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Cahill, L.C. 
ORCID: 0000-0002-7897-0862,
2023.
The influence of situational threat cues on men’s body shape and size preferences.
PhD, Nottingham Trent University.
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Abstract
Previous research has examined men's body shape and size preferences concerning waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) and body mass index (BMI). However, such research has failed to account for the impact of external cues or to investigate the influence of immediate situational cues at the individual level. This thesis aims to examine the effects of mortality, masculinity, and pathogen situational threat cues on men's WHR and BMI preferences, as well as on their preferences for specific body areas. To achieve this, we developed computerised stimuli that vary in WHR and BMI and a novel eye-tracking paradigm that measures overt and covert attentional preferences.
We conducted four experiments (experiments one, two, three and five) to investigate our predictions that situational threat cues would increase men's preferences for more attractive WHRs (i.e., 0.7 WHR) and BMIs (i.e., average BMI), as well as increase their preferences for specific body areas. However, we found no evidence to support these predictions across a range of self-report measures and indicators of overt and covert attention. Experiment five, however, produced unexpected results related to pathogen threat. Participants exposed to pathogen threat cues displayed a significantly higher revisit count for the head and breast areas of interest than those in the control condition. This finding suggests that pathogen threat might increase preferences for those specific areas of the body.
Overall, our findings offer interesting insights into the influence of our situational threat cues on men’s body shape and size preferences and expand existing research in those fields. More broadly, our findings also have implications for a context-dependent view of mate selection, potentially suggesting that long-term contextual cues may influence men’s body shape and size preferences more than situational threat cues at the individual level.
We also completed an additional experiment (experiment four) to explore the effect of our masculinity threat prime further. In this, we explored whether threatening men’s masculinity (and women’s femininity) influenced their attitudes toward trans and gender-diverse people. Unlike findings from other countries (e.g., Poland), we found that threatening UK men’s masculinity did not influence their attitudes toward trans and gender-diverse people. Our findings offer important insights into how UK cisgender men may react to a masculinity
threat cue.
| Item Type: | Thesis | ||||||||||||||||
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| Creators: | Cahill, L.C. | ||||||||||||||||
| Contributors: |
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| Date: | October 2023 | ||||||||||||||||
| Rights: | The copyright in this work is held by the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re-use of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed to the author. | ||||||||||||||||
| Divisions: | Schools > School of Social Sciences | ||||||||||||||||
| Record created by: | Laura Ward | ||||||||||||||||
| Date Added: | 07 Nov 2024 09:19 | ||||||||||||||||
| Last Modified: | 07 Nov 2024 09:19 | ||||||||||||||||
| URI: | https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/52518 |
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