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Women "Advertise" Fertility
Dik Zak writes with word of a paper published in the journal Hormones and Behavior. A study found that women take greater care over their appearance when they are at peak levels of monthly fertility. The researchers took two photos of each of 30 women, one near ovulation and one at the other end of her cycle. They then showed the paired photos (with faces obscured) to a group of observers, who were asked to judge in which photo the women were trying to look more attractive. The observers chose the "high fertility" subject nearly 60% more of the time than would be expected by chance.
Looks like kdawson isn't too fertile right now.
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Like you uhh know you we are (most of us) are at the 100% fertility rate most of the time and uhhh we don't care about advertising it. I am not sure where i am going with this. Oh snap, i need to shave the 4 month old beard. Wonder where dad keeps his razor...
Hardly statistically significant:-
60% of 30 is 18 - I mean come on, that's only 3 over the pure chance 50%!
There's a reason other than "randomness" that your wife bothers you more at times. It's not just because she thinks that you need "a break from your work". Open your eyes, men! She wants something from you!
My wife and I figured this out ages ago. She's all over me during ovulation. Anyone who's married and paying attention should also be able to notice this. But then again, how many guys know their wife's monthly schedule? Hmm.
--Posted as AC for privacy
One word...
Sweatpants.
\/\/\/
Took them three months to get this news across the pond?
According to my wife I have a genetic defect which causes me to be more attracted to her when she is menstruating. This has obvious disadvantages in that she is both unlikely to get pregnant and unlikely to not kick my ass when fondled in that state. Good thing I don't want kids, or a genetic legacy.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
A similar study was conducted about 10 years ago, if not more. Slashdot! News for amnesiacs. Stuff that mattered long ago.
Dear stranger, what is this "women" you speak of?
The case study was to small, only 30 women with only 2 pictures, not only did we not collect data, but with the lack of numbers we creates a very large error of margin.
Example, flip a coin once, and you get heads, your test reveals 100% heads when flipping a coin. Flip it 10 times, you got heads 3 times, so according to this test when flipping a coin you have 30% chance to get heads. Now flip it 100 times. That number will be a lot closer to 50%.
Try 1000 women with 6 pictures each (3 in prime and 3 out of prime) then have 100 different people scoring each card.
All this test does is shows is hey maybe there is something, and let us do a real test.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
The summary says that the fertile pic was chosen 60% more often than expected by pure chance, however the article states it was simply chosen 60% of the time, and that it was "Well beyond random chance" which is quoted in the article that way as well. The author may have known that the term might not be appropriate to describe a 60%/40% split with 30 subjects and 42 judges.
But hey, keep refining and expanding the group and see if the rate stays steady or increases. Could be very interesting.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Not 60% of the time, but 60% more than expected if it were chance alone. So more likely 1.6 * (30*.5) = 24/30, not 18/30.
But of course the actual number isn't in the article.
The enemies of Democracy are
What a jip. I wanted to see the pictures they used not the boring words they used in their study write up :)
When I'm at "the other end of my cycle" aka, my period, I'm bleeding and bloated and cramping and my face is breaking out, and looking pretty is not exactly high on my list. When I'm not, looking pretty is much less of a hassle. So, not exactly rocket science here.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Too bad we can't actually the results. Then we could judge for ourselves.
does it really mean anything for us humans? I mean, if women actually attracted more men when they look attractive, then we wouldn't have had a surge of babies 9 months after the northeast power blackout, quite the contrary.
I'm sure human being still have a tendency to "display" their fertility, by looks or by scents, on some unconscious level, simply because we're just really clever monkeys, but I'm not certain humans are receptive to these signals anymore, and if they are, psychological and intelligent decision-making processes in the brain probably supercede animal instincts.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The full article can be found here.
