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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
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
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.
The full article can be found here.
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
Sure we would. Everyone looks better in the dark.
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."
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
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
The published analysis is more analogous to saying that each women has a score that measures how much more or less attractively they dress during ovulation. In the article's case the score is defined in terms of the percentage of observers who think that a women is more attractively dressed during ovulation, with scores ranging from 0% to 100%. The 42 observers are used to estimate that score for each women. The reported percentage of 59.5% is the mean of these scores, and is not a percentage of the 30 women.
The analysis asks whether this mean score is greater than 50%. Whether or not significance is achieved with 30 observations in this case depends on the distribution of these 30 scores, which is not given in the article. Using only the information about the mean (59.5%), using a t.test (the actual analysis was more sophisticated, and included covariates) we can easily constuct p-values ranging from 0.1404 (12 women score 0%, 18 score 100%) to 5.969e-12 (15 women score 55%, 15 women score 65%)
It is possible (but presumably unlikely) that more women actually looked worse to a majority of the observers during ovulation and still get a mean score of 65% (for example if 22 women scored 45% and 8 scored 100%).
When you allow a plug-in root access, there's always risk of spawning child processes.
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?
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...
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