Interesting article Ovulating women shun their fathers

dcmraad · 04-12-2010 6:07pm #1

Just found an interesting article and thought I would pass it on. I am not sure if I ever thought or noticed before, what do you think out there. Is is something you have ever noticed?

PARIS: Women instinctively shun their fathers when they are most fertile, even as they seek out the companionship of their mothers, a new study has shown.
The reasons, say the researchers, is evolution. Females in other species have also been observed to give a wide birth to male kin during periods of maximum fertility.
"The behaviour has long been explained as a means of avoiding inbreeding and the negative consequences associated with it," explained lead author Debra Lieberman, from the University of Miami.

Mobile phones reveal the connection

"But until we conducted our study, nobody knew whether a similar pattern occurred in women."
Lieberman and colleagues examined mobile phone records of 48 women in their reproductive years, noting the date and duration of all calls with their fathers and, separately, their mothers over the course of a billing period.
They found that women called their dads less frequently during the days when the were ovulating, and would hang up sooner if the calls came the other way.

Far more likely to call mum

Overall, daughters were half as likely to ring their fathers during high fertility days compared to the period of menstruation. What's more, the conversations that did occur lasted about half as long.
The researchers checked to be sure that the women were not giving their dads the slip in order to meet male suitors.
Nor were they simply trying to evade parental control: even when hormones were working overtime, the women were far more, rather than less, likely to give mum a ring.

Protection against weak offspring

Women have hard-wired mechanisms that protect against the risk of less healthy children, which tend to occur when close genetic relatives mate, the researchers concluded.
"It makes sense that women would reduce their interactions with male genetic relatives, who are undesirable mates," Lieberman said.
At the same time, when women are in their most fertile phase they are attracted to men with ‘masculine’ qualities such as husky voices and competitive personalities, previous research has shown.
The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Psychological Science.

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3897/ovulating-women-shun-their-fathers

Dudess · 04-12-2010 6:50pm

Heh, very contemporary way to conduct the study.

Ickle Magoo · 04-12-2010 6:59pm

To avoid inbreeding? Daughters avoid their fathers when they have their periods to avoid inbreeding? Seriously? I would think it is just because traditionally mothers would give more tea and sympathy, no? I guess 48 women is hardly constitutes a conclusive study in any case.

It's not true in my case anyway - the contact or the incest! :eek:

My dad would make me hot water bottles and he'd demand a game of chess to take my mind off things. My mum on the other hand was completely unsympathetic.

seenitall · 04-12-2010 7:03pm

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

To avoid inbreeding? Daughters avoid their fathers when they have their periods to avoid inbreeding? Seriously? I would think it is just because traditionally mothers would give more tea and sympathy, no? I guess 48 women is hardly constitutes a conclusive study in any case.

It's not true in my case anyway - the contact or the incest! :eek: My dad would make me hot water bottles and he'd demand a game of chess to take my mind off things. My mum on the other hand was completely unsympathetic.

No - that wouldn't make any sense. The OP is about the ovulation ("fertile days"), not periods.

Ickle Magoo · 04-12-2010 7:08pm

seenitall wrote: »

No - that wouldn't make any sense. The OP is about the ovulation ("fertile days"), not periods.

Replace periods with fertility and it still makes no sense - and with a survey group of less than 50, that's hardly surprising but yes, point taken.

metrovelvet · 04-12-2010 7:51pm

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

To avoid inbreeding? Daughters avoid their fathers when they have their periods to avoid inbreeding? Seriously? I would think it is just because traditionally mothers would give more tea and sympathy, no? I guess 48 women is hardly constitutes a conclusive study in any case.

It's not true in my case anyway - the contact or the incest! :eek: My dad would make me hot water bottles and he'd demand a game of chess to take my mind off things. My mum on the other hand was completely unsympathetic.

Ovulating, not menstruating. Lol I avoid everybody when Im on the rag so I dont kill them. :pac:

Chuchoter · 04-12-2010 8:45pm

Tiny sample size, too many variables (fights, dad doesn't use phone, does not account for visiting) means the experiment is invalid.

iguana · 04-12-2010 11:53pm

Maybe they call dad on the landline?

panda100 · 05-12-2010 11:32am

Its a sad indictment of Western education systems that this sort of sh*te gets funding.

Scarinae · 12-12-2010 1:55am

I'm puzzled by this one - Psychological Science is quite an influential psychology journal, from what I can gather (impact factor 5.090, ranked sixth amongst psychology journals worldwide), but 48 is a tiny sample size! I'm surprised that they consider that enough data to extrapolate any meaningful results from.

The original paper is here if anyone wants to read it! (too many statistics for me to be bothered to do anything more than skim at this hour, maybe tomorrow)

whatdoicare · 13-12-2010 12:39am

Eh, no.
I ovulated this week and I met and spoke to my dad every day of it - (I work near him and meet him for lunch)
This research is a heap of nonsense.

Monty Burnz · 13-12-2010 12:51am

Sorry to intrude ladies, but this is a peer-reviewed article published in a journal so every objection ye have raised and a thousand others have already been accounted for. Doesn't mean it's true in all cases (or true at all) but it's pretty good evidence.

Wibbs · 13-12-2010 9:33am

Being published in a "peer-reviewed article" is not always reliable. The same journals regularly publish pretty dubious guff opinion nailed down as fact. Especially at the more tabloid end of the genre and the non tabloid end still needs to fill copy space. The blank page is a cruel master and advertisers even worse.

While the findings are interesting enough, like Fishie said the sample size is so small as to be meaningless. It reminds me of cosmetic and hair ads "smoother looking skin in 10 days. 90% of women agree" kinda crap, with the small print "70 women polled stopped on the street and asked leading questions".

Proper research has already shown that women avoid men whose smell/immune systems are like their fathers and male siblings. When ovulating that might also come into play, but there are so many other factors coming into it.

Monty Burnz · 13-12-2010 2:58pm

Wibbs wrote: »

Being published in a "peer-reviewed article" is not always reliable. The same journals regularly publish pretty dubious guff opinion nailed down as fact. Especially at the more tabloid end of the genre and the non tabloid end still needs to fill copy space.

This is one of the big hitters, not a small-time journal that will publish any rot, as Fishie points out:

Fishie wrote: »

I'm puzzled by this one - Psychological Science is quite an influential psychology journal, from what I can gather (impact factor 5.090, ranked sixth amongst psychology journals worldwide)

I agree re. the sample size - I wonder why they didn't get more data? Re. trying to 'fill space' - that's not a problem for the top journals. Academic careers hang on getting articles published in high-impact factor journals like this one, and they will have a very high bar for rejecting submissions.

Ickle Magoo · 13-12-2010 3:20pm

Or as Richard Horton, editor-in-cheif at the British medical journal The Lancet points out;

The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.

I think we only need look as far as a certain Andrew Wakefield to know what he's talking about.

Monty Burnz · 13-12-2010 4:50pm

Hmm...a lot of hostility towards this research it seems.

Ickle Magoo · 13-12-2010 5:05pm

Cynicism, rather than hostility. I have a little more trouble assuming that by mere virtue of being peer reviewed by the editorial board of a psychology journal that the article and the conclusions it has reached are infallible or even "good evidence" of what they are claiming.

Monty Burnz · 13-12-2010 5:25pm

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

Cynicism, rather than hostility. I have a little more trouble assuming that by mere virtue of being peer reviewed by the editorial board of a psychology journal that the article and the conclusions it has reached are infallible or even "good evidence" of what they are claiming.

Fair enough - cynicism is a valuable tool in research.

At the same time, it's an interesting finding, and I presume someone will do a follow-up with a larger sample size.

iguana · 13-12-2010 8:17pm

Wibbs wrote: »

Proper research has already shown that women avoid men whose smell/immune systems are like their fathers and male siblings.

That's interesting, preference for a different immune system makes sense. Isn't there also, though, some suggestion that we tend to end up with partners who have quite a bit of resemblance to our close male relatives, especially our fathers, or is that just a false assumption?

Wibbs · 13-12-2010 11:39pm

Yea it's a weird one. The cliche is that men end up with their mothers, but it seems women are more likely to end up with mirrors of their dads, but only in personality and the like. Biologically not so much. IE the immune system/smell thang. This was observed in Kibbutz's in Israel and other collective farm type environments. The women would assume that men they were rasied with, even when most weren't related were "out of bounds" and tended to go outside the "family". The men were less concerned about that. Similar was found with adopted children. They imprint on the opposite sex parent, but avoid the DNA match(again even when its not theirs). The women did this more. I suppose it makes sense as a mechanism to avoid too close a genetic match. Especially in humans as we are so closely related as a species anyway. So lads, if you want the girl, act like, but don't smell like her dad.

cdaly_ · 14-12-2010 9:37am

Wibbs wrote: »

So lads, if you want the girl, act like, but don't smell like her dad.

So like "You're not going anywhere dressed like that!" kind of thing?...

14-12-2010 2:40pm

On a similar vein-

A study conducted by UCLA's Department of Psychiatry has revealed that the kind of male face a woman finds attractive can differ depending on where she is in her menstrual cycle.

For instance, if she is ovulating, she is attracted to men with rugged and masculine features.

However, if she is menstruating, she is more prone to be
attracted to a man with scissors lodged in his temple and a bat jammed
up his ass while he is on fire.

Further studies are expected.

Annnnywaaay... I'm cynical about the study the OP posted about but wouldn't disbelieve it. I don't think the mobile phone records of 48 women is enough to be anywhere near conclusive but it's interesting. Makes sense from an evolutionary POV and I'd imagine that it's mirrored by other species. Cynical of the research but think there could be something to the theory. Haven't noticed it myself, must pay attention.

Interestingly, I definitely notice that my sense of smell increases hugely when I'm ovulating (have a pretty good sense of smell anyway but it goes into over-drive; can literally smell when milk in about to go bad if it's in a closed fridge and I'm somewhere in the house) so maybe there is some weight to Wibbs' post about avoiding similar-smelling men. I definitely notice different houses and families smell differently.

dcmraad · 14-12-2010 2:56pm

00112984 wrote: »

On a similar vein-

A study conducted by UCLA's Department of Psychiatry has revealed that the kind of male face a woman finds attractive can differ depending on where she is in her menstrual cycle.

For instance, if she is ovulating, she is attracted to men with rugged and masculine features.

However, if she is menstruating, she is more prone to be
attracted to a man with scissors lodged in his temple and a bat jammed
up his ass while he is on fire.

Further studies are expected.

Annnnywaaay... I'm cynical about the study the OP posted about but wouldn't disbelieve it. I don't think the mobile phone records of 48 women is enough to be anywhere near conclusive but it's interesting. Makes sense from an evolutionary POV and I'd imagine that it's mirrored by other species. Cynical of the research but think there could be something to the theory. Haven't noticed it myself, must pay attention.

Interestingly, I definitely notice that my sense of smell increases hugely when I'm ovulating (have a pretty good sense of smell anyway but it goes into over-drive; can literally smell when milk in about to go bad if it's in a closed fridge and I'm somewhere in the house) so maybe there is some weight to Wibbs' post about avoiding similar-smelling men. I definitely notice different houses and families smell differently.

I only posted the link because it was interesting. Further study will be done. We already know women are attracted to different types of men dependent on their cycle. We know that we synch cycles too with a dominant female. We have a better sense of smell and better colour vision.

Interesting article Ovulating women shun their fathers

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