| Popular music,which is construed as an important form of cultural products and widely consumed in our daily life, has gained much attention and exploration from numerous researchers with different research orientation. Among which one refers to social constructivists who espouse the music content and genre will be affected by various environmental forces(social and economic conditions). While evolution psychologists contend the content of song lyrics keeps invariant to time and place precisely because it serves as instantiation of our evolved universal human nature, especially for human sexuality. By applying Darwinism literary analysis to song lyrics, the current study tried to identify the recurring themes complying with the key tenets of mating preference in evolutionary psychology. From the perspectives of seeking and offering attributes that each sex preferred to,we content-analyzed the lyrics with the goal to investigate the similarities and differences in mating preference in both sex, and to explore whether the mating criteria would change spanning different time periods and environmental settings.Study 1 qualitatively analyzed 197 pieces of song lyrics collected from professional music charts over a period of three decades in contemporary China by utilizing thematic content analysis. The findings demonstrated that (1)five prominent themes were identified, including attributes preferred in prospective mates,love and commitment, sexual infidelity, paternity uncertainty and proclivity to engage in conspicuous consumption. Thirteen subthemes and fifteen third-level themes were displayed in lyrics as well.From the thematic level, themes of love and commitment and conspicuous consumption revealed cultural differences while the themes concerning sexual infidelity and paternity uncertainty were preferred by different sex. (2)At the attribute seeking level, both sex place equal importance to fidelity,considerate and exciting personality, nevertheless,sex differences displayed in the proclivity that men were more likely to prefer physical attractiveness than women while women highlighted honesty and reliability much more than men. As for the secondary attribute both sex draw less attention to,women showed greater demand for resources than men.(3) From the attributes offering perspective,both sex tended to exhibit interior quality when attracting prospective mates and men were more likely to offer such attributes conforming to women’ expectations. (4) The quantity of mating criteria fluctuated over the three decades. Overall,the demands of seeking attribute about physical attractiveness and fidelity had been on a rise,and the pursuit in typical considerate-kind attribute,instead,had declined over the past 30 years.Meanwhile, both physical attractiveness and personality traits were of greater concern for women when evaluating a mate. The attribute of exciting personality was most frequently mentioned in the 80’s song lyrics and experienced a dramatical decrease since then. Such results indicated the social context might, to some degree,enhance or weaken the strength of some aspects of mating criteria.Study 2 replicated the content analysis of the mating preferences of characters in another source of literary data:179 songs in KTV music charts randomly selected from 2 different area(Xi’an and Wuhan). The results illustrated the sex difference in mating preferences found in study 1 was consistent in current study and displayed in a more robust way. In addition to the similarities in mate selection criteria, we still found some differences in strength when seeking and offering the attributes between the 2 different culture-rooted plots. Specifically,men in the south were more likely than the northwesters to sing about women’s considerate-kind attributes and exhibited artistic attributes of self while women prefer mates possess the attribute fidelity and show emotional reliance when compared with women in northwest. Men in south were had more proclivity to show ones exciting personality while women seek for men with honesty and reliability than southern women.Based on the preferred attributes when selecting mates identified from the previous studies,study 3 attempted to explore the sex differences in framing effects driven by negativity bias within the mating domain. Men and women evaluated 11 prospective mates described using either negatively and positively framed attribute information. Findings indicated that women were more susceptible to negative information about mates and this robust difference remained stable when evaluating either high or low quality mates. At the attribute level,women exhibited greater negative bias for honesty and reliability,emotional reliance,intelligence and possessing resources while both sex show the same sensitivity for attributes kindness, consideration and fidelity. This reveals women were more vigilant and discriminable in the mating domain which is partly consistent with the evolutionary tenets of parental investment theory and the rest part may be explained by socialization,... |
