About
Our research group is mainly focused on two major areas: evolutionary psychology and decision-making. Our research team is comprised of several doctoral students, master's degree students and collaborating researchers interested in these topics. Within the area of Evolutionary Psychology, the goal is to understand intimate relationships and interpersonal attraction from an evolutionary perspective.
In turn, two research lines are now being developed in the Decision-making area: one about how we make decisions under uncertainty and how we understand the probability involved in those decisions; and another one about how we make judgements on justice or injustice of lived or witnessed situations and which are the effects of those judgements on our behavior.
We currently have three main research lines:
The first one deals with the effect of attractiveness on implicit cognitive processes, namely attention, memory and time perception. What our studies have been showing, both in laboratorial and more realistic contexts, is that very attractive stimuli tend to capture more attention and to be best remembered, and are also perceived as having had more presentation time than neutral or unattractive stimuli.
The second research line is linked to the study of infidelity, in particular the motivations that lead people to cheat on their partners and the emotional impact of cheating. Our results show that about 25% of people had at least one extramarital affair. They also show that there are differences between genders, with 40% of men and 20% of women stating they had cheated on their partners. In addition, women tend to cheat in a more emotional manner than men, and men in a more sexual manner than women. Our studies also demonstrate that people who are in a dissatisfying relationship, who attach great importance to physical attractiveness, who have many alternatives available, as well as a higher sexual desire and a lower self-regulation, are more prone to have extramarital affairs.
The third research line is about decision-making in romantic relationships. Here, we try to analyze, among other things, how people select their romantic partners, why they stay in unhappy relationships, and how they decide to end a relationship.
