Communication of Mate Quality in Humans

Abstract

In most human societies, individuals compare between numerous potential mates. Recent research on biological determinants of mate preferences explores the idea that attractive physical characteristics might be cues of underlying good genes. The first half of this chapter summarises this work on physical cues of mate quality, including facial, bodily, vocal and olfactory traits. The second half of the chapter speculates on how broad principles that arise out of this research might be directly transposed to understand potential good-gene effects on behaviour and ‘body language'. Reliability of behavioural cues betraying mate quality is likely to determine how far biological interpretations on behaviour can be applied, and an outline for how researchers might tackle this issue is proposed.