. (2018), we reported ovulatory increases in extra-pair sexual desire, in-pair sexual desire, and self-perceived desirability, as well as several moderator analyses related to the good genes ovulatory shift hypothesis, which predicts attenuated ovulatory increases in extra-pair desire for women with attractive partners. Gangestad and Dinh (2021) identified errors in how we aggregated two of the four main moderator variables. We are grateful that their scrutiny uncovered these errors. After corrections, our moderation results are more mixed than we previously reported and depend on the moderator specification. However, we disagree that the evidence for moderation is robust and compelling, as Gangestad and Dinh (2021) claim. Our data are consistent with some previously reported effect sizes, but also with negligible moderator effects. We also show that what Gangestad and Dinh (2021) call an "a priori[…]more comprehensive and valid composite" is poorly justifiable on a priori grounds, and follow-up analyses they report are not robust to a composite specification that we consider at least as reasonable. Psychologists have to become acquainted with techniques such as cross-validation or training and test sets to manage the risks of data-dependent analyses. In doing so, we might learn that we need new data more often than we intuit and should remain uncertain far more often. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Women feel more attractive before ovulation: evidence from a large-scale online diary study.

How attractive we find ourselves decides who we target as potential partners and influences our reproductive fitness. Self-perceptions on women's fertile days could be particularly important. However, results on how self-perceived attractiveness changes across women's ovulatory cycles are inconsistent and research has seldomly assessed multiple attractiveness-related constructs simultaneously. Here, we give an overview of ovulatory cycle shifts in self-perceived attractiveness, sexual desirability, grooming, self-esteem and positive mood. We addressed previous methodological shortcomings by conducting a large, preregistered online diary study of 872 women (580 naturally cycling) across 70 consecutive days, applying several robustness analyses and comparing naturally cycling women with women using hormonal contraceptives. As expected, we found robust evidence for ovulatory increases in self-perceived attractiveness and sexual desirability in naturally cycling women. Unexpectedly, we found moderately robust evidence for smaller ovulatory increases in self-esteem and positive mood. Although grooming showed an ovulatory increase descriptively, the effect was small, failed to reach our strict significance level of .01 and was not robust to model variations. We discuss how these results could follow an ovulatory increase in sexual motivation while calling for more theoretical and causally informative research to uncover the nature of ovulatory cycle shifts in the future.

Using 26,000 diary entries to show ovulatory changes in sexual desire and behavior.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on Jun 3 2019 (see record 2019-34417-001). In the original article the number of participants available for robustness checks should have been 1,054, not 1,043; this applies to the third sentence in the abstract, the first sentence of the second paragraph in the Participants section, the first sentence of the second paragraph in the Robustness Checks section, and the subsample size of women in Table 3. The correct number of naturally cycling usable data should have been 429, not 421. The correct number of diary days should have been 26,680, not 25,948. The correct percentage of diary days in the fourth sentence in the Exclusion Criteria section should have been 5%. Figure 1 should have included guessing hypotheses (n 40) and long diary interruptions (n 41) as further reasons for exclusion, and an error in the effsize R package led to the reporting of inflated effect sizes for the differences between hormonal contraceptive users and non-users in Table 1. Figure 1, Table 1, and Table 3 have been corrected. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Previous research reported ovulatory changes in women's appearance, mate preferences, extra- and in-pair sexual desire, and behavior, but has been criticized for small sample sizes, inappropriate designs, and undisclosed flexibility in analyses. In the present study, we sought to address these criticisms by preregistering our hypotheses and analysis plan and by collecting a large diary sample. We gathered more than 26,000 usable online self-reports in a diary format from 1,054 women, of which 429 were naturally cycling. We inferred the fertile period from menstrual onset reports. We used hormonal contraceptive users as a quasi-control group, as they experience menstruation, but not ovulation. We probed our results for robustness to different approaches (including different fertility estimates, different exclusion criteria, adjusting for potential confounds, moderation by methodological factors). We found robust evidence supporting previously reported ovulatory increases in extra-pair desire and behavior, in-pair desire, and self-perceived desirability, as well as no unexpected associations. Yet, we did not find predicted effects on partner mate retention behavior, clothing choices, or narcissism. Contrary to some of the earlier literature, partners' sexual attractiveness did not moderate the cycle shifts. Taken together, the replicability of the existing literature on ovulatory changes was mixed. We conclude with simulation-based recommendations for reading the past literature and for designing future large-scale preregistered within-subject studies to understand ovulatory cycle changes and the effects of hormonal contraception. Interindividual differences in the size of ovulatory changes emerge as an important area for further study. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Routinely randomize potential sources of measurement reactivity to estimate and adjust for biases in subjective reports.

