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Human mate choice research often concerns sex differences in the importance of traits such as physical attractiveness and social status. A growing number of studies indicate that cues to social context, including other people who appear in stimulus photographs, can alter that individual's attractiveness. Fewer studies, however, consider judgements of traits other than physical attractiveness, such as wealth. Here we manipulate the presence/absence of other people in photographs of target models, and test the effects on judgments of both attractiveness and earnings (a proxy for status). Participants (N = 2044) rated either male or female models for either physical attractiveness or social/economic status when presented alone, with same sex others or with opposite sex others. We collectively refer to this manipulation as 'social context'. Male and female models received similar responses for physical attractiveness, but social context affected ratings of status differently for women and men. Males presented alongside other men received the highest status ratings while females presented alone were given the highest status ratings. Further, the status of females presented alongside a male was constrained by the rated status of that male. Our results suggests that high status may not directly lead to high attractiveness in men, but that status is more readily attributed to men than to women. This divide in status between the sexes is very clear when men and women are presented together, possibly reflecting one underlying mechanism of the modern day gender gap and sexist attitudes to women's economic participation. This adds complexity to our understanding of the relationship between attractiveness, status, and sex in the light of parental investment theory, sexual conflict and economic theory.

The facial width-to-height ratio (FWHR) is the width of the face divided by the height of the upper face. There is mixed evidence for the hypothesis that the FWHR is a cue of threat and dominance in the human face. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analyses of all peer-reviewed studies (and 2 unpublished studies) to estimate the magnitude of the sex difference in the FWHR, and the magnitude of the relationship between the FWHR and threatening and dominant behaviours and perceptions. Studies were eligible for inclusion if the authors reported an analysis involving the FWHR. Our analyses revealed that the FWHR was larger in men than in women (d = .11, n = 10,853), cued judgements of masculinity in men (r = .35, n of faces = 487; n of observers = 339), and was related to body mass index (r = .31, n = 2,506). Further, the FWHR predicted both threat behaviour in men (r = .16, n = 4,603) and dominance behaviour in both sexes (r = .12, n = 948) across a variety of indices. Individuals with larger FWHRs were judged by observers as more threatening (r = .46, n of faces = 1,691; n of observers = 2,076) and more dominant (r = .20, n of faces = 603; n of observers = 236) than those with smaller FWHRs. Individuals with larger FWHRs were also judged as less attractive (r = -.26, n of faces = 721; n of observers = 335), especially when women made the judgements. These findings provide some support for the hypothesis that the FWHR is part of an evolved cueing system of intra-sexual threat and dominance in men. A limitation of the meta-analyses on perceptions of threat and dominance were the low number of stimuli involving female and older adult faces.

Androphilia refers to attraction to adult males, whereas gynephilia refers to attraction to adult females. The current study employed self-report and viewing time (response time latency) measures of sexual attraction to determine the sexual orientation of Samoan cisgender men (i.e., males whose gender presentation and identity is concordant with their biological sex) who engage in sexual interactions with transgender male androphiles (known locally as fa'afafine) compared to: (1) Samoan cisgender men who only engage in sexual interactions with women, and (2) fa'afafine. As expected, both measures indicated that cisgender men who only engaged in sexual interactions with women exhibited a gynephilic pattern of sexual attraction, whereas fa'afafine exhibited an androphilic one. In contrast, both measures indicated that cisgender men who engaged in sexual interactions with fa'afafine demonstrated a bisexual pattern of sexual attraction. Most of the cisgender men who exhibited bisexual viewing times did not engage in sexual activity with both men and women indicating that the manner in which bisexual patterns of sexual attraction manifest behaviorally vary from one culture to the next.

Background: The proportion of male births has been shown to be over 50% in temperate climates around the world. Given that fluctuations in ambient temperature have previously been shown to affect sex allocation in humans, we examined the hypothesis that ambient temperature predicts fluctuations in the proportion of male births in New Zealand., Methodology/principal Findings: We tested three main hypotheses using time series analyses. Firstly, we used historical annual data in New Zealand spanning 1876-2009 to test for a positive effect of ambient temperature on the proportion of male births. The proportion of males born ranged by 3.17%, from 0.504 to 0.520, but no significant relationship was observed between male birth rates and mean annual temperature in the concurrent or previous years. Secondly, we examined whether changes in annual ambient temperature were negatively related to the proportion of male stillbirths from 1929-2009 and whether the proportion of male stillbirths negatively affected the proportion of male live births. We found no evidence that fewer male stillbirths occurred during warmer concurrent or previous years, though a declining trend in the proportion of male stillbirths was observed throughout the data. Thirdly, we tested whether seasonal ambient temperatures, or deviations from those seasonal patterns, were positively related to the proportion of male births using monthly data from 1980-2009. Patterns of male and female births are seasonal, but very similar throughout the year, resulting in a non-seasonal proportion of male births. However, no cross correlations between proportion of male births and lags of temperature were significant., Conclusions: Results showed, across all hypotheses under examination, that ambient temperatures were not related to the proportion of male births or the proportion of male stillbirths in New Zealand. While there is evidence that temperature may influence human sex allocation elsewhere, such effects of temperature are not universal.