Experts

Menstrual Cycle In Women Affects Their Preferences, Study Suggests

By Kamal Nayan | Update Date: Feb 18, 2014 09:29 AM EST

If a woman loves his mate and suddenly she stops it, evolution has to be blamed. A new research has come up with the findings that explains how woman's preferences for mates changes according to the menstrual cycle. 

According to the findings, ovulating women prefer mates who display sexy traits like a masculine body and facial feature. However those traits are typically not desired in long-term mates. 

"Women sometimes get a bad rap for being fickle, but the changes they experience are not arbitrary," said Martie Haselton, a professor of psychology and communication studies at UCLA and the paper's senior author, in a press release. "Women experience intricately patterned preference shifts even though they might not serve any function in the present."

Researchers said the findings were less clear about specifically which male characteristics are most alluring to ovulating women. They agreed that male body scent was a strong driving point for women though. 

"Until the past decade, we all accepted this notion that human female sexuality was radically different from sexuality in all of these other animal species - that, unlike other species, human female sexuality was somehow walled off from reproductive hormones," Haselton said. "Then a set of studies emerged that challenged conventional wisdom."

According to a hypothesis, the male shift occurred because of evolutionary adaptation that has served our ancestors' reproductive interests even before the modern medicine was accepted. 

"If women understand the logic behind these shifts, it might better inform their sexual decision-making so that if they notice suddenly that they're attracted to the guy in the next cubicle at work, it doesn't necessarily mean that they don't have a great long-term partner," Haselton added in the press release. "They're just experiencing a fleeting echo from the past." 

The findings will appear this month in the Psychological Bulletin.

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