Sensational Interests, Mating Effort, and Personality: Evidence for Cross-Cultural Validity

Abstract

Abstract. We assessed whether violent or macabre interests (“sensational interests”) were related to mating effort and a higher-order personality construct reflecting the combined features of higher Extraversion, lower Psychoticism, and lower Neuroticism in 1321 participants from English-speaking (Tucson, Arizona, and Glasgow, Scotland) and Spanish-speaking (Hermosillo, Mexico, and Talca, Chile) communities. Participants from Spanish-speaking communities generally had more sensational interests. Mating effort was positively related to sensational interests, though the relationship was slightly weaker in Spanish-speaking communities. Personality effects were modest and entirely moderated by language; personality was negatively related to sensational interests in English-speaking communities, but positively associated to sensational interests in Spanish-speaking communities. These findings suggest that the relationship between mating effort and sensational interests is universal and reflects general intrasexual competition, whereas the relationship between personality and sensational interests is more culture-specific.

Assortative Pairing and Life History Strategy

“…The principal focus of this ongoing cross-cultural study is to determine whether assortative pairing on several traits of interest, including LH strategy, is stronger in romantic or in social partners. For example, previous studies both within the United States (Weiss et al 2004) and crossculturally (Egan et al 2005), supported the hypothesis that sensational interests serve as a form of sexual display by showing that they were significantly correlated with mating effort across different cultures. By systematically comparing social to romantic partners, the aim of this study was to determine whether these displays functioned intrasexually among same-sex friends or intersexually (epigamically) among oppositesex lovers.…”

A Life-History Model of Human Fitness Indicators

“…For example, Charles and Egan (2004) found that mating effort (as measured by the MES) was positively related to self-reported delinquency in a large sample of adolescents; while Egan, et al (2005) found a relationship between Mating effort and sensational, or macabre interests. Other researchers have identified a relationship between delinquency and promiscuity (Rowe & Rodgers, 1989), and mating effort (Rowe, Vazsonyi, & Figueredo, 1997).…”

Positive assortative pairing in social and romantic partners: A cross-cultural observational field study of naturally occurring pairs

“…In addition, our study used these methods while sampling four different cultural groups and systematically comparing the assortative coefficients across them (see Egan et al, 2005). These different coefficients were used to assess different kinds of relation: (1) the Within-Person Correlation Coefficients among self-ratings (operationalized as the correlation between the Respondent Rating Self scores) were used to assess how highly these four traits were naturally associated with each other, as a baseline for comparison with how high any cross-trait associations might be across relationship partners; (2) the Inter-Rater Reliabilities (operationalized as the correlation between the Partner Rating Respondent scores with the Respondent Rating Self scores), were use to assess the Target Accuracy (Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006) of each partner rating the other on these four traits, to determine whether sufficient mutual familiarity on these traits existed among partners for the partner ratings to be meaningful; (3) the Perceived Assortative Pairing Coefficients (operationalized as the correlation between Respondent Rating Self scores with the Respondent Rating Partner scores), to determine the Perceived Similarity (Acitelli, Douban, & Veroff, 1993) among partners, which may sometimes be a stronger predictor of relationship outcomes than actual similarity; and (4) the Actual Assortative Pairing Coefficients (operationalized as the correlation between Respondent Rating Self scores with the Partner Rating Self scores), to assess the Actual Similarity (Acitelli, Douban, & Veroff, 1993) among partners, with respect to how each of them represent themselves by self-report.…”

“…After 10 years of research with the Sensational Interests Questionnaire (SIQ), and its more narrowly focused sister-instrument, the Sensational Interests Questionnaire-Revised (SIQ-R, Egan et al, 2005;Weiss, Egan, & Figueredo, 2004) it seems the key predictor within sensational interests is militarism, which, independently of low agreeableness, predicts antisocial acts such as an adolescent's desire to carry a weapon, teenage delinquency, and physical aggression (Barlas & Egan, 2006;Charles & Egan, 2009;Egan & Campbell, 2009). To see an interest in aggression-related topics as inherently pathological is to reject the adaptive function that such knowledge may have imparted for most of humanities' pre-history when the struggle for survival was generally rather harsher than in contemporaneous times.…”