Although widely cited as strong evidence that sexual selection has shaped human facial-attractiveness judgments, findings suggesting that women’s preferences for masculine characteristics in men’s faces are related to women’s hormonal status are equivocal and controversial. Consequently, we conducted the largest-ever longitudinal study of the hormonal correlates of women’s preferences for facial masculinity (N = 584). Analyses showed no compelling evidence that preferences for facial masculinity were related to changes in women’s salivary steroid hormone levels. Furthermore, both within-subjects and between-subjects comparisons showed no evidence that oral contraceptive use decreased masculinity preferences. However, women generally preferred masculinized over feminized versions of men’s faces, particularly when assessing men’s attractiveness for short-term, rather than long-term, relationships. Our results do not support the hypothesized link between women’s preferences for facial masculinity and their hormonal status.

Being able to judge another person's visuo-spatial perspective is an essential social skill, hence we investigated the generalizability of the involved mechanisms across cultures and genders. Developmental, cross-species, and our own previous research suggest that two different forms of perspective taking can be distinguished, which are subserved by two distinct mechanisms. The simpler form relies on inferring another's line-of-sight, whereas the more complex form depends on embodied transformation into the other's orientation in form of a simulated body rotation. Our current results suggest that, in principle, the same basic mechanisms are employed by males and females in both, East-Asian (EA; Chinese) and Western culture. However, we also confirmed the hypothesis that Westerners show an egocentric bias, whereas EAs reveal an other-oriented bias. Furthermore, Westerners were slower overall than EAs and showed stronger gender differences in speed and depth of embodied processing. Our findings substantiate differences and communalities in social cognition mechanisms across genders and two cultures and suggest that cultural evolution or transmission should take gender as a modulating variable into account.

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Acknowledgments: This research was supported by European ResearchCouncil grants awarded to BCJ (OCMATE) and LMD (KINSHIP). We thank Sean Murphy and Lawrence Barsalou for helpful discussion and comments, and thank the Editor and two reviewers for thoughtful and constructive comments. No evidence that preferences for facial masculinity track changes in women's hormonal status AbstractAlthough widely cited as strong evidence that sexual selection has shaped human facial attractiveness judgments, evidence that preferences for masculine characteristics in men's faces are related to women's hormonal status is equivocal and controversial. Consequently, we conducted the largest ever longitudinal study of the hormonal correlates of women's preferences for facial masculinity (N=584). Analyses showed no evidence that preferences for facial masculinity were related to changes in women's salivary steroid hormone levels. Furthermore, both within-subject and between-subject comparisons showed no evidence that oral contraceptive use decreased masculinity preferences. However, women generally preferred masculinized over feminized versions of men's faces, particularly when assessing men's attractiveness for short-term, rather than long-term, relationships. Our results do not support the hypothesized link between women's preferences for facial masculinity and their hormonal status.

Al-Shawaf et al. (2015 Evolution & Human Behavior, 36, 199-205) found that people who were more interested in pursuing a short-term mating strategy (indexed by higher total scores on the Revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory) reported less sexual disgust (indexed by lower scores on the sexual disgust subscale of the Three Domain Disgust Scale). By contrast with these results for sexual disgust, Al-Shawaf et al. (2015) observed no significant associations between interest in pursuing a short-term mating strategy and moral or pathogen disgust. This pattern of results, wherein sociosexuality correlates with lower sexual disgust but is unconnected to disgust more generally, may indicate specific cognitive adaptations that counter the possible disgust responses associated with engaging in shortterm mating. Here we replicated Al-Shawaf et al's (2015) findings for sexual disgust and sociosexual orientation in a large sample (N=7166). Although we found that individuals who were more interested in pursuing a short-term mating strategy reported significantly lower moral disgust, these relationships were very weak. Together, these results suggest a robust relationship between disgust and short-term mating that is relatively specific to sexual disgust.