Your right, I woudl say this is pretty well known you don't need statistics to prove it. Though to most of these geeks that may not be relivant. Point is we are all animals before we are human and for evalutionary reasons we were born to procreate. Thus I can always tell even upon walking in the house when my girlfriend is at that time. matter of fact after I broke up with my x I used to go and 'drop by' around that time and checking back on the calender it was abtou once a month like clockwork.
but experimentally i've verified that i'm more likely to end up in a bed with a cute girl than someone with unfortunate looks.
Also, i've noted that if she grabs my package, i stop caring about looks until after the deed is done, so maybe it's a wash.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
So they'll advertise, but never actually have any for sale? It's like shopping at Best Buy.
... "only years later did I work out that all my successful driving tests, interviews etc were at times when I was fertile".
this article is useless without pics!!
Check the article again, "The judges chose the photo taken during the fertile phases 60 per cent of the time."
The judges picked the fertile phase photo 60% of the time, when random chance would suggest 50%. This is an 20% more than random chance would predict. Significant, but not quite as amazing as a 60% difference that the summary erroneously suggests.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
60% increase in observations picked correctly.
They showed pairs of pictures of 30 women to a group of observers. Suppose there were 25 people in the test group ("observers"). Each was shown all 30 pairs of pictures. That's 25*30=750 observations, each with an opportunity to pick the right one.
Chance would say they'd pick the high-fertility picture 50% of the time; 325 out of 750 observations. Instead they picked it 60% more often than that, i.e. 520 times. (=1.6 * 325). The fact that there were 520 "correct" picks instead of 325 is more than enough for a statistically significant result.
(Those aren't the actual numbers, 25 was a guess, but it makes the point.)
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
.... Before or after women get married?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
If HUMAN FEMALES really wanted to advertise fertility they have their nose light up and breasts double in size.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
And how can I get one?
What?
to attribute it to them 'trying' to look better is a complicating variable.
could you say a fresh rose-bud is 'trying' to look better
at that period in its development??
all i can say... is sometimes they just seem to GLOW more then,
and that happens to be attractcive. i've noticed this especially
about pregnant women -- they seem sheathed in a healthy glow
(relative to their own physionagmy) during those months.
2cents.
I am a statistician, and reading through the comments hear, am saddened that many readers claim that "statistical significance" could not have been achieved in this study because of a sample size of 30 women. First, that's only part of the random sample in this study, the other part is men sampled to judge the pictures.
.01, which usually signifies statistical significance.
Second of all, I have looked up the actual publication in "Hormones and Behavior", and the p-value associated with their main test is
Ultimately, determining whether some difference in populations is due to chance depends on more than just sample size. It depends on how large of a difference you want to detect, and the variance of the measurements within a group. Of course, larger sample sizes help, but it ultimately depends on what you're studying, and the design of the experiment.
So while I definitely applaud being sceptical of all statistics, I urge you to look up the actual publications, read the methodology, and then decide if the results are something you believe. Kneejerk reactions to n = 30 don't really help anyone though.
I have not read through this publication in its entirety yet.
Actually, one of the hazards of sex is that animal instincts often do override intelligent decision-making processes. That's why many college campuses try to make condoms as available as possible (through conveniently-located vending machines, mainly, though student health at my college would give them out for free): They know students are going to be having sex, and when you're in bed with someone, you don't want to stop, get in the car, run to the corner store and buy a new pack of condoms.
To two different articles. The word "more" came from the second link, which was to New Scientist, which according to the helpful link provided by brian0918, is wrong. It was in fact a 60% rate of picking the picture of the ovulating woman. Anyway, that's where the confusion came from.
The enemies of Democracy are
They're called pheromones. And yes, we can most definitely sense these.
Anecdotal: I'm not a particularly attractive guy, but chicks dig me. I can't explain it.
Doc: Thank you for volunteering for our experiment
Subject: That's fine. What's it about?
Doc: We can't tell you. But could you tell me what part of your menstrual cycle you're in?
Subject: So it's about menstrual cycles?
