Hey guys—has your wife or girlfriend ever shot you “a look” after a seemingly innocent conversation with another woman?
A new study may clear the air a bit, as a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has found women can sense when another woman is ovulating and tends to react by “guarding” her man.
In the study, researchers carried out four analyses with nearly 480 heterosexual engaged or married women. All volunteers were pulled from Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing tool. In each part of the study, the women saw photographs of a number of women, and were asked how inclined they would be, on a seven-point scale, for the women to become friends with their partner.
The researchers said volunteers were much more prone to want to put distance between the woman pictured and their partner when the woman in the photograph was ovulating. Volunteers were not informed which women were ovulating and, most likely, they didn’t take the idea into account. However, other studies have shown humans are subconsciously alert to various physical cues that reveal when women are more fertile.
“Research across species demonstrates that social perceptions, cognitions, and behaviors do temporarily shift in response to ovulation, and that these shifts may enhance individuals’ reproductive fitness,” the report said. “Similarly, psychological research on humans has demonstrated that (a) women’s perceptions and behaviors shift across their own cycles and (b) men respond to these cyclic shifts.”
Women with hot partners were even more guarded
The other parts of the study confirmed female volunteers were particularly guarded when they considered their mate as desirable, and when the woman in the photograph was physically appealing.
“Specifically, women with desirable partners reported that they would show increased sexual interest in their partners after viewing a high-fertility target, regardless of how attractive that target was,” the researchers wrote.
Despite this apparent impulse to guard one’s mate, the study authors noted there is very little evidence showing this strategy is effective in maintaining a relationship. The study team also pointed out that the picture used in the study were of women unfamiliar to the subjects, and different outcomes might result in scenarios involving friends or acquaintances.
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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