About
78
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Introduction
My research encompasses several topics in evolutionary-developmental psychology, biological psychology, cultural evolution, cognitive psychology, behavioral neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and evolutionary-developmental origins of health and disease.
You can contact me at tluo230(a)aucklanduni.ac.nz
Additional affiliations
May 2021 - May 2022
November 2014 - July 2015
January 2016 - June 2016
Position
- Research Assistant
Description
- Conducting research on the evolution of intelligence with Dr. Alexander Taylor
Education
December 2015 - March 2020
University of Auckland
Field of study
September 2010 - August 2012
Publications
Publications (78)
[Target Article.] Women’s capacity for sexual fluidity is at least as interesting a phenomenon from the point of view of evolutionary biology and behavioral endocrinology as exclusively homosexual orientation. Evolutionary hypotheses for female nonheterosexuality
have failed to fully account for the existence of these different categories of nonhet...
[Target Article.] Objectives: Sexual selection typically centers on bodily and psychological traits. Non-bodily traits ranging from housing and vehicles through art to social media can, however, influence sexual selection even in absence of the phenotype proper. The theoretical framework of human sexual selection is updated in this article by unify...
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global societal, economic, and social upheaval unseen in living memory. There have been substantial cross-national differences in the kinds of policies implemented by political decision-makers to prevent the spread of the virus, to test the population, and to manage infected patients. Among other factors, these po...
The development of costly traits such as immune function and secondary sexual traits is constrained by resource availability. The quality of developmental conditions and the availability of resources in ontogeny may therefore influence immune system functions and other biological traits. We analyzed causal pathways between family socioeconomic posi...
A scientific approach to human health and behaviour cannot afford to ignore the insights provided by evolutionary biology. Pure socialisation accounts overlook key evidence on the relations between biological sex and health, leading to biased understanding and potentially counterproductive interventions. Many observed sex disparities in health refl...
Background:
Evolutionary selection pressures, most notably sexual selection, have created (and continue to sustain) many psychobehavioral differences between females and males. One such domain where psychobehavioral sex differences may be prominent is romantic love. The ways in which females and males may experience and express romantic love differ...
Introduction
Although some findings indicate that yoga can reduce stress and anxiety, many studies present mixed results. The potential of yoga interventions to alleviate anxiety, including the mechanisms and boundary conditions by which it does so, is an under-researched topic. Anxiety is often divided into “state anxiety” and “trait anxiety,” the...
The dominant evolutionary theory of sexual attraction posits that attraction serves as a psychobehavioral and motivational mechanism for identifying healthy, fertile, and appropriate mates. According to this theory, humans and animals display cues that reflect their mate quality and, if successful, are perceived as attractive by potential mates. Th...
The internet can deliver scalable and accessible treatments for addiction and sexual health. This study investigated reasons for changing pornography use and the feasibility and impact of a brief internet-delivered intervention. The intervention delivered goal setting and goal review, action and coping planning, self-monitoring, social support and...
Darwin’s theory of sexual selection refers to a form of natural selection that operates on reproductive success. Sexual selection comprises any variation in direct fitness among different phenotypes caused by their ability to gain sexual partners, produce fertilized eggs, and generate offspring. Sexual selection is a subcategory of natural selectio...
We propose that major depressive disorder is not a unitary disease. Instead, different triggering factors causing periods of low mood can give rise to different and sometimes even opposite symptom patterns. Some of the symptoms of depression are maladaptive; others may be psychobehavioural adaptions to solve the adaptive problem that triggered the...
Schizophrenia has been an evolutionary paradox: it has high heritability, but it is associated with decreased reproductive success. The causal genetic variants underlying schizophrenia are thought to be under weak negative selection. To unravel this paradox, many evolutionary explanations have been suggested for schizophrenia. We critically discuss...
Objective
Findings on the associations between sex hormones and immune function are scarce and mixed, especially in women. To contribute to the understanding on how sex hormones and immune function interact, we analyzed relationships between testosterone, estradiol, and immune responses in women.Methods
Two doses of hepatitis B vaccine were adminis...
Significance
In many monogamous species, a substantial proportion of offspring is sired by other males than the one providing care at the nest. Although females often solicit extra-pair mating, the benefits of extra-pair copulations to females are not fully understood. In this study on pied flycatchers, we tested whether extra-pair paternity in nei...
Objective
Phenotypic markers associated with developmental stability such as fluctuating asymmetry, facial attractiveness, and reports of minor ailments can also act as indicators of overall physical health. However, few studies have assessed whether these markers might also be cues of mental health. We tested whether self- and other-perceived faci...
