Common Coupling
Relative Income and Mental Health in Couples
Demid Getik
Economic Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
The share of couples where the wife out-earns the husband is increasing globally. In this paper, I examine how this dynamic affects mental health. Using data on the 2001 marital cohort in Sweden, I show that while mental health is positively associated with own and spousal income, it is negatively linked to the wife’s relative income. In the most conservative specification, the wife starting to earn more increases the likelihood of a mental health diagnosis by 8-11%. This represents a significant indirect cost of changes in family dynamics.
Gender Wage Gap, Bargaining Power, and Charitable Giving of Households
So Yoon Ahn & Meiqing Ren
Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We show that gender-specific labor market conditions significantly affect married couples’ charitable giving in the US. Using Bartik-style wage measures, we find that when potential relative female wages increase by 1 percentage point, households’ charitable giving share out of family income increases by 2.2%. The impact from a 1 SD change in relative wages for couples with given education and races is comparable to the implied effect of Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 2017, which changed donation incentives significantly. Moreover, contributions to religious organizations, favored by women, increase when relative wages rise. Our results are consistent with household bargaining explanations.
Increases in LGB Identification Among US Adults, 2014–2021
Jean Twenge, Brooke Wells & Jennifer Le
Sexuality Research and Social Policy, September 2024, Pages 863–878
Methods: Data are from the nationally representative Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS; n = 1.5 million) of US adults from 2014 to 2021.
Results: An increasing number of US adults identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) between 2014 and 2021. LGB identification increased from 3.4% in 2014–2015 to 5.5% in 2020–2021 among all adults and from 7.6% in 2014–2015 to 15.7% in 2020–2021 among young adults ages 18 to 24. The increase in LGB identification appeared in both “blue” liberal states and “red” conservative states, suggesting a nationwide rather than regional shift.
Sexual assault victims face a penalty for adjacent consent
Jillian Jordan & Roseanna Sommers
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 20 August 2024
Abstract:
Across 11 experimental studies (n = 12,257), we show that female victims of sexual assault are blamed more and seen as less morally virtuous if their assault follows voluntary sexual intimacy, a factor we term “adjacent consent”. Moreover, we illuminate a psychological mechanism contributing to this penalty: When a woman who provided no consent whatsoever is assaulted, people tend to see her as more moral than if she were not victimized (the “Virtuous Victim Effect”) -- yet people do not extend the same moral elevation to victims who consented to sex-adjacent activity before they were assaulted. Adjacent consent plays a unique role in undermining the moral elevation of rape victims; respondents continue to elevate victims when, in the absence of adjacent consent, we introduce other information that makes the perpetrator seem less abhorrent or that makes the victim seem promiscuous, reckless, or sexually interested in her perpetrator. Furthermore, adjacent consent disqualifies rape victims from moral elevation in the eyes of a wide swath of respondents -- including political liberals and undergraduates who, when no assault occurs, have no moral objection to (or even applaud) the victim’s voluntary sexual intimacy. Our results thus illuminate how sexual assault victims may be penalized for adjacent consent by even progressive or “sex-positive” communities. Finally, we identify a potential real-world consequence of adjacent consent: using field data from over 180,000 students across 33 U.S. universities, we find evidence that victims are less likely to report their sexual assaults in cases involving adjacent consent.
Encoding of female mating dynamics by a hypothalamic line attractor
Mengyu Liu et al.
Nature, forthcoming
Abstract:
Females exhibit complex, dynamic behaviors during mating with variable sexual receptivity depending on hormonal status. However, how their brains encode the dynamics of mating and receptivity remains largely unknown. The ventromedial hypothalamus, ventro-lateral subdivision contains estrogen receptor type 1-positive neurons that control mating receptivity in female mice. Unsupervised dynamical systems analysis of calcium imaging data from these neurons during mating uncovered a dimension with slow ramping activity, generating a line attractor in neural state space. Neural perturbations in behaving females demonstrated relaxation of population activity back into the attractor. During mating population activity integrated male cues to ramp up along this attractor, peaking just before ejaculation. Activity in the attractor dimension was positively correlated with the degree of receptivity. Longitudinal imaging revealed that attractor dynamics appear and disappear across the estrus cycle and are hormone-dependent. These observations suggest that a hypothalamic line attractor encodes a persistent, escalating state of female sexual arousal or drive during mating. They also demonstrate that attractors can be reversibly modulated by hormonal status, on a timescale of days.
Hormonal and cycle phase predictors of within-women shifts in self-perceived attractiveness: Tests of alternative functional models
Goirik Gupta, Zachary Simmons & James Roney
Hormones and Behavior, August 2024
Abstract:
Prior research has produced mixed findings regarding whether women feel more attractive during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Here, we analyzed cycle phase and hormonal predictors of women's self-perceived attractiveness (SPA) assessed within a daily diary study. Forty-three women indicated their SPA, sexual desire, and interest in their own partners or other potential mates each day across 1–2 menstrual cycles; saliva samples collected on corresponding days were assayed for estradiol, progesterone, and testosterone; and photos of the women taken at weekly intervals were rated for attractiveness. Contrary to some prior studies, we did not find a significant increase in SPA within the estimated fertile window (i.e., cycle days when conception is possible). However, within-cycle fluctuations in progesterone were significantly negatively associated with shifts in SPA, with a visible nadir in SPA in the mid-luteal phase. Women's sexual desire and SPA were positively associated, and the two variables fluctuated in very similar ways across the cycle. Third-party ratings of women's photos provided no evidence that women's SPA simply tracked actual changes in their visible attractiveness. Finally, for partnered women, changes in SPA correlated with shifts in attraction to own partners at least as strongly as it did with shifts in fantasy about extra-pair partners. Our findings provide preliminary evidence for the idea that SPA is a component of women's sexual motivation that may change in ways similar to other hormonally regulated shifts in motivational priorities. Additional large-scale studies are necessary to test replication of these preliminary findings.