With the advent of online and app-based studies, researchers in psychology are making increasing use of repeated subjective reports. The new methods open up opportunities to study behavior in the field and to map causal processes, but they also pose new challenges. Recent work has added initial elevation bias to the list of common pitfalls; here, higher negative states (i.e., thoughts and feelings) are reported on the first day of assessment than on later days. This article showcases a new approach to addressing this and other measurement reactivity biases. Specifically, we employed a planned missingness design in a daily diary study of more than 1,300 individuals who were assessed over a period of up to 70 days to estimate and adjust for measurement reactivity biases. We found that day of first item presentation, item order, and item number were associated with only negligible bias: Items were not answered differently depending on when and where they were shown. Initial elevation bias may thus be more limited than has previously been reported or it may act only at the level of the survey, not at the item level. We encourage researchers to make design choices that will allow them to routinely assess measurement reactivity biases in their studies. Specifically, we advocate the routine randomization of item display and order, as well as of the timing and frequency of measurement. Randomized planned missingness makes it possible to empirically gauge how fatigue, familiarity, and learning interact to bias responses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Probing Ovulatory-Cycle Shifts in Women's Preferences for Men's Behaviors.

The existence of ovulatory-cycle shifts in women's mate preferences has been a point of controversy. There is evidence that naturally cycling women in their fertile phase, compared with their luteal phase, evaluate specific behavioral cues in men as more attractive for sexual relationships. However, recent research has cast doubt on these findings. We addressed this debate in a large, preregistered, within-participants study using salivary-hormone measures and luteinizing-hormone tests. One hundred fifty-seven female participants rated the sexual and long-term attractiveness of 70 men in dyadic intersexual interactions in natural videos. Multilevel comparisons across two ovulatory cycles indicated that women's mate preferences for men's behaviors did not shift across the cycle for either competitive or courtship behavior. Within-women hormone levels and relationship status did not affect these results. Hormonal mechanisms and implications for estrus theories are discussed.

Predictive validity and adjustment of ideal partner preferences across the transition into romantic relationships.

Although empirical research has investigated what we ideally seek in a romantic partner for decades, the crucial question of whether ideal partner preferences actually guide our mating decisions in real life has remained largely unanswered. One reason for this is the lack of designs that assess individuals' ideal partner preferences before entering a relationship and then follow up on them over an extended period. In the Göttingen Mate Choice Study (GMCS), a preregistered, large-scale online study, we used such a naturalistic prospective design. We investigated partner preferences across 4 preference domains in a large sample of predominantly heterosexual singles (N = 763, aged 18-40 years) and tracked these individuals across a period of 5 months upon a possible transition into romantic relationships. Attesting to their predictive validity, partner preferences prospectively predicted the characteristics of later partners. This was equally true for both sexes, except for vitality-attractiveness where men's preferences were more predictive of their later partners' standing on this dimension than women's. Self-perceived mate value did not moderate the preference-partner characteristics relations. Preferences proved to be relatively stable across the 5 months interval, yet were less stable for those who entered a relationship. Subgroup analyses using a newly developed indicator of preference adjustment toward (vs. away from) partner characteristics revealed that participants adjusted their preferences downward when partners fell short of initial preferences, but showed no consistent adjustment when partners exceeded them. Results and implications are discussed against the background of ongoing controversies in mate choice and romantic relationship research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Validation of the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire Short Scale (NARQ-S) in convenience and representative samples.

Due to increased empirical interest in narcissism across the social sciences, there is a need for inventories that can be administered quickly while also reliably measuring both the agentic and antagonistic aspects of grandiose narcissism. In this study, we sought to validate the factor structure, provide representative descriptive data and reliability estimates, assess the reliability across the trait spectrum, and examine the nomological network of the short version of the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (NARQ-S; Back et al., 2013). We used data from a large convenience sample (total N = 11,937) as well as data from a large representative sample (total N = 4,433) that included responses to other narcissism measures as well as related constructs, including the other Dark Triad traits, Big Five personality traits, and self-esteem. Confirmatory factor analysis and item response theory were used to validate the factor structure and estimate the reliability across the latent trait spectrum, respectively. Results suggest that the NARQ-S shows a robust factor structure and is a reliable and valid short measure of the agentic and antagonistic aspects of grandiose narcissism. We also discuss future directions and applications of the NARQ-S as a short and comprehensive measure of grandiose narcissism. (PsycINFO Database Record

Narcissism and romantic relationships: The differential impact of narcissistic admiration and rivalry.

