#243 Lars Penke: The Evolution Of Personality, Intelligence, And Mate Preferences
Dr. Lars Penke is Full Professor of Biological Personality Psychology at the Georg August University of Göttingen. His research interests include the evolutionary significance of individual differences, social endocrinology, links of somatometric measures of the body and face with psychological traits, the evolutionary psychology of mate choice, romantic relationships and sexuality, neurostructural indicators of intelligence and cognitive ageing, behavior genetics, and life history theory.
In this episode, we talk about personality, intelligence, and mate preferences from an evolutionary perspective. We start with personality, and go through the several different hypotheses for the evolutionary genetics of personality. We also discuss the literature on personality calibration, and the one on birth order effects. We refer to the limitations of personality inventories (including the Big Five), and then talk about how intelligence correlates with different indicators of robust brain development. We talk about the heritability of intelligence, and different approaches to try to identify the genes associated with it, like GWAS and GCTA. Finally, we discuss some literature on mate preferences. We talk about speed-dating scenarios, and what we can learn from them; and changes in women’s sexuality across their menstrual cycle, particularly in the ovulatory phase (or the luteal phase).
Time Links:
Personality from an evolutionary perspective
What we know (and don’t know) about the evolutionary genetics of personality
Is there personality calibration?
The role of the environment in personality development, and how it interacts with its innate aspects
The literature on birth order effects
The limitations of personality inventories
Intelligence and brain development
The heritability of intelligence
Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS) and Genome-wide complex trait analysis (GCTA), and the genetics of intelligence
Speed-dating to study mate preferences
Changes in women’s sexuality across the menstrual cycle
What about women on the pill?
The evolutionary rationale for human long-term pair-bonding
Follow Dr. Penke’s work!
Follow Dr. Penke’s work:
Faculty page: http://bit.ly/309hldK
Website: http://www.larspenke.eu/
ResearchGate profile: http://bit.ly/308rAPE
Twitter handle: @LarsPenke
Relevant articles:
Approaches to an evolutionary personality psychology: http://bit.ly/305dcYb
An integrative study of facultative personality calibration: http://bit.ly/33FaTgW
Genomic analysis of family data reveals additional genetic effects on intelligence and personality: http://bit.ly/31Kl81F
Using 26 thousand diary entries to show ovulatory changes in sexual desire and behaviour: http://bit.ly/2Z8jkle
Does Ovulation Change Women’s Sexual Desire, After All?: http://bit.ly/2yYWAp1