We thank Sharpe and colleagues for the opportunity to discuss our article titled “The dark side of the rainbow: Homosexuals and bisexuals have higher Dark Triad traits than heterosexuals” in more detail. Here, we address the methodological concerns raised by Sharpe et al. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111270) and conclude by discussing our c...
We thank Sharpe and colleagues for the opportunity to discuss our article titled “The dark side of the rainbow: Homosexuals and bisexuals have higher Dark Triad traits than heterosexuals” in more detail. Here, we address the methodological concerns raised by Sharpe et al. and conclude by discussing our critics’ problematic suggestion that there is...
The aim of this project was to identify the range of change strategies used for gambling harm reduction and to create resources on implementing these strategies in real-life situations. The resources for gambling were developed using cocreation with experts with lived experience.
Over a two-stage data mining and review process, we developed four s...
The presence of pathogens has imposed constant threats to human survival and reproduction. Selective pressures exerted by pathogens have shaped our array of immune functions—including physiological, psychological, and behavioral immune systems. Pathogens and epidemics have plagued humankind and our ancestors from their dawn, yet despite advances in...
Research on the Dark Triad traits — psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism — reveals malevolent, transgressive, and self-centered aspects of personality. Little is known about the Dark Triad traits in individuals differing in sexual orientation, with some studies showing that non-heterosexual individuals have Dark Triad profiles resembling t...
Habitat quality has direct effects on the evolutionary fitness of breeding organisms, which is why it is believed that animals tend to have an evolved preference for the best possible habitats. However, some animals may mistakenly choose to reproduce in habitats that decrease their fitness, resulting in ‘ecological traps’. In this study, we tested...
Psychological sex differences have been studied scientifically for more than a century, yet linguists still debate about the existence, magnitude, and causes of such differences in language use. Advances in psychology and cognitive neuroscience have shown the importance of sex and sexual orientation for various psychobehavioural traits, but the ext...
In this introductory chapter, we discuss the nexus between evolutionary theory and behavioral genetics, using it to elucidate the biological origins of human behavior and motivational predispositions. We introduce relevant behavioral genetics methods and evolutionary theoretical background to provide readers with the necessary conceptual tools to d...
Zietsch and Sidari (2020) argue that life history theory does not offer an appropriate model for understanding inter-individual trait covariation. We examine in great detail four major claims of Zietsch and Sidari’s critique of life history theory as an explanation of inter-individual covariation among phenotypic, especially psychometric, traits. W...
Humans have been using fire for hundreds of millennia, creating an ancestral expansion toward the nocturnal niche. The new adaptive challenges faced at night were recurrent enough to amplify existing psychological variation in our species. Night-time is dangerous and mysterious, so it selects for individuals with higher tendencies for paranoia, ris...
Objective
The ability of parasites to hijack the nervous system, manipulating the host’s physiology and behavior in ways that enhance the parasite’s fitness while damaging host fitness, is a topic of ongoing research interest in evolutionary biology, but is largely overlooked in mental health research. Nevertheless, recent evidence has shown that T...
The dominant evolutionary theory of sexual attraction posits that attraction serves as a psychological mechanism for identifying healthy, fertile, and appropriate mates. According to this theory, humans and animals display cues that reflect their mate quality and are perceived as attractive by potential mates. There is evidence for such valid cues...
While COVID-19 infection and mortality rates are soaring in Western countries, Southeast Asian countries have successfully avoided the second wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic despite high population density. We provide a biochemical hypothesis for the connection between low COVID-19 incidence, mortality rates, and high visceral adiposity in Southeas...
Bipolar disorder is a mental health disorder characterized by extreme shifts in mood, high suicide rate, sleep problems, and dysfunction of psychological traits like self-esteem (feeling inferior when depressed and superior when manic). Bipolar disorder is rare among populations that have not adopted contemporary Western lifestyles, which supports...
This dataset includes psycholinguistic data on 694 English-language and 451 Dutch-language novels, acquired with computerised analysis of digitised novels published mainly between 1800 and 2018. The English-language novels have a total word count of 66.9 million words, while the Dutch-language novels comprise 49.6 million words, therefore offering...
Bisexual behavior is an order of magnitude more common than exclusive homosexuality in women. Many evolutionary hypotheses on sexual orientation have focused on homosexuality, particularly in men, yet there has recently been a growing recognition that male and female homosexuality may have different evolutionary origins, and that the various forms...
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global societal, economic, and social upheaval unseen in living memory. There have been substantial differences in the kinds of policies implemented by political decision-makers to prevent the spread of the virus, to test the population, and to manage infected patients. Among other factors, these policies vary wit...