Narcissism is known to be related to romantic success in short-term contexts (dating, early stage relationships) but also to problems in long-term committed relationships. We propose that these diverging romantic outcomes of narcissism can be explained by differential associations with agentic versus antagonistic dimensions of grandiose narcissism: Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry. Both dimensions serve the central narcissistic goal of gaining and maintaining a grandiose self-view, but do so by different processes: Admiration is characterized by the tendency to promote the positivity of one's self-view by seeking social admiration (assertive self-enhancement). Rivalry is characterized by the tendency to protect oneself from a negative self-view by derogating others (antagonistic self-protection). Across 7 studies (total N = 3,560) using diverse measures and methodological approaches (self-, peer, and partner reports, as well as interpersonal perception measures in video-based studies, face-to-face laboratory encounters, and online surveys), we show that the short-term romantic appeal associated with narcissism is primarily attributable to the dimension of Admiration, whereas the long-term romantic problems associated with narcissism are primarily attributable to the dimension of Rivalry. These results highlight the utility of a 2-dimensional reconceptualization of grandiose narcissism for explaining its heterogeneous romantic outcomes. The findings further underscore the idea that different facets of personality traits might impact different aspects of romantic relationship quality, depending on the stage of the relationship. Such a more nuanced view increases the predictive validity of personality traits in social relationship research. (PsycINFO Database Record

Narcissistic admiration and rivalry: disentangling the bright and dark sides of narcissism.

We present a process model that distinguishes 2 dimensions of narcissism: admiration and rivalry. We propose that narcissists' overarching goal of maintaining a grandiose self is pursued by 2 separate pathways, characterized by distinct cognitive, affective-motivational, and behavioral processes. In a set of 7 studies, we validated this 2-dimensional model using the newly developed Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (NARQ). We showed that narcissistic admiration and rivalry are positively correlated dimensions, yet they have markedly different nomological networks and distinct intra- and interpersonal consequences. The NARQ showed the hypothesized 2-dimensional multifaceted structure as well as very good internal consistencies (Study 1, N = 953), stabilities (Study 2, N = 93), and self-other agreements (Study 3, N = 96). Narcissistic admiration and rivalry showed unique relations to the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), the Big Five, self-esteem, pathological narcissism, and other narcissism-related traits like Machiavellianism, psychopathy, self-enhancement, and impulsivity (Study 4, Ns = 510-1,814). Despite the positive relation between admiration and rivalry, the 2 differentially predicted general interpersonal orientations and reactions to transgressions in friendships and romantic relationships (Study 5, N = 1,085), interpersonal perceptions during group interactions (Study 6, N = 202), and observed behaviors in experimental observations (Study 7, N = 96). For all studies, the NARQ outperformed the standard measure of narcissism, the NPI, in predicting outcome measures. Results underscore the utility of a 2-dimensional conceptualization and measurement of narcissism.

Justice sensitivity and forgiveness in close interpersonal relationships: the mediating role of mistrustful, legitimizing, and pro-relationship cognitions.

The purpose of the present investigation was to explore and better understand the relationship between justice sensitivity from a victim's perspective (JS-victim) and interpersonal forgiveness. In particular, we aimed to identify the cognitive mechanisms mediating this relationship and test the moderating influence of post-transgression perpetrator behavior. We used data from a questionnaire study employing a Swiss community sample (N = 450) and 2 scenario-based studies employing German online samples, in the context of romantic (N = 242) and friendship relationships (N = 974). We consistently found JS-victim to be negatively related to dispositional (Study 1) and situational forgiveness (Studies 2 and 3). Study 2 demonstrated the relationship between JS-victim and reduced forgiveness to be partly mediated by mistrustful interpretations of the partner's post-transgression behavior. In Study 3, cognitions legitimizing one's own antisocial reactions and a lack of pro-relationship cognitions were identified as further mediators. These variables mediated the negative effect of JS-victim on forgiveness largely independent of whether the friend perpetrator displayed reconciliatory behavior or not. Findings suggest that the cognitive mechanisms mediating victim-sensitive individuals' unforgiveness could barely be neutralized. Future research should investigate their malleability in light of qualitatively different perpetrator behaviors as well as their broader relational implications.