Doc: No. We ask everyone that quaestion.
Subject: I believe you.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I've noticed some people talking about the "60%" figure being misleading or not statistically significant. This is a result of bad journalism, and nothing more. The linked Daily Mail article claims that "The judges chose the photo taken during the fertile phases 60 per cent of the time," while the New Scientist Article states that "[Judges] chose the woman in her "high fertility" photo some 59.5 per cent of the time more often than would be expected by chance." In short, had the Daily Mail journalist not failed out of high school math (any monkey should realize that 60% is borderline significant at best), the article would have claimed that "Judges chose the photo taken during the fertile phases 80% of the time."
'Tis all. Move along now.
I think I remember this being common knowledge back when I was studying anthropology.
For sake of argument, assume that there is an objective way to measure who takes greater care of their appearance and that all 42 judges are experts at measuring that and never wrong. In that case, these results boil down to 18 out of 30 women taking better care of their appearances during one of their ovulation phases than during one of their non-ovulation phases. When you combine that with the possibility that some of the judges could be wrong (thus increasing the expected variance), it's even less significant - not more. I'm going to go with Scooter on this one.
Granted, I haven't thought too hard on this one, so I might be missing something, but the judges opinions can not be treated independently from what they are judging.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Actually, the study said that 50% of the time they were 60% correct. Might be the same if you did a study of weather forecasters. But seriously, may be my own personal judgment, but given a sample size of n=60, I wonder what confidence level we are dealing with that the actual figure lies within 1 to 2 sample standard deviations using correct versus incorrect as the test. I wouldn't bet too blackjack chips on this one, unless the alternative is roulette.
I don't get it. What is this "woman" that you speak of?
that if women dress more attractive when they are most fertile, as well as the fact that fertility for women falls sharply after age 30, that women generally don't give a crap about their appearance past age 30?
Doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me, since women seem to put on more makeup, as well as visit the plastic surgeon more often as they get older. The vanity of women seems to increase with age if you ask me.
This is a classic example why grad student research, which this strongly suggests is so bad. Yes, a female will on average dress more attractive during the end of her cycle, but not directly caused by ovulation itself. The underlying reason is progestogen. (progestin in females taking birth control. ).
Why is this? Simple. For men the primary mechanism underling sexual desire is 5a-dehydro-testosterone (DHT), not directly from testosterone as many people think. Without DHT, sexual desire in men is very unlikely. This is the main reason why many bodybuilders lack sexual desire during the "on season". This has been known for some time, and in Europe a synthetic form of DHT (1-methylated DHT) called Proviron is used for treating sexual desire problems. In fact, its main side effect is an uncontrollable erection. Go figure...
In females, progesterone is used in the final stages of ovulation, but it has powerful neurological effects on sexual desire similar to DHT, but unfortunately this mechanism is not completely understood yet. Eventhough causes of why certain females have have lack of sexual desire are many, for physical reasons progesterone typically is at the top of the list.
Estrogen on the other hand which is strong in the early part of a womens cycle, from a nearuological effects standpoint, produces the same effect in both women and men, in that it increases emotion. Because fat will increase estrogen in women and men, this is strong reason why overweight people are typically more emotional.
This is the one type of advertising where you don't want your pop-up to be blocked.
You know, they are missing a key point. A major factor in this is how women FEEL. Personally, my wife feels like crap when she has PMS, and then has cramps. She dosen't feel like dressing up, spending a while on makeup, or anything else she feels like doing the rest of the month. If someone feels like crap (let's say: sick with a bad cold) they are not likely to dress up and look nice..... same for men or women. The study seems to skip this rather obvious point.
I remember hearing about a study from the University of New Mexico (iirc) some years ago (3-5) that came to a similar conclusion. It said that when women are ovulating, there was a larger percentage of skin that was shown vs. what was covered up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks
Why am I never the target demographic!
We geeks are just too dumb to get it.
Did you click the link? .....
What woman in her right mind would allow someone to take photos of her based on her freakin' period?
"Will you be menstrating in the next week?"
*smack*
"I take that as a yes."
Let me put this in the "No Shit" pile.
This isn't a new information at all. This is just a repeat of other studies done using the same methods. For example, this one was published in 2004: http://www.liv.ac.uk/evolpsyc/2004_face_ovulation. pdf
"Other end = luteal phase" is as specific a window as the study gives. Apparently this means a couple weeks from the onset of bleeding (via "ovulation calculator," the first day of bleeding up through [cycle length - 18] days later).
You may be onto something with psychological [neurophysiological] effects--how reasonable is it to feel pretty the week after your period?--but it's not quite as trivial as your insight suggests.
It'd be nice if the study had exempted bleeding days for the reasons you listed. It'd be even nicer to look for a contrast versus, say, women taking "fewer periods" drugs. Is the hypothesized "ornamentation behavior" linked to ovulation per se, or merely the absence of PMS / menstruation-related discomfort?
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
Interesting, but hardly surprising. It reminds me of a cool evolutionary-psychology speculation about why women get bitchy when their periods start. The start of a period indicates that her partner has failed to impregnate her, so in terms of natural selection, that is the time to seriously reconsider the relationship.
In any case, it is deeply alarming to see such mounting evidence that most of our "free choices" are impelled from below, from the parts of our brains that still believe we are living in the jungle.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Do you think Bob Goatse is fertile?
Maybe he's ovulating.
Ovulating out of his ass.
Oh for gods sake - I don't need scientific research to tell you why women are more attractive while they are ovulating. Most of us feel like crap before, during and after our period and, as a result, we don't want anyone to bother us so we spend less time on our appearance. However, when your near ovulation you are typically more interested in sex because, well, you don't feel like crap. So more time and effort go into hair and makeup as a result. Case closed :)
You had me at merlot
Does Dik Zak have a sibling named Nut
When you allow a plug-in root access, there's always risk of spawning child processes.
If she's wearing granny panties and a maxi pad, she's on her period. If she's wearing underwear that would be troublesome to remove blood spots from, she's not.
Come June, I may just hot synch her schedule with an iPhone.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
After menopause may be a different story of course, but a great deal about female psychology changes at that point. That's no doubt why post-menopausal women weren't included in the study.
What is most interesting about female appearance, aside from any natural gift, is the more a woman dresses up the less she will be accepting of male attention. By attention, I mean a willingness to actually converse and interact, including the ultimate in sexual interaction. When an attractive woman primps herself, she places strict limits on partners she will accept, and yet in doing so will also attract all men.
"The discovery overturns the theory that women - unlike other female animals - always hide signs they may be ovulating.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Are you just fertile today, or do you look like that all the time?
Considering that all of the features that make a woman "womanly" are the ones that indicate, even indirectly, fertility and the ability to bear children, that's not surprising at all. Women have also been shown to choose men with more masculine (testosterone-induced) features when they're more fertile. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that "evolutionary fitness" simply means being able to pass along your genes, and so evolution has shaped most of our behaviors around conceiving, bearing, and raising children.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
What are these "women" creatures and where do they live?
Please post pictures, thanks.
Sig for hire.
Moderators, for the love of....don't just give high ratings to people who post technical-sounding gibberish!!
The parent post is spreading misinformation with regard to the link between libido and di-hydro-testosterone (you'll note that he got the abbreviation incorrect, and attached a spurious "5a" to the front, because he confused the name of the enzyme -- 5-alpha-reductase -- responsible for DHT formation with the chemical itself!)
I'm not going to claim that DHT isn't involved with male sex drive, but it's certainly not the "primary mechanism" behind male libido. One needs only refer to the volumes of studies done on the relationship between selective serotonin reuptake inhibior antidepressants ("SSRIs", e.g. Celexa, Prozac, Paxil) and libido suppression to see that the issue is more complicated than a single hormone imbalance.
What makes this really galling, however, is that the guy has the guts to criticize real scientific research before spouting this crap, and you folks take it as some sort of authority!
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Wow. That's conclusive.
I've seen fat women missing teeth and wearing shorts with the word "Juicy" over their dimpled ass cheeks who were toating six kids with them.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
The point is more that in the menstrual part of the cycle, women feel bad and consequently look worse too. So it's the other way around. The study offers no way to disentangle this.
Women not only feel hornier at this time of the month, they also feel in a better mood. And when you feel better with yourself, you care more for yourself, not only women, also men do.
Please google and research "peak oil" a bit. You will discover this crisis is a lot worse than they have told you
That's not significant at all (p = 0.2734375) and it certainly doesn't have enough power. Of course I would take surgery, since estimates favor survival, but I would not take it as a guarantee to survive. Testing should continue. Furthermore, the example you give is unnatural, since there would have been only 8 people in the world with this "physical ailment", apparently over a long time span (otherwise, you wouldn't be able to judge survival), which makes me think you just made it up.
An about the 2 people example: I'm sure it generalizes over the judgement capabilities of these 2 people, but that doesn't generalize over the entire population. And women would not dress better on the off-chance of meeting one of these two; evolution would have found a better allocation of resources...
They're all dirty whores!
Who said it was caused by the ovulation itself? The article was just saying that women tend to dress more attractively when they are fertile. Whether that is caused by the ovulation itself, by progesterone, or random firings of the synapses is something that we still don't know. progesterone is used in the final stages of ovulation
1) Please stop mixing up progesterone (the natural hormone) with progestogen (class of hormones) and progestin (synthetic hormone).
2) Take a look here. You will see the evolution of hormone concentrations over the course of the menstrual cycle. If what you are saying was true (and the effect mentioned in the paper really was caused by the progesterone), you would expect to see an increased effect when progesterone levels hit their peak - somewhere in the middle of the luteal phase. (and no, that is not "in the final stages of ovulation")
But let's look at the article again:
[the photos were taken] one on a high fertility day of the cycle (follicular phase) and one on a low fertility day of the cycle (luteal phase).
What do you know? Those days in the luteal phase are actually low fertility days. Days in which women don't care as much how they look. Precisely the opposite of what you were saying...
Also, I don't understand what the second paragraph (the one about DHT) has to do with anything. It's not related to the article, it's not related to the other paragraphs in your post, and it's also wrong. Have a look here - mesterolone (the active ingredient in Proviron) is not hydrogenated - so it is a relative of testosterone, rather than DHT (compare it with the images found here).
The conclusion? You don't know what you are talking about, but you go around criticizing other people's research. The fact that your post got a "+5, informative" modifier only proves that people will believe anything that sounds technical, even if it's pure garbage...
It would be nice to see the additional detail so that actual significance could be inferred. If I cared enough (it's well outside my area of study), I'd write them and ask for it. Most researchers will provide said data upon request. (I've never had one turn me down.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
:(
I see no women around me advertising their fertility. Heck, I'd be happy with a disdainful scowl, instead of "get lost, I'm armed" and reaching for the Mace.
Download a copy of Female Alert System. This lovely piece of software has kept me from going nuts trying to figure out why one day my wife is all over me and I can do no wrong, to the next day she wants nothing to do with me and I can do no right. Seriously, this little freeware from Heaven is a Godsend. All you do is plug in her last start date and cycle length and it calculates what mood she's in for any given day. Ridiculously accurate, so you know what days to suggest that you need to buy a new MacPro and 1TB RAID, and what days to "work late" (fragging.)
MacTacToe - for every problem, an elegant solution
But are you part of the target audience?
I remember Desmond Morris, on The Human Animal, reporting on very similar studies (amount of skin shown, versus ovulation), quite a number of years ago.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.