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Eastwick and Finkel (2008) apply a longitudinal approach to speed dating. A Newsweek interview (2008) with the authors sums up their findings: Finkel: "There was a disconnect between what they said they wanted and what they actually wanted."

Eastwick: "People have theories, and those theories guide us, but they might not always be correct."
In ( Read more... )

The site UKDating.com compiled the "seeking" information from 40,000 women's dating profiles to make a profile of "the perfect man." The Daily Mail (UK, 2008) claims that height was the most important attribute, specifying that "Mr. Right" should be at least 5'10". Good looks came in second to height. Perhaps the importance of height contributes ( Read more... )

According to Wikipedia, "Speed Dating" was introduced in 1998, and by 2000 had gained national recognition, partially thanks to an episode of Sex in the City wherein a successful lawyer pretends to be an airline stewardess to stop scaring away potential dates. The repetitive format of speed-dating made it a natural choice for the study of mating ( Read more... )

Meston and Buss (2007) compiled a list of 237 reasons why human beings have sex - a number soon outstripped by the number of newspaper stories about the research (see Google News). They then asked 1,549 undergraduates to rate from 1 to 5: "how frequently each of the following reasons led you to have sex in the past. ... If you have not had sex ( Read more... )

Evolutionary psychology suggests that men and women value different characteristics in a mate. Wade and Fowler (2006) attempted to test this model to see how the features of the partner in infidelity affected the level of upset in men and women. Their results suggest that only women may rate the competitor in their mate's terms. While ( Read more... )

The Daily Mail (UK, 2007) reports on research (publication pending) by Lynda Boothroyd of the University of Durham (UK) that indicates that women are attracted to men who resemble their fathers, mediated by their relationship with their father. Girls who like their fathers are more likely to be attracted to men who resemble them. Boothroyd was ( Read more... )

Gender roles in heterosexual dating have been extensively studied. For example, Karl Grammer (1990) suggests that males use body language to signal dominance, whereas women's body language indicates both submission and "bodily self-presentation." Grammer (2000) points out ten years later that women seem to be in control of opposite-sex ( Read more... )

Abbey and Melby (1986) found that males perceived more sexual intent than females in both ambiguous and nonambiguous nonverbal situations. Levesque et al (2006) also found that men attributed more sexual interest after brief interaction than women, but that women tended to generalize attraction to positive personality characteristics more than men ( Read more... )

Humans make judgements about the perceived gender of other humans so quickly that we are usually not aware of having done it. What factors influence these snap decisions? Ganel et al (2002) suggest that identity and gender are inseparably linked in cognitive facial recognition. This is in contrast to other models that suggest identity and sex ( Read more... )