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century of mate preferences: The cultural evolution of values,” Journal of Marriage and Family Life 63:2 (May, 2001): 491-504. For an analysis of humor’s effect on attractiveness, see S. B. Kaufman, et al., “The role of creativity and humor in mate selection” in Mating Intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind’s reproductive system, edited by Glenn Gehr and Geoffrey Miller (Philadelphia: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007). For how dopamine levels in rats decrease with each sexual encounter, see D. F. Fiorino, et al., “Dynamic changes in nucleus accumbens dopamine efflux during the Coolidge effect in male rats,” Journal of Neuroscience 17 (June, 1997): 4849-4855. For those interested in the brain in love, I recommend Helen Fisher’