David M. G. Lewis

Self-esteem is hypothesized to be an evolved psychological system that monitors and responds to cues to one's own relational value. Here, we employ a novel, cue-based approach to generate and test the hypothesis that self-esteem tracks specific, fitness-relevant morphological features. Specifically, we investigated whether females' self-esteem systematically varies as a function of their waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and lumbar curvature (LC). Participants (N = 177) indicated on two body morph arrays—one varying in WHR and one varying in LC—the morphs that corresponded to (i) their current levels of these features, (ii) the levels they believed potential mates find most attractive, and (iii) the levels they viewed as ideal for themselves. They also completed the Body Esteem Scale and Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale. Results demonstrated that (1) participants internalized, as their own “ideal”, the levels of WHR and LC they perceived potential mates to desire, and (2) their self-esteem levels tracked the discrepancy between their idealized levels of WHR and LC and their own current levels of these features. These effects of WHR and LC on self-esteem were independent and fully mediated by their effects on body esteem. Discussion centers on how efforts to mitigate the negative effects of media exposure on women's self-esteem could potentially be improved by more precisely targeting the specific morphological cues to which self-esteem is sensitive.

Disgust is a protective emotion that coordinates a suite of cognitive and behavioral changes to reduce people's likelihood of infection. Existing research demonstrates that people react with disgust to pathogenic stimuli compared to non-pathogenic stimuli, but there has been a paucity of research examining whether people are equipped with a more finely graded disgust response: do people discriminate between pathogen threats of different magnitudes and react with more disgust toward pathogen threats of a greater magnitude? We derived multiple novel predictions from the Threat-Dependent Disgust hypothesis and tested them across three experiments involving participants from the United States and India (total n = 1,333). In Study 1 (n = 428), we tested the prediction that people would be more disgusted by a pathogen threat touching their hand relative to their foot, given that touching a pathogen with the hand is more likely to result in the pathogen entering the body envelope (e.g., through the mouth). In Study 2 (n = 453), we tested the prediction that people would be more disgusted by a pathogen threat touching another person's hand relative to another person's foot; people touch others more with their hands than with their feet, so a conspecific with a contaminated hand poses a greater disease threat than one with a pathogen on their foot. In Study 3 (n = 452), we tested the prediction that people would be more disgusted by skin wounds caused by pathogenic infections than by surgical incisions; although both wounds pose the risk of exposure to another's bodily fluids, wounds caused by pathogenic infections pose a greater disease threat. Results across all three experiments suggest that disgust is sensitive to the magnitude of pathogen threat in a more finely tuned manner than previously demonstrated. Discussion focuses on interpretation of this gradient-like sensitivity of disgust, incorporating these findings into the broader disgust literature, and future directions.

Objectives
Sexual selection via contest competition has equipped countless organisms with weaponry in their appendages to overpower their opponents. Here, we tested (1) whether greater upper limb length—measured as span controlling for biacromial width—confers an advantage in contest competition among adult humans, (2) several possible means by which upper limb length might increase success in intrasexual contest competition, and (3) whether, consistent with male–male contest competition creating stronger selection pressures than female–female contest competition, male Homo sapiens have greater upper limb length.

Methods
We collected fight statistics and facial and body photographs from professional combatants (N = 715) in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC; Study 1). Sexual dimorphism in upper limb length was then examined via diverse and demographically representative samples from four studies (total N = 6915), from Croatian adolescents and older Singaporean adults to United States Army personnel born across all major world regions (Studies 2a–2d).

Results
First, we found that greater upper limb length is associated with increased success in intrasexual contest competition, an effect driven by both the capacity to grapple opponents to submission and to knock opponents unconscious (Study 1). Second, we found unequivocal, cross-cultural evidence of unique sexual dimorphism in upper limb length after controlling for allometry: across four studies, men exhibited longer upper limbs than women (Studies 2a–2d).

Conclusion
Upper limb length may have been shaped by intrasexual selection, with implications across the biological, anthropological, and psychological sciences.

With dementia incidence projected to escalate significantly within the next 25 years, the United Nations declared 2021-2030 the Decade of Healthy Ageing, emphasising cognition as a crucial element. As a leading discipline in cognition and ageing research, psychology is well-equipped to offer insights for translational research, clinical practice, and policy-making. In this comprehensive review, we discuss the current state of knowledge on age-related changes in cognition and psychological health. We discuss cognitive changes during ageing, including (a) heterogeneity in the rate, trajectory, and characteristics of decline experienced by older adults, (b) the role of cognitive reserve in age-related cognitive decline, and (c) the potential for cognitive training to slow this decline. We also examine ageing and cognition through multiple theoretical perspectives. We highlight critical unresolved issues, such as the disparate implications of subjective versus objective measures of cognitive decline and the insufficient evaluation of cognitive training programs. We suggest future research directions, and emphasise interdisciplinary collaboration to create a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that modulate cognitive ageing.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures for each experimental study, a general questionnaire examining health prevention behaviors and COVID-19 experience, geographical and cultural context characterization, and demographic information for each participant. Each participant started the study with the same general questions and then was randomized to complete either one longer experiment or two shorter experiments. Data were provided by 73,223 participants with varying completion rates. Participants completed the survey from 111 geopolitical regions in 44 unique languages/dialects. The anonymized dataset described here is provided in both raw and processed formats to facilitate re-use and further analyses. The dataset offers secondary analytic opportunities to explore coping, framing, and self-determination across a diverse, global sample obtained at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can be merged with other time-sampled or geographic data.

In 1753, artist William Hogarth declared a specific S-shaped line to be the 'Line of Beauty' (LoB). Hogarth's assertion has had a profound impact on diverse fields over the past two and a half centuries. However, only one recent (2022) study has investigated whether Hogarth's assertion accurately captures humans' actual aesthetic preferences, and no research has explored why people find the LoB beautiful. We conducted two studies testing the hypothesis that the LoB's perceived beauty is an incidental by-product of cognitive systems that evolved to attend to fitness-relevant morphological features in people. In Study 1, we replicated the finding that female bodies whose lumbar curvature approximates the biomechanical optimum for dealing with the exigencies of pregnancy are rated as more attractive. In Study 2, we found that abstract lines extracted from these bodies were perceived as more beautiful than other lines. These results suggest that the preference for Hogarth's LoB is an incidental by-product of psychological mechanisms that evolved for other purposes. More broadly, these findings suggest that an evolutionary psychological approach - in particular the concept of evolutionary by-product - may be useful for understanding, explaining, and predicting people's aesthetic preferences for certain abstract symbols, which otherwise might seem arbitrary and inexplicable.

Due to the environmental benefits of entomophagy, a growing field of research is now investigating the factors that predict people's willingness to eat insects. In the current studies, we examined how willingness to eat insects may vary as a function of individual differences in disgust sensitivity, food neophobia, and hunger. We conducted two studies, one using a self-report measure and one using a behavioral measure of willingness to eat insects. In both studies, higher food neophobia predicted reduced willingness to eat insects. Disgust predicted lower self-reported, but not behavioral, willingness to eat insects. By contrast, hunger did not predict willingness to eat insects in either study. Our findings suggest that reducing food neophobia toward insects may be important for acceptance of entomophagy and may inform future marketing strategies that aim to encourage people to view insect protein as a viable source of nutrition.

In their commentary on our paper, Brandner et al. commit an elementary statistical mistake that leads to entirely erroneous conclusions. When this statistical error is corrected, the effects described in our original paper appear exactly as reported. In principle, we could end our reply there. However, ending our reply there would be a lost opportunity for promoting best practices in Error Management Theory (EMT) research. The commentators make several other missteps that present the opportunity to draw attention to important principles in EMT research and offer clarifications that we hope assist in the operationalization, design, and interpretation of EMT-inspired studies in the future. We discuss these points and provide several EMT research scenarios to help to illustrate a key principle. We hope this reply highlights some of the key elements of best practices in EMT research and sheds light on pitfalls that researchers must make sure to avoid.

From cockroaches and cuttlefish to crocodiles and chimpanzees, organisms across diverse taxa are equipped with physical and psychological systems for courting opposite-sex conspecifics. In this chapter, we focus on the colorful—literally and figuratively—collection of courtship ornaments, tactics, and strategies of one primate species: Homo sapiens. Humans use their vocal qualities—deep voices, soft voices, expressive voices—to show their dominance, kindness, and intelligence. They dance dynamically, kiss passionately, and offer caring (as well as deceptive) compliments. Humans’ courtship signals and the psychophysical systems that detect them span the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory. We review research across these perceptual modalities and offer suggestions for future work into the many uncharted areas of this fascinating domain.

In recent years, researchers have discovered much about how disgust works, its neural basis, its relationship with immune function, its connection with mating, and some of its antecedents and consequents. Despite these advances in our understanding, an under-explored area is how disgust may be used to serve a communicative function, including how individuals might strategically downplay or exaggerate the disgust display in front of different audiences. Here, we generated two hypotheses about potential communicative functions of disgust, and tested these hypotheses in four countries (Turkey, Croatia, Germany, and Norway). We found no evidence in support of either hypothesis in any country. Discussion focuses on the likely falsity of the two central hypotheses, alternative interpretations of our findings, and directions for future research.