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Studying Sex Differences in Psychosocial Life History Indicators

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Abstract

The last decade has seen rapid growth in the study of human life history strategies, with advances to theory, increasingly sophisticated research designs, and innovative new tools now being at the disposal of researchers. Contemporary evolutionary psychology suggests there should be variation in biological and psychological traits attributable to differences between the sexes. We review theory underpinning sex differences in evolutionarily adaptive behaviors and then outline the developmental stages and behaviors pertinent to life history strategies that could be subject to these differences. We then review contemporary work that has examined sex in relation to these domains and end with recommendations for future research agendas. We conclude that future work needs to consider sex more comprehensively (studying the sexes separately when necessary) when evaluating measures and models designed to tackle important life history research questions.

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Notes

  1. Note that life history speed represents a conceptual continuum rather than a single psychometric dimension (Copping et al. 2017; Gruijters and Fleuren 2018; Richardson et al. 2017c).

  2. Figure 1 summarizes core life history themes and does not represent a specific model. Debate continues about the importance of specific functions and traits, as well as the causal and temporal event orders, the impact of past versus current environments, etc.

  3. It should be noted that there is debate regarding the impact of early experiences on later development particularly surrounding the influence of attachment (see Barbaro et al. 2017a; Groh et al. 2014 for examples) and the potential for genetic confounding of estimates from genetically uninformative studies of development (Barbaro et al. 2017b).

  4. While menopause in females means that the male reproductive window is potentially larger (their ability to reproduce persists until death), given lower life expectancies in our ancestral environment, typical reproductive windows for males and females were likely closely aligned in our evolutionary past.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Nicole Barbaro and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful suggestions in improving this manuscript and Rikaela Masgai for providing Fig. 1.

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Copping, L.T., Richardson, G.B. Studying Sex Differences in Psychosocial Life History Indicators. Evolutionary Psychological Science 6, 47–59 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-019-00211-2

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