Social Psychology Commons^™

The Impact Of Environmental Variability On Perceptions Of Parental Ability From Bodily Cues, Kaitlyn Boykin

Master's Theses

This study aimed to extend work considering how bodily cues appear diagnostic of parental ability. I examined body adiposity and sexually dimorphic features for women (i.e., breast size) and men (i.e., muscularity). I further considered how salience of resource scarcity might heighten perceptions of a potential mate as an effective parent when possessing features that connote underlying resource availability (e.g., body fat). Participants were primed with resource scarcity or a control condition before assessing parental affordances of female and male targets. Targets were orthogonally manipulated to possess high and low levels of adiposity. Female targets were manipulated for breast size …