Homosexual Orientation in Males: Evolutionary and Ethological Aspects

Evolutionary theory proposes that adaptive traits are reproduced more successfully than maladaptive traits. Accordingly, natural selection should favour heterosexuality as it facilitates reproduction and the propagation of genes. However, the question becomes, what has maintained homosexuality in a small but consistent percentage of the human population? Research into the evolutionary and hormonal factors associated with a homosexual orientation have yielded provocative but inconsistent results. It also suggests that human sexual orientation, and in particular homosexual orientation, is too complex to be described by one simple model or a single research discipline. The current paper treads a new path and emphasises an integrative approach for the understanding of homosexuality. The authors examine the combined effects of evolutionary factors and neurohormonal processes on the development of a homosexual orientation. It is suggested that research into the topic could benefit from an examination of and change in some of the assumptions upon which much past research has been based

Human Pheromones: Integrating Neuroendocrinology and Ethology

The effect of sensory input on hormones is essential to any explanation of mammalian behavior, including aspects of physical attraction. The chemical signals we send have direct and developmental effects on hormone levels in other people. Since we don't know either if, or how, visual cues might have direct and developmental effects on hormone levels in other people, the biological basis for the development of visually perceived human physical attraction is currently somewhat questionable. In contrast, the biological basis for the development of physical attraction based on chemical signals is well detailed

Face Gender and Emotion Expression: Are Angry Women More Like Men?

Certain features of facial appearance perceptually resemble expressive cues related to facial displays of emotion. We hypothesized that because expressive markers of anger (such as lowered eyebrows) overlap with perceptual markers of male sex, perceivers would identify androgynous angry faces as more likely to be a man than a woman (Study 1) and would be slower to classify an angry woman as a woman than an angry man as a man (Study 2). Conversely, we hypothesized that because perceptual features of fear (raised eyebrows) and happiness (a rounded smiling face) overlap with female sex markers, perceivers would be more likely to identify an androgynous face showing these emotions as a woman than as a man (Study 1) and would be slower to identify happy and fearful men as men than happy and fearful women as women (Study 2). The results of the two studies showed that happiness and fear expressions bias sex discrimination toward the female, whereas anger expressions bias sex perception toward the male

Getting that female glance: Patterns and consequences of male nonverbal behavior in courtship contexts

Abstract Females apparently are the choosier sex in courtship contexts, but there still is limited information about female selection criteria in real courtship settings. Given that a female knows little about a heretofore unacquainted male, upon what dimensions can (and do) females base their initial courtship decisions? Here, we report findings from observational studies that investigated male nonverbal behavior in a bar context. Study 1 documented the body movements of males prior to making contact with a female. It was found that males who successfully made bcontactQ courtship initiation with females exhibited different body language in this precontact phase than did males who did not make contact with females, including significantly more glancing behaviors, space-maximization movements, intrasexual touching, and less closed-body movements. The findings from a second withinsubject study comparing the behavior of men in a bar when women were present or not present supported the initial study's findings and showed that males' emphasis on these behaviors increases in a mate-relevant context. We suggest that certain aspects of male nonverbal behavior in courtship contexts can serve as self-presentation and mate-value signals

Spectro-spatial Profile for Gender Identification using Emotional-based EEG Signals

 Identifying gender has become essential specially to support automatic human-computer interface applications and to customize interactions based on affective responses. The electroencephalogram (EEG) has been adopted for recording the neuronal information as waveforms from the scalp. The objective of this study was twofold. First, to identify genders from four different emotional states using spectral relative power biomarkers. Second, to develop Spectro-spatial profiles that afford additional information for gender identification using emotional-based EEGs. The dataset has been collected from ten healthful volunteer students from the University of Vienna while watching short emotional audio-visual clips of angry, happiness, sadness, and neutral emotions. Wavelet (WT) has been used as a denoising technique, the spectral relative power features of delta (), theta (), alpha (), beta () and gamma () were extracted from each recorded EEG channel. In the subsequent steps, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Pearson’s correlation analysis were performed to characterize the emotional-based EEG biomarkers towards developing the Spectro-spatial profile to identify gender differences. The results show that the spectral set of features may provide and convey reliable biomarkers for identifying Spectro-spatial profiles from four different emotional states. EEG biomarkers and profiles enable more comprehensive insights into various human behavior effects and as an intervention on the brain. The results revealed that almost high relative powers from all emotional states appear in females compared to males. Particularly,  was the most prominent for anger,  and  were widely observed in happiness,  was the most appears in sadness,  and  were the powers that appears widely in neutral. Moreover, in females, neut was correlated with and _ang, _neut was mostly correlated with _ang. Besides, _neut was correlated with _ang, _neut was correlated with _ang, _neut was mostly correlated with _sad. Moreover, in males, _neut showed a very strong correlation with _sadness whereas _neut was correlated with _hap and _neut was correlated with _hap. Therefore, the proposed system using the WT denoising method, spectral relative power markers, and the spectro-spatial profile plays a crucial role in characterizing the emotional-based EEGs towards gender identification. The classification results were 89.46% for SVM and 90% for the KNN. Therefore, the proposed system using the WT denoising method, spectral relative powers features, SVM, and KNN classifiers were crucial in gender identification and characterizing the emotional EEG signals

Effective EEG channels for emotion identification over the brain regions using differential evolution algorithm

The motivation of this study was to detect the most effective electroencephalogram (EEG) channels for various emotional states of the brain regions (i.e. frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital). The EEGs of ten volunteer participants without health conditions were captured while the participants were shown seven, short, emotional video clips with audio (i.e. anger, anxiety, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise and neutral). The Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter was adopted for smoothing and denoising the EEG dataset. The spectral features were performed by employing the relative spectral powers of delta (δRP), theta (θRP), alpha (αRP), beta (βRP), and gamma (γRP). The differential evolution-based channel selection algorithm (DEFS_Ch) was computed to find the most suitable EEG channels that have the greatest efficacy for identifying the various emotional states of the brain regions. The results revealed that all seven emotions previously mentioned were represented by at least two frontal and two temporal channels. Moreover, some emotional states could be identified by channels from the parietal region such as disgust, happiness and sadness. Furthermore, the right and left occipital channels may help in identifying happiness, sadness, surprise and neutral emotional states. The DEFS_Ch algorithm raised the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classification accuracy from 80% to 86.85%, indicating that DEFS_Ch may offer a useful way for reliable enhancement of the detection of different emotional states of the brain regions

Laying Eyes on Headlights: Eye Movements Suggest Facial Features in Cars

Humans’ proneness to see faces even in inanimate structures such as cars has long been noticed, yet empirical evidence is scarce. To examine this tendency of anthropomorphism, participants were asked to compare specific features (such as the eyes) of a face and a car front presented next to each other. Eye movement patterns indicated on which visual information participants relied to solve the task and clearly revealed the perception of facial features in cars, such as headlights as eyes or grille as nose. Most importantly, a predominance of headlights was found in attracting and guiding people’s gaze irrespective of the feature they were asked to compare – equivalent to the role of the eyes during face perception. This response to abstract configurations is interpreted as an adaptive bias of the respective inherent mechanism for face perception and is evolutionarily reasonable with regard to a »better safe than sorry« strategy

Empathy, Communication, Deception

Empathy is understood as a mode of understanding operating on a subconscious level of mental processing. The cognitive element can only abstractly be distinguished from its affective expression. When recognizing a fellow creature we involuntarily sympathize with it. Recognition of covert motivations of overt behavior is the first step in formation of a communication channel between two (or more) empathizing agents. Yet, since communication evolved in variably complex social environments it was subject to pressure of conflicting individual interests. Deception thus evolved as an adaptive evolutionary strategy. Empathic understanding does not necessarily entail recognition of agent’s real intentions. Deception may be achieved on both conscious and unconscious processing levels. A sufficient degree of biopsychosocial maturity must be reached for a child to be able to independently recognize verbal and non-verbal communication finesses. Once this level has been attained, the prevailing emotional orientation determines his/her degree of empathizing competence

The Representation of Self Reported Affect in Body Posture and Body Posture Simulation

It is taken for granted that the non-verbal information we acquire from a person’s body posture and position affects our perception of others. However, to date human postures have never been described on an empirical level. This study is the first approach to tackle the unexplored topic of human postures. We combined two approaches: traditional behavior observation and modern anthropometric analysis. Photographs of 100 participants were taken, their body postures were transferred to a three dimensional virtual environment and the occurring body angles were measured. The participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire about their current affective state. A principal component analysis with the items of the affect questionnaire (Positive Negative Affect Scales, PANAS) revealed five main factors: aversion, openness, irritation, happiness, and selfconfidence. The body angles were then regressed on these factors and the respective postures were reconstructed within a virtual environment. 50 different subjects rated the reconstructed postures from the positive and negative end of the regression. We found the ratings to be valid and accurate in respect to the five factors