What age of a prospective partner do you consider preferable? Would you prefer a partner of the same age as yours? Or would you prefer a partner with an age difference in dating? According to evolutionary views, men and women … Continue reading
Author Archives: Victor Karandashev
Human Predisposition to Homogamy in Love
Genetic similarity and social homogamy play important roles in our interpersonal attraction and love. As I showed elsewhere, genetic resemblance between individuals predisposes them to fall in love. Partners in a couple share more genetic traits than random strangers. Nonetheless, … Continue reading
Physical Beauty of Men and Women Across Cultures
Physical beauty characterizes attractive facial features, facial expressions, physical qualities of the body, bodily expressions, and grooming. These are the major groups of appearances that people pay attention to while they are communicating with others. Physical beauty is not only … Continue reading
Sexual Preferences for Physical Attractiveness
To what extent do men and women place different values on different aspects of physical attractiveness when trying to mate? Evolutionary science gives us important keys for better understanding the mating value of physical attractiveness. However, despite the general universality … Continue reading
Why Do We Love Good-Looking People?
The good-looking people are likable. No doubt. They entice us with their physically attractive appearance. We also tend to fall in love with beautiful women and handsome men. They look cool and perfect in everything. A Stereotype of Beauty Our … Continue reading
The “Mere Exposure Effect” and Love Attraction
Familiarity and similarity are powerful forces in our love attraction that can be influenced by genetic predisposition, imprinting, or by the “mere exposure effect.” They all have the same psychological mechanism of prototypicality. Despite our interest in novelty, we are … Continue reading
Sexual Imprinting of Attraction and Love
The mechanism of imprinting plays an important role in shaping our sexual attraction and love preferences. I explain what “imprinting” is elsewhere. Early works by Konrad Lorenz (Lorenz, 1935) demonstrated that the early experiences of birds and animals could affect … Continue reading
Imprinting of Love Attachment
We tend to perceive people who look familiar to us as more attractive than those who look unfamiliar. This is the familiarity principle that also guides our mating, sexual preferences, and love. The phenomenon of imprinting is at the root … Continue reading
Attraction to Familiar Others
Something familiar is frequently attractive to us, despite our interest in novelty. It is a persistent pattern of human perception and behavior, which is called the familiarity principle (Reis & Sprecher, 2009). The principle is rooted in the mere exposure effect. … Continue reading
Genetic Diversity and Genetic Sexual Attraction
Despite the importance of similarity in genetic sexual attraction, genetic diversity is equally important in love. It appears that both similarities and differences between love partners play important roles. Evolutionary Value of Genetic Diversity Genetic sexual attraction plays an important … Continue reading