Isn't this recession thing really going too far, whats going on man? well it seems like now life and relationships have got something to do with it too, oh yeah! like which guy ever thought about recession and a girl at the same time, I don't know how much this is true but I guess sometimes even scientists need to amuse themselves with something i guess they would call Wicked!!!...read on

This is an interesting theory:

Some scientists have argued that during a recession, men desire fuller figured women. So pass the enchiladas and let’s consider the evidence.

Amid plunging bank accounts and canceled vacations, behold: a bright spot. The recession might actually bring one thing that some women can welcome. Studies suggest that changes in the state of the economy can influence what men find sexually attractive in women– and when the economy’s bad, it’s good to be fat. Or, at least, a tiny bit fatter. It isn’t much, but it’s all we’ve got.

In 2005, Dr. Leif Nelson, an experimental psychologist then at NYU’s SternBusinessSchool, published a study that now cries out for our renewed attention.

“When the economy is clearly and uniformly tanking,” Dr. Nelson told The Daily Beast earlier this week, “what will emerge is some kind of a shift to more of an ideal of a fuller, plumper woman.”

The concept driving Nelson’s work is that people implicitly judge the overall availability of “resources” in the environment—both cash and food—based on how much of it they themselves have. This assessment, in turn, influences their choice of a romantic partner. Nelson’s work also assumes that feeling poor and feeling hungry, while not identical sensations, are linked to the same basic, underlying mechanism.

He himself does not try to explain what, or why, that is. “This is the sort of opaque black box of the process,” he says. “That feeling of resource scarcity goes into the black box and a relationship preference comes out the other side. Certainly what it is not is that men are introspecting and saying, ‘Hmm, how hungry am I right now? I need to recalibrate my preference in women.’

Nelson interprets this ultra-thin margin as the products of statistics, arguing that what is likely going on is that one group of men is swayed, fairly substantially, toward heavier women, while others might not be as affected. The average difference looks small, but it may stand in for something significantly, um, larger.

The concept driving Nelson’s work is that people implicitly judge the overall availability of “resources” in the environment—both cash and food—based on how much of it they themselves have. This assessment, in turn, influences their choice of a romantic partner. Nelson’s work also assumes that feeling poor and feeling hungry, while not identical sensations, are linked to the same basic, underlying mechanism.

He himself does not try to explain what, or why, that is. “This is the sort of opaque black box of the process,” he says. “That feeling of resource scarcity goes into the black box and a relationship preference comes out the other side. Certainly what it is not is that men are introspecting and saying, ‘Hmm, how hungry am I right now? I need to recalibrate my preference in women.’”

Nelson isn’t attached to various biological or psychological reasons that might explain his results, but Dr. Terry Pettijohn II, a psychologist who has done related research, has his own point of view.

Pettijohn believes that one major factor that determines what men consider sexually attractive in women is something he calls “the environmental-security hypothesis.” Men are likely to choose the women they’re involved with at least in part from an instinctual sense of what is in their own best interest, given the current state of the “environment.” During challenging economic times, men would gravitate toward women they intuited were mature, independent and protective; when times are flush, men wouldn’t prioritize these same values, and instead seek a woman who appeared to be “less emotionally strong, less physically strong,” Pettijohn says.

Pettijohn investigated his hypothesis in two different studies, looking at the facial features of the most popular American movie actresses from 1932-1995 and then, in a second study, looking at both the bodies and faces of Playboy Magazine’s Playmate of the Year from 1960, when the tradition began, through 2000. He found that during rocky economic and social times (which he calculated with a composite “General Hard Times Measure”), the most popular actresses appeared more mature, with smaller eyes, thinner faces, and stronger chins; likewise, the playmate of the year during these tumultuous periods were slightly “taller and heavier,” and also tended to have smaller eyes. By contrast, when things were good, the popular actresses had more baby-faced qualities—bigger eyes, chubbier cheeks—and the playmates tended to be “shorter and lighter.”

… Hot and Heavy

by Casey Schwartz