Hostility Mediates the Relations Between Self-Perceived Physical Health Status and Cost-Inflicting Mate Retention

Physical health has been argued to provide a range of reproductive advantages such as being preferentially chosen as a mate, having more disease-resistant children, and possessing a higher capacity to invest in mates, offspring, allies, and kin. Few researchers have, however, examined how self-perceptions of physical health status may correspond to the strategies that individuals use to vie for and to retain desired mates. In the current study, we asked 144 Canadian young adults currently in long-term romantic relationships to report their self-perceived severity and frequency of a range of physical health symptoms, feelings of romantic jealousy, and engagement in 2 domains of mate retention behavior (benefit-provisioning and cost-inflicting). Contrary to our hypothesis, those perceiving themselves to be in poorer physical health were not more jealous, but they did enact more cost-inflicting mate retention behavior. This led to the speculation that other kinds of negative emotionality may explain this relation. Hostility was explored post hoc as a potential mediator of the above association. As predicted, controlling for age, sex, and relationship length, higher hostility significantly mediated the positive link between the severity and frequency of self-perceived physical health issues and engagement in cost-inflicting mate retention. Results support the importance of self-perceived physical health status in guiding mate competition tactics and the role of hostility in understanding why those seeing themselves as poorer in health use more cost-inflicting behavior to retain their romantic partners. Public Significance Statement Across species, physical health status carries important information about an animal's desirability as a mate and their tendency to engage in particular kinds of behavior when competing for mates. Our results show that lower self-perceived physical health status among humans may encourage a greater expression of hostile feelings, which may facilitate the use of cost-inflicting behavior (e.g., manipulation and deceit) to guard a valued romantic relationship.