(no subject)
Friday, November 4, 2005
A glance at the December issue of Personal Relationships: Flowers and fists
The more often men give flowers to their lovers, or engage in other "mate-retention behaviors" such as vigilance or emotional manipulation, the more often they hit them.
That is the chilling finding of a study by Todd K. Shackelford, an associate professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University, and five colleagues. They found that the more men do things to dissuade their partners from leaving them, the more likely they are to be violent. "Although many mate-retention behaviors appear to be innocuous romantic gestures (e.g., displaying resources, giving flowers), some may be harbingers of violence," the authors write.
The researchers surveyed 461 men, 560 women, and 107 couples about their use or experience of mate-retention behaviors and violence toward women. In each group, the researchers found greater violence in men who engaged in more of the retention behaviors.
The authors also found that acts of vigilance -- such as dropping by unexpectedly to see what partners were doing, and calling to make sure a partner was where she said she would be -- were the clearest predictors of violence, followed by acts of emotional manipulation. Vigilant acts, they note, are examples of "autonomy-limiting behaviors" that are "motivated by male sexual proprietariness and designed to restrict women's sexual autonomy." Earlier research, they say, showed that 40 percent of women with highly vigilant partners also reported being seriously assaulted by their partners.
The authors speculate that those behaviors may have evolved over the millennia to solve such adaptive problems as deterring a partner from being unfaithful or leaving. When the behaviors are thwarted, men are deprived of the promise of their initial mate selection and courting, so they lash out in attempts to solve their problems. Without a doubt, the researchers say, "mate poaching, infidelity, and defection from a mateship undoubtedly were recurrent adaptive problems over human evolutionary history."
Those studies, the authors say, "can potentially be used to inform women and men, friends and relatives, of danger signs -- the specific acts and tactics of mate retention -- that portend the possibility of future violence in relationships."
The article, "When We Hurt the Ones We Love: Predicting Violence Against Women From Men's Mate Retention," is available online to subscribers and for purchase at http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2005.00125.x
--Peter Monaghan
Third from last paragraph completely weird, no?