Ugh, This UCLA Professor Wants to Make Ovulation the New Time of Month?

By Amanda Lewis Mon., Nov. 19 2012 at 7:00 AM

UCLA Newsroom

OH HAI! Didn't see you there. You just happened to catch us reading this paper. You know, together. Left: Martie Haselton, right: Christina Larson.

Blaming your girlfriend's mood swings on her period is so last century. According to UCLA psychology and communications professor Martie Haselton, ovulation is "the new time of the month."

"This research... [has] been sort of a mini-revolution in understanding women's sexuality," Haselton says, referring both to her own work and to studies done by fellow evolutionary psychologists. Just before ovulation, she's found, women avoid contact with male kin. Their voices rise in pitch. And most recently, in a study published in November's Hormones and Behavior journal, she and graduate student Christina Larson determined that during this highly fertile window, women devalue relationships with partners that have long-term potential and feel closer to partners with more sex appeal.

Because, according to Haselton's dual mating hypothesis, women have evolved to want a hot, masculine lover and a high-status, caring husband -- and few men are both.

If that dichotomy sounds unreasonable or offensive, join the club. Evolutionary psychology remains a contentious discipline, seen by some as a legitimate field of study and others as a murky pseudoscience.

A few weeks ago, a burp from the mass indigestion caused by evolutionary psychology went viral when blogosphere outrage -- particularly from the scientist and feminist corners -- led CNN to remove an article from its website summarizing the results of a study about how ovulation affects voting (Fertile gals love the GOP!).

Haselton calls the retraction "stupid" and took to Twitter in a #healthtalk forum to defend the author behind that research, University of Texas at San Antonio assistant professor Kristina Durante, with whom she coauthored a 2006 study showing women dress more attractively during ovulation.

"People like to think of voting as cold and rational," Larson says, "which of course is ridiculous. It is influenced by biology, but not to the exclusion of other factors."

In spite of this public show of support, however, Haselton purses her lips at those in her field, like Durante, who rely on self-reported menstrual cycle data instead of testing subjects, as she does, for the hormone that indicates the onset of ovulation. Haselton also says her research doesn't invite vehement backlash as Durante's did because, "When it comes to sexuality, people buy it."

But not everyone does. Meredith Reiches, a Harvard lecturer in Human Evolutionary Biology, says several results in Larson and Haselton's most recent study are only marginally significant, statistically, and that Haselton's work may mistake culture for biology, perpetuating unfortunate stereotypes.

When it comes to female behavior, drawing the line between nature and nurture is fraught with uncomfortable precedent. In his 1889 book, The Evolution of Sex, the Scottish scientist Patrick Geddes famously rejected the pursuit of gender equality by declaring, "What was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament."

In 2010, on the lookout for all the modern-day Geddes in her own field, Reiches started an informal monthly Feminism and Evolutionary Biology Reading Group of five to ten of her fellow academics, whose expertise ranges from evolutionary biology and psychology to law, philosophy and cognitive neuroscience.

"The stories that reinforce power structures stick around," Reiches writes in an e-mail, before listing numerous places in this newest study where Haselton's science seems unsound.

Kate Clancy, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who collaborated with science blogger scicurious on tandem posts dissecting and railing against Durante's voting research, also questioned the biases behind Haselton's work, which draws conclusions about all of humanity from a small selection of so-called WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) UCLA undergraduates.

"The way we think about love and relationships is different from the way an agriculturalist thinks of it, or a forager, and probably quite different from our ancestors," she says in an e-mail. "So the question is how something could have evolved (this variation in romantic feelings and attraction) if the phenomenon (modern, Western conceptions of romance, monogamy and love) may not have existed in the past."

Although Haselton and Larson maintain that the attitudes of the 108 women they studied signify traits that are universal and biological, not confined to 21st century university hookup culture, they're not altogether convincing. The primary questions asked in their study -- Do other women find your partner desirable? How would you rate your partner's current and future social and financial status? -- reflect qualities that, in spite of this "dual mating hypothesis," seem both arbitrary and subjective, regardless of the time of month.

Reiches quite rightly points out that, with her dual mating hypothesis, Haselton "makes a pretty big assumption about women being attracted not to a particular mate but to some kind of ideal or central tendency." Reading over what the evolutionary psychology literature defines, vaguely and appallingly, as the type of masculine sexiness all women have evolved to be attracted to -- "masculine face... masculine voices, social dominance" -- it's worth questioning whether this study would have turned out quite differently if done among undergraduates at Bard, not UCLA.

Haselton and Larson do acknowledge the limitations of their work, saying that ovulation influences, but does not determine, behavior. Haselton (and others) also points out that the biggest issue with the media taking offense to studies linking ovulation to certain behavior is the misconception that women are more driven by their hormones than men, a sexist idea that is nowhere to be found in any of this research. She also complains that the mainstream media often reports her work "in a sexier way, in a gossip column-y kind of way."

And perhaps that's true. Reiches and Clancy offer serious critiques, but the popular press isn't always equipped to determine what is or isn't good science. Sexy research like Haselton's and Durante's provides click-bait that offer readers the grown-up equivalent of a horoscope, with slightly more authority: a convenient, cozy narrative to live by, a trickle of meaning to help answer the age-old question: Why am I who I am? Pinpointing who in this chain -- the study subjects, the scientists, the journalists, the readers -- is responsible for reinforcing gender stereotypes isn't always clear.

Maybe it's all of us.

The real question, though, is what happens when this research truly permeates pop psychology, when a woman puts on a glittery top and happens to click 'Ignore' when her brother calls, and her husband rolls his eyes, saying, "Somebody must be ovulating!"

"I don't know that it's a good thing," Haselton says, "but I think this research really captures people's attention. And I think that people really do want explanations for why things vary from day to day... It's more scientific than an anecdote, for sure."

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We Recommend

swgangestad

Martie Haselton and colleagues have published seminal papers contributing to a broader literature, newly emerging, documenting ways that women’s attention, interests, and behavior change across the ovulatory cycle. At least three dozen papers document such changes. All (including Dr. Haselton’s) underwent peer review. No doubt, any individual article is limited in a variety of ways: the population studied, the precise measures assessed, the robustness of statistical findings. And hence, any individual article can be criticized for being an incomplete documentation of a phenomenon. Enduring truths emerge over time. We may not fully understand, at this point, precisely what psychological changes across the ovulatory cycle mean. (Women in only a few traditional societies have been studied, as noted.) One can’t get to a fuller understanding, however, without the field growing through periods in which our understanding is less than complete. Having followed Martie Haselton’s work closely for the past decade, I know that she and her colleagues are serious and well-respected scientists who fully appreciate this perspective on this literature. Readers may come away with the impression that Amanda Lewis thinks – and perhaps you should too – that this research is silly science. To those truly interested in what the literature says, and what theoretical issues are outstanding, I recommend the primary sources. You get no accurate sense whatsoever from this thinly researched reporting of what researchers have found, as well as ways in which they cautiously construe their data.

Steven Gangestad, Distinguished Professor, University of New Mexico

swgangestad

hajks

KLJohnson

As a colleague of Dr. Haselton's, I was surprised to see her research endeavors described in a manner that trivialized their importance. Dr. Haselton's research examines the pronounced and sometimes counterintuitive impacts that hormones have on behavior. Knowledge of these impacts is crucial for understanding social behavior, broadly, and relationship development and maintenance, specifically. Her research is conducted using rigorous experimental methods, and her findings are described with precision and care. For unknown reasons, Ms. Lewis's report omits these important facts and instead succumbs to speculation without evidence. Your readers deserve better.

Kerri L. Johnson, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Psychology

University of California, Los Angeles

deblieb1

Ovulation is not new and humans (like many species) have evolution—not scientists—to thank for making ovulation a critical time in the menstrual cycle. For anyone interested in learning about recent findings about the effects of ovulation on women’s sexual psychology, I urge you to read the primary literature—and not rely on a reporter who remains innocent of evolutionary biology and psychology. Biologists have documented in a wide-range of species the phenomenon of female estrus. That is, females in other species are fertile during a short window of time each menstrual cycle and, in many species, females shift their behaviors during this time in ways that led, on average, to better reproductive outcomes. Haselton and colleagues are among the first to discover that even in humans, women exhibit these shifts. Haselton’s work has advanced our understanding of female sexuality showing that it is much more complex than scientists (and even cultural relativists) have thought. As a well-respected researcher across multiple disciplines within the academy (indeed, Haselton was a long-standing Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Evolution and Human Behavior), Haselton has expanded the range of questions researchers are now asking about close relationships, women’s health, and fertility. Rather than attempting to disparage research with such far-reaching implications, this reporter might have tried to understand it without retreating to the tired debate between culture versus biology.

Dr. Debra Lieberman, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Miami

billvh1

Amanda Lewis’ article is a poorly researched hatchet job that appears to be attacking Martie Haselton because Lewis is uncomfortable with what she sees as the political implications of Martie’s work. I’ve known Martie for over a decade and have read all of her papers – the positions attributed to her in this article are gross caricatures of her work. To choose one of many examples, she would never claim that her latest research paper conducted with UCLA students is representative of the entire world, or that culture doesn’t matter. In trying to poke fun at a provocative and critically important line of research on hormones and behavior, Amanda Lewis has misrepresented the work of a serious scholar, and from what I can tell misunderstood it as well. It’s ironic that Lewis essentially accuses Martie of importing anti-feminist pseudo-science into the public discourse when in fact Lewis is the only one engaged in that enterprise.

Bill von Hippel, Professor of Psychology, University of Queensland

Amanda_Lewis

@billvh1 I think I make it pretty clear that journalists in the popular press like myself have no way to tell what science is legitimate and what science isn't -- and I think you are attributing criticism made by *other scientists in the field of evolutionary biology* to me... which is weird, because I didn't make up their quotes, questions and critiques out of thin air.

billvh1

@Amanda_Lewis If you can't tell which science is legitimate and which isn't, then you shouldn't report science. Your readers count on you for your fact-checking and for your judgment, and I think you let them down in both cases in this article. The criticisms you report are politically motivated and ill informed, as is the entire treatment in this article.