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Andrew Watt Cardiff Metropolitan University

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Deiniol Skillicorn Cardiff Metropolitan University

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Jediah Clark Cardiff Metropolitan University

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Rachel Evans Cardiff Metropolitan University

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Paul Hewlett Cardiff Metropolitan University

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Nick Perham Cardiff Metropolitan University

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Open access

Background

Heterosexual men and women differ in their sensitivity to cues indicating material status. This dissociation has been explained by appealing to sexual selection processes that encourage women to evaluate men on the basis of their material status but could perhaps be explained by sex differences in contextual attention, or, associative representations.

Method

In Experiment 1, heterosexual women rated the attractiveness of an opposite sex model in 4 conditions; (1) attractive context, (2) attractive context with implied ownership, (3) unattractive context, and (4) unattractive context with ownership implied. A second experiment used a fictitious stockbroker learning task (with both men and women) in 2 biconditional discriminations to measure contextual attention (stage 1) and then to explore the structure of contextual representation (stage 2) using a transfer of occasion setting test.

Results

In Experiment 1, females increased ratings in attractive contexts, both when context ownership was implied and when it was not. In the first stage of Experiment 2, men and women were equally sensitive to contextual cues. In stage 2, women’s learning was impaired when a stimulus previously used as a target was employed as a context (they showed transfer of occasions setting), men showed no such difference.

Conclusions

Sex differences in sensitivity to cues indicating material status may reflect how men and women tend to encode the relationships between background/context stimuli and target stimuli. Women automatically attend to the background and modulate the value of targets using a hierarchical form of representation, whilst men represent background-target associations configurally.

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Editor(s)-in-Chief: David P. Schmitt

Editor(s): Lisa DeBruine

Editor(s): Clark Barrett

Review editor(s): Sandra Virgo

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2019  
Scimago
H-index
21
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0,118
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Anthropology Q4
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics Q4
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Q4
Social Psychology Q4
Scopus
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5/9=0,6
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Anthropology 212/398 (Q3)
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics 553/629 (Q4)
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology 130/145 (Q4)
Scopus
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0,362
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Cites
9
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5
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31%

 

Evolution, Mind and Behaviour
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Evolution, Mind and Behaviour
Language English
Size A4
Year of
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2002
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2021 Volume 19
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1
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