Emily J. Miner

The Future of an Applied Evolutionary Psychology for Human Partnerships

There has been significant recent progress in our understanding of human mate choice. We outline several frontiers of rapid cultural change which may increasingly directly affect individual self-evaluation in the mating market, formation and maintenance of long-term partnerships, and potentially reproductive outcome and child health. Specifically, we review evidence for the effects of (1) increasing exposure to mass media, (2) the advent of novel ways to meet potential partners, and (3) cultural influences which may disrupt or alter the expression of evolved mate preferences. We comment on the potential for these effects to influence self-perception and partner-perception, with downstream effects on relationship satisfaction and stability. A common theme emerges, which is that these effects may contribute to relationship dissatisfaction and dissolution, with negative implications for societal change. We then address how we envisage evolutionary psychology research may focus on and offer informed approaches to ameliorate these effects in the future. We picture the development of a field of applied evolutionary psychology, and we suggest that this will increasingly become a central focus for many researchers.

Husband's Esteem Predicts his Mate Retention Tactics:

delity or prevent their defection from the relationship. These tactics include low-risk acts that render the current relationship more attractive by bestowing benefits on the woman, as well as cost-inflicting acts that render defection from the relationship risky or dangerous for her. Previous research has linked mens mate retention behavior with mens mate value (value as a current or potential partner) using womens reports. The current research addresses limitations of that research using self-reports and cross-spousal reports from 107 married couples concerning their self-esteem and their esteem for their partner. The results indicate that the level of esteem that wives have for their husbands is positively associated with their perception of their husbands use of positive inducements and negatively associated with their husbands self-reported use of cost-inflicting mate retention behaviors (i.e., Direct Guarding, Intersexual Negative Inducements, and Intrasexual Negative Inducements). The level of self-esteem reported by men was negatively associated with their self-reported direct guarding behavior. Discussion explores the possibility that esteem—both self-esteem and esteem from ones partner—functions as an internal gauge of relative mate value.

Book Review: All Thorns, No Rose: A Well-Intentioned but Misguided Book about SmellA review of Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. William Morrow: New York, 2007, 288 pp, US

With her first book, Rachel Herz aims to inform readers about their sense of smell, encouraging them to both engage and appreciate this oft-neglected sense. The Scent of Desire fills a literary gap as the first popular science book to examine the psychology of smell. However, as a scientifically informed guide to olfaction, this book falls short. The introductory chapters provide an introduction to the subject of olfaction. The first chapter is devoted to the anatomy of the olfaction system and reviews competing theories about how smells are recognized and characterized by the brain. It is full of anecdotes highlighting the role smell plays in our daily lives, providing the naïve reader with a straightforward entry into the world of olfaction. Herz also mentions in passing that other mammals that do not share our trichromatic vision rely more on their sense of smell than we do, acknowledging the likely trade-off between vision and olfaction in humans. Later, Herz speculates that humans’ smell preferences develop through odor-associative learning. She discusses how the association of novel smells with positive and negative experiences might produce the individual and cultural differences in smell preferences that she outlines. Herz also tackles memory, drawing an important distinction between the objective accuracy and the emotional quality of memories, allowing her to appropriately distinguish between accurate memories and impactful memories. She continues to use anecdotes to discuss both recovered memories and the links between smells and posttraumatic stress disorder. The middle chapters draw connections between olfaction and several other disciplines or areas of popular interest. Herz introduces the reader to aromatherapy and the perfume industry, beginning with brief reviews of their histories. She also includes a section about multiple chemical sensitivities syndrome, which provides the reader with a