Mating strategy, disgust, and food neophobia

•First direct evidence of a link between food neophobia and trait-level disgust.•First evidence suggesting that food neophobia is related to sexual disgust.•First evidence of a connection between food neophobia and mating strategy.•Puts forth a novel, testable hypothesis to explain current findings....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Appetite 2015-02, Vol.85, p.30-35
Main Authors: Al-Shawaf, Laith, Lewis, David M.G., Alley, Thomas R., Buss, David M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
Choice Behavior
Disgust
Emotions
Evolutionary psychology
Female
Food neophobia
Food preferences
Food Preferences - psychology
Food selection
Humans
Male
Mating strategy
Middle Aged
Sexual Behavior - psychology
Young Adult
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Summary:•First direct evidence of a link between food neophobia and trait-level disgust.•First evidence suggesting that food neophobia is related to sexual disgust.•First evidence of a connection between food neophobia and mating strategy.•Puts forth a novel, testable hypothesis to explain current findings. Food neophobia and disgust are commonly thought to be linked, but this hypothesis is typically implicitly assumed rather than directly tested. Evidence for the connection has been based on conceptually and empirically unsound measures of disgust, unpublished research, and indirect findings. This study (N = 283) provides the first direct evidence of a relationship between trait-level food neophobia and trait-level pathogen disgust. Unexpectedly, we also found that food neophobia varies as a function of sexual disgust and is linked to mating strategy. Using an evolutionary framework, we propose a novel hypothesis that may account for these previously undiscovered findings: the food neophilia as mating display hypothesis. Our discussion centers on future research directions for discriminatively testing this novel hypothesis.
ISSN:0195-6663
1095-8304
DOI:10.1016/j.appet.2014.10.029