Melissa Marie McDonald

Oakland University · Department of Psychology

Given the importance of reproductive choice in female mating strategies, women may be equipped with a threat-management system that functions to protect reproductive choice by avoiding individuals and situations that have historically posed an increased threat of sexual coercion. Previous research suggests that bias against outgroup men may be one...

The social science literature contains numerous examples of human tribalism and parochialism-the tendency to categorize individuals on the basis of their group membership, and treat ingroup members benevolently and outgroup members malevolently. We hypothesize that this tribal inclination is an adaptive response to the threat of coalitional aggress...

Recent research has shown that White women's bias against Black men increases with elevated fertility across the menstrual cycle. We demonstrate that the association between fertility and intergroup bias is not limited to groups defined by race, but extends to group categories that are minimally defined, and may depend on the extent to which women...

Adopting an evolutionary approach to the psychology of race bias, we posit that intergroup conflict perpetrated by male aggressors throughout human evolutionary history has shaped the psychology of modern forms of intergroup bias and that this psychology reflects the unique adaptive problems that differ between men and women in coping with male agg...

The Oxford Handbook of Human Mating covers the contributions and up-to-date theories and empirical evidence from scientists regarding human mating strategies. The scientific studies of human mating have only recently risen, revealing fresh discoveries about mate attraction, mate choice, marital satisfaction, and other topics. Darwin’s sexual select...

Defense of reproductive choice is an important motivation in women's self-protection psychology for which the “staying alive theory” cannot fully account. Evidence indicates that some elements of women's self-protection psychology function to protect reproductive choice rather than survival, or may be equally well explained by either motivation. In...

Sex differences in religiosity are cross-culturally common and robust, yet it is unclear why sex differences in some cultures are larger than in others. Although women are more religious than men in most countries, religions frequently provide asymmetrical benefits to men at the expense of women. Two global analyses (51 countries and 74 countries)...

The circumvention of female reproductive choice via rape is a costly and evolutionarily persistent threat to women’s reproductive fitness. This is argued to have generated selection pressure for a precautionary threat management system for rape avoidance among women. Such a system would regulate women’s fear of rape as a functional emotional respon...

In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as local public health regulation and laws, the Rochester Center for Behavioral Medicine (RCBM) made a switch from being a primarily in-person clinic, to providing psychiatric treatment services solely via telehealth. To evaluate the impact of the switch and effectiveness of telehealth-del...

Peers and primary caregivers influence the development of religious beliefs during childhood and adolescence. However, previous research has not assessed whether childhood religious experiences with peers and primary caregivers are differently related to individual differences in adult religiosity. We investigated whether the frequency of childhood...

Belief in supernatural agents is ubiquitous, as evidenced by its prevalence in religion, folklore, and cultural practices. It is theorized that, given recurrent ancestral risks of predation and frequent contact with other dangerous agents, mechanisms for agency detection may have evolved and play an important role in facilitating belief in supernat...

Is the capacity for genocide “hard-wired” into the evolved psychology of our species? Using perspectives from evolutionary psychology, this chapter discusses and provides evidence for the evolved psychological underpinnings of intergroup violence and outlines how sexual selection may have prompted the evolution of psychological mechanisms that faci...

Science identity based frameworks have proven fruitful in predicting persistence in careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). However, much of the research in this area is qualitative or relies on measures of science identity that have not been validated. Here, we propose and provide initial evidence for the validity and...

Female sexual orientation has received less theoretical and empirical attention than male sexual orientation and few reviews are devoted to female sexual orientation. Moreover, research investigating female sexual orientation often underappreciates insights afforded by evolutionary theory. This review begins with an overview of the literature on fe...

Using an evolutionary perspective, we test the hypothesis that women's fear of rape will vary as a function of individual characteristics that increase vulnerability to rape, or which exacerbate the reproductive consequences thereof (i.e., mate value and conception risk). We also examine the internal structure and construct validity of the Fear of...

Exposure to an outgroup member voicing criticism of his or her own group fosters greater openness to the outgroup’s perspective. Research suggests that this effect owes its influence to a serial process in which participants’ perception of the risk involved in voicing internal criticism leads to an increase in the perceived credibility of the speak...

The origin of the tendency for men to value wealth more than women can be explained by both social role theory and evolutionary theory. We integrate these two perspectives to provide insight into a unique cultural context, the Jewish ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, where social roles are reversed, such that women are the primary breadwinners in...

Across a diversity of contexts, men tend to exhibit greater intergroup bias than do women. However, in the domain of dating, this trend is reversed, such that women more strongly prefer to date men of their own racial group. Researchers employing an evolutionary perspective suggest that this sex difference can be explained by an evolutionary histor...

Research suggests that hearing an outgroup member voice internal criticism increases individuals’ openness to the outgroup's perspective. We replicate and extend these findings in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Israeli participants exposed to a Palestinian official voicing internal criticism reported more openness to the Palestini...

Moral judgment is influenced by both automatic and deliberative processing systems, and moral conflict arises when these systems produce competing intuitions. We investigated the role of emotional arousal in inhibiting harmful action in a behavioral study of utilitarian tradeoffs in a 3D digital simulation of two classic “trolley” scenarios in whic...

Creating a sense of interpersonal similarity of attitudes and values is associated with increased attraction and liking. Applying these findings in an intergroup setting, though, has yielded mixed support. Theorizing from a social identity perspective suggests that highlighting intergroup similarity may lead to increased antipathy to the extent tha...

Humans perform copulatory behaviors that do not contribute directly to reproduction (e.g., cunnilingus, prolonged copulation). We conducted a content analysis of pornography to investigate whether such behaviors might contribute indirectly to reproduction by influencing ejaculate volume—an indicator of ejaculate quality. We coded 100 professional p...

Creating a sense of interpersonal similarity of attitudes and values is associated with increased attraction and liking. Applying these findings in an intergroup setting, though, has yielded mixed support. Theorizing from a social identity perspective suggests that highlighting intergroup similarity may lead to increased antipathy to the extent tha...

Intergroup conflict perpetrated by male aggressors throughout human evolutionary history is likely to have shaped psychological systems at the foundations of modern forms of intergroup conflict. We posit that sexual selection processes operating at both intra- and intersexual levels have shaped psychological biases in intergroup relations, and that...

One perspective on embodiment proposes that bodily states exert direct, context-free effects on psychological states, as in the research on “power poses.” We propose instead that bodily states influence psychology by pro- viding information about what actions are possible. If such an assessment is to be effective, however, it must consider the body...

A dual-audience signaling problem framework provides a deeper understanding of the perpetuation of group-based inequality. We describe a model of underachievement among minority youth that posits a necessary trade-off between academic success and peer social support that creates a dilemma not typically encountered by nonminorities. Preliminary evid...

Previous research has demonstrated that ostracism from a social group generates psychological distress. As it stands, only a few previous studies have found evidence that immediate reactions to ostracism are moderated by individual differences. Using the classic Cyberball paradigm, the present research examined a comprehensive set of personality mo...

Research on prepared learning demonstrates that fear-conditioning biases may exist to natural hazards (e.g., snakes) compared to nonnatural hazards (e.g., electrical cords) and that fear is more readily learned toward exemplars of a racial out-group than toward exemplars of one's own race. Here we push the limits of the generalizability of the mech...

Researchers adopting an evolutionary perspective have conceptualized the Dark Triad as an exploitative interpersonal style reflective of a fast life history strategy. However, not all research has supported this claim. We posit that different elements of the constructs associated with the Dark Triad may reflect different life history strategies. Ou...

Experimentally investigating the relationship between moral judgment and action is difficult when the action of interest entails harming others. We adopt a new approach to this problem by placing subjects in an immersive, virtual reality environment that simulates the classic "trolley problem." In this moral dilemma, the majority of research partic...

Research shows that women more positively evaluate targets evincing cues of high male genetic quality as a function of fertility across the menstrual cycle. Recently, a link between fertility and anti-black race bias has also been documented, an effect that is argued to serve a sexual coercion avoidance function. Here we demonstrate that both effec...

Previous research suggests that several individual and cultural level attitudes, cognitions, and societal structures may have evolved to mitigate the pathogen threats posed by intergroup interactions. It has been suggested that these anti-pathogen defenses are at the root of conservative political ideology. Here, we test a hypothesis that political...