Stressed Men Prefer Wide-Bodied Women

You can argue with your spouse about why this is the case: men under stress find heavier women more attractive than do men who are not stressed. How do we know? Researchers at Britain’s Newcastle University divided a group of 81 men in half (kind of) and put one group through a series of exercises (counting backwards by 13s from 1,022) intended to induce stress. They then asked men in both groups, the stressed and unstressed, to look at 10 black-and-white frontal-view photographs of leotard-clad women (whose faces have been blocked out) whose body sizes range from very thin (or “emaciated,” in the study’s parlance) to obese. They were asked to identify which body they found most attractive, or ideal. A Newcastle news release reports that the men who were stressed gave significantly higher ratings to the normal weight and overweight figures than the non-stressed group did. Read the study here.