Francesca Luberti

Nipissing University · Department of Psychology

Objective Trait mate value covaries with several socio-political attitudes. One’s dating popularity in a mating market can, however, shift one’s self-perceived mate value in that market. We tested whether dating popularity could therefore also shift socio-political attitudes, and whether trait mate value could moderate this effect. Method Heterose...

The suppression of female sexuality is a widespread phenomenon, which often has harmful effects on the wellbeing of women who are the target of the suppression. Theories that have attempted to explain the origins of the phenomenon have heavily focused on which sex might be responsible for the suppression. In the past two decades, researchers in soc...

Past research has found that sexualized women are often dehumanized (i.e., attributed reduced human qualities).However, the mechanisms contributing to such dehumanization remain poorly understood. In this pre-registered experiment involving a within-subject, placebo-controlled, cross-over design, we tested whether testosterone contributes to men’s...

Objectives Individual differences in socio-political attitudes can reflect mating interests, and attitudes can also shift in response to mating market cues, including mating competitor quality. In four experiments, we tested whether competitors’ attractiveness (Experiments 1F&1M) and income (Experiments 2F&2M) would influence socio-political attitu...

People vary both in their embrace of their society’s traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents...

Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun inves...

Attitudes toward sexual relationships can have evolutionary underpinnings because these attitudes often serve, or at least reflect, the attitude holder’s mating self-interest. Sexually restricted individuals, for example, hold conservative attitudes toward same-sex and opposite-sex sexual relationships because conservative attitudes benefit their m...

Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration, and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun inve...

People vary in the extent to which they embrace their society’s traditions, impacting a range of social and political phenomena. People also vary in the degree to which they perceive disparate dangers as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions likely regularly offered direct and indirect avenues for addressing hazar...

For over two decades, researchers in the field of human social neuroendocrinology have been using single-dose pharmacological challenge protocols to determine the causal effects of testosterone on psychological, behavioural, and neural processes. Most of these single-dose administration studies have so far used (1) single-sex samples and (2) varyin...

Sociopolitical attitudes are often the root cause of conflicts between individuals, groups, and even nations, but little is known about the origin of individual differences in sociopolitical orientation. We test a combination of economic and evolutionary ideas about the degree to which the mating market, sex, age, and income affect sociopolitical o...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vo...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either est...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurringwithin groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either esta...