Amanda Guitar

University of Alabama | UA · Department of Anthropology

Human communication has been largely influenced by the global popularization of social network sites such as Facebook over the past decade. From PCs to mobile phones, humans can now communicate in ways never before experienced during our history on Earth; moreover, sites like Facebook are providing a novel platform for engaging in female intrasexua...

Numerous studies have found that piercing and tattooing the body is an increasingly prevalent trend in modern popular culture; however, this is not only a modern practice. Evidence of various forms of body ornamentation has been found in human societies dating back thousands of years. Although prior research has focused on the potential relationshi...

For two decades, psychologists studying ovulation have successfully employed a series of "T-shirt studies" supporting the hypothesis that men can detect when a woman is most fertile based on olfactory detection of ovulatory cues. However, it is not known whether the ability to detect female fertility is primarily a function of biological sex, sexua...

Although there has been a tremendous amount of research attention on differences in reactions to sexual infidelity and emotional infidelity, there is a lack of information available as to how the two constructs overlap with respect to actual behavior, how expectations for distress vary by behavior, and how sexual and emotional content influence exp...

Beginning in infancy, males have a higher mortality rate than females– this sex-differentiated pattern holds across stages of life, but is exacerbated during years of peak courtship (adolescence and young adulthood), likely as a function of the fact that young males partake in risky behavior during courtship (Kruger & Nesse, 2007). The Male-to-Fema...

Objective Stress is a mental and physical phenomenon, affecting functions throughout the body. When someone is stressed, they might twitch, stumble over their words, look tense, or sweat. However, these are all visual and auditory clues. We wanted to investigate if people can pick up on the olfactory signals of stress as well. More specifically, we...

Scholars have suggested that emotions are evolved adaptations that increase fitness by adjusting the response of the individual to the specific situation. Thus, the particular emotion experienced by an individual should be dependent on whether the situation is a threat/opportunity, in the physical/social domain, and if the outcome is a success/fail...

Regional academic conferences provide a variety of benefits to attendants, but hosting them can be costly. Here, we share benefits and drawbacks of hosting regional evolution meetings from the vantages of a tenured associate professor, a tenure-track assistant professor, and a doctoral student. We use experiences of hosting the NorthEastern Evolut...

Body art that lesions the skin can result in infection, making tattoos and piercings inherently risky forms of expression. Evolutionary theorists have posited two complementary hypotheses for the popularity of tattooing and piercing in the face of less dangerous options. The “human canvas hypothesis” suggests that tattooing and piercing may be hard...

Researchers studying interpersonal relationships often distinguish between “sexual infidelity” and “emotional infidelity.” Yet, it remains largely unclear whether and how individuals actually conceptualize these constructs in their own lives, and how men and women vary, if at all, in their definitions and understanding of different types of infidel...

The current research question sought to examine political psychology as it relates to evolutionary mismatch. The basic hypothesis is that people will be more cognitively prepared to think about political situations that are relatively small in scale compared with political situations that are large in scale. This research also examined the effects...

The Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) minor at SUNY New Paltz is an incredibly diverse academic program that attracts majors from nearly all disciplines. EvoS students are provided with unique educational opportunities beyond their standard curricula, such as the opportunity to engage and collaborate with researchers and distinguished guest speakers from...

Teaching evolutionary principles in higher education can provide an integrative theoretical foundation that can be used to incorporate vast amounts of interdisciplinary knowledge. Yet, paradoxes regarding evolutionary theory's place in academia are rampant—particularly when it comes to applying evolutionary principles to psychology. The EvoS Consor...

Reviews the book, Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe by Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza (2009). This is an extensive book based on Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza's brainchild; a new theory on human uniqueness. Their theory, simply put, is that the human species‘ unique ability to throw objects (and thus kill conspecifics, or m...