Although obesity is known to be a risk factor for COVID-19 severity, there is an urgent need to distinguish between different kinds of fat – visceral and subcutaneous fat – and their inflammation status in COVID-19. These different fat types have partially diverging biochemical roles in the human body, and they are differentially associated with SA...
The elemental composition of organisms belongs to a suite of functional traits that change during development in response to environmental conditions. However, associations between adaptive variations in developmental speed and elemental body composition are not well understood. We compared body mass, elemental body composition, food uptake and fat...
Immune function, height and resource accumulation comprise important life history traits in humans. Resource availability models arising from life history theory suggest that socioeconomic conditions influence immune function, growth and health status. In this study, we tested whether there are associations between family income during ontogeny, ad...
Only dominant individuals have unrestricted access to contested resources in group-living animals. in birds, subordinates with restricted access to resources may respond to intragroup contests by acquiring extra body reserves to avoid periods of food shortage. In turn, higher body mass reduces agility and increases predation and mortality risk to s...
We present data from 122 nations showing that Baumard’s argument on the ecological predictors of life history strategies and innovation is incomplete. Our analyses indicate that wealth, parasite stress, and cold climate impose orthogonal effects on life histories, innovation,
and industrialization. Baumard also overlooks the historical exploitation...
We present data from 122 nations showing that Baumard's argument on the ecological predictors of life history strategies and innovation is incomplete. Our analyses indicate that wealth, parasite stress, and cold climate impose orthogonal effects on life histories, innovation, and industrialization. Baumard also overlooks the historical exploitation...
Eating disorders are evolutionarily novel conditions. They lead to some of the highest mortality rates of all psychiatric disorders. Several evolutionary hypotheses have been proposed for eating disorders, but only the intrasexual competition hypothesis is extensively supported by evidence. We present the mismatch hypothesis as a necessary extensio...
The elemental composition of organisms relates to a suite of functional traits that change during development in response to environmental conditions. It may be a part of a phenomenon known as ‘developmental programming’, which hypothetically creates phenotypes that are better adapted to their environments. However, associations between development...
Evolution causes biological and cultural diversity through adaptation to environmental conditions. This idea forms the cornerstone of recent research on the ecological origins of innovation and creativity, advanced prominently by Van de Vliert and Murray (2018) as the ecotheory of creativity. Van de Vliert and Murray propose that heat demands and c...
The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of storytelling in data interpretation, decision-making and individual-level adoption of business analytics (BA).
Design/methodology/approach:
Existing theory is extended by introducing the concept of BA data-driven storytelling and by synthesizing insights from BA, storytelling, behavioral research...
Female sexual orientation and its various species-wide and species-specific manifestations comprise a topic to which one scientific article can hardly do justice. We have nevertheless attempted to analyze the topic more broadly than any one scientific article of which we are aware. To this end, we applied Tinbergen’s four questions and life history...
Evolution causes biological and cultural diversity through adaptation to environmental conditions. This idea forms the cornerstone of recent research on the ecological origins of innovation and creativity, advanced prominently by Van de Vliert and Murray (2018) as the ecotheory of creativity. Van de Vliert and Murray propose that heat
demands and c...
Brian Boyd is a leading scholar of evolutionary and biocultural approaches to art, especially literature. He conceives of art as a form of cognitive play with pattern that exercises and refines our creative, cognitive, emotional, and social skills. Brian Boyd has made a significant contribution to understanding the human capacity for and fascinatio...
The elemental composition of organisms belongs to a suite of functional traits that may adaptively respond to fluctuating selection pressures. Life history theory predicts that predation risk and resource limitations impose selection pressures on organisms' developmental time and are further associated with variability in energetic and behavioral t...
I provided a broad overview of extended phenotype theory, unifying it for the first time with life history theory and behavioral ecology in the Target Article titled "An updated theoretical framework for human sexual selection: From ecology, genetics, and life history to extended phenotypes" (Luoto, 2019). The empirical component of the Target Arti...
[In press for Behavioral and Brain Sciences].
We present data from 122 nations showing that Baumard’s argument about the ecological predictors of life history strategies and innovation is incomplete. Our analyses indicate that wealth, parasite stress, and cold climate impose orthogonal effects on life histories, innovation, and industrialization....
Objectives:
Male height and health affect a diverse range of social and economic outcomes such as competition for resources and mates. Life history theory predicts that limited availability of bioenergetic resources curbs the development of central life history functions such as somatic growth, immunity, and investment in offspring. Although genet...
Evidence suggests that brain serotonin (5-HT) is one of the central mediators of different types of animal personality. We tested this assumption in field crickets Gryllus integer using a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). Crickets were selected for slow and rapid development and tested for their coping styles under non-stressful condit...
Our romantic partners are not only a source of intimacy for us and of genetic information for our offspring—their qualities also signal something about us to the external world. “Mate choice copying” is a form of social learning which allows an individual to learn from the information gathered and mate choices made by others. Having examined the ne...
Motta-Mena and Puts (2017) have recently reviewed the endocrinological substrates of human female sexuality. We point out a shortcoming in their review, since their claim that estrogen “has a limited role, if any, in masculinizing the human brain and behavior” does not stand up to close scrutiny, especially when applied to females.
Predator-prey interactions are an important evolutionary force affecting the immunity of the prey. Parasitoids and mites pierce the cuticle of their prey, which respond by activating their immune system against predatory attacks. Immunity is a costly function for the organism, as it often competes with other life-history traits for limited nutrient...
Animals normally respond to stressful environmental stimuli by releasing glucocorticoid hormones. We investigated whether baseline corticosterone (CORT), handling-induced corticosterone concentration(s), and body condition indices of members of willow tit (Poecile montanus) groups differed while wintering in old growth forests and managed young for...
Research in pharmacopsychology has much to benefit from an evolutionary approach to psychopathology. This is because the possible benefits of medication can be properly understood only by analyzing why the symptoms of mental disorders exist in the first place. This rationale applies not only to major depressive disorder, but also to medicine more g...
Major depressive disorder constitutes one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. However, it is not a unitary disease — it is a heterogeneous syndrome, with patients differing remarkably in symptom profile, pathophysiology and treatment responsiveness. Previous attempts to subtype major depressive disorder have showed limited clinical appli...
Communities of symbiotic microorganisms that colonize the gastrointestinal tract play an important role in food digestion and protection against opportunistic microbes. Diet diversity increases the number of symbionts in the intestines, a benefit that is considered to impose no cost for the host organism. However, less is known about the possible i...
Deficiency of food resources in ontogeny is known to prolong an organism's developmental time and affect body size in adulthood. Yet life history traits are plastic: an organism can increase its growth rate to compensate for a period of slow growth, a phenomenon known as ‘compensatory growth’. We tested whether larvae of the greater wax moth Galler...
Recent experimental work on the relationship between cognitive processing and the appreciation of beauty has suggested that thought is a prerequisite for feeling beauty. This Commentary draws on research in cognitive science and neuroaesthetics to argue that although thought is one of the three primary constituents of beauty response, thought per s...
Vertebrates differ in their ability to mount an adaptive immune response to novel antigens. Bioenergetic resources available to an organism are finite; investment in reproduction compromises immune function and may therefore affect critical life history trade-offs. We tested whether reproduction impairs the ability to produce an antibody response a...
The causes and consequences of among-individual variation and covariation in behaviours are of substantial interest to behavioural ecology, but the proximate mechanisms underpinning this (co) variation are still unclear. Previous research suggests metabolic rate as a potential proximate mechanism to explain behavioural covariation. We measured the...
This poster presents our work on the evolution of female nonheterosexuality. It differs from our previous poster titled ”Female homosexuality: a testosterone-mediated fast life history strategy?” in that it is pitched to a more general audience.
Cuticle melanism in insects is linked to a number of life history traits: a positive relationship is hypothesized between melanism, immune function, fecundity and lifespan. However, it is not clear how activation of the immune system affects trade-offs between life history traits in female mealworm beetles (Tenebrio molitor) differing in cuticle me...
Factors such as temperature, habitat, larval density, food availability and food quality substantially affect organismal development. In addition, risk of predation has a complex impact on the behavioural and morphological life history responses of prey. Responses to predation risk seem to be mediated by physiological stress, which is an adaptation...
Drosophila body characteristics and negative geotaxis under spider predation
Data on dry body mass, lipid amount, nitrogen & carbon concentrations and climbing speed during negative geotaxis trials in Drosophila fruit flies (males, females) reared with spiders (predator identity) and in the control group (reared without predators).
A review on the phylogeny, ontogeny, and physiology of female homosexuality
Questions
Question (1)
Hi,
I am wondering how to get confidence intervals for coefficients in HLM software? I am using HLM8 specifically. It is curious that the program doesn't automatically report confidence intervals as SPSS does, especially because CIs are needed when writing up the results of multilevel analyses for papers. Have the developers decided not to include this feature or is there a way to get HLM to compute confidence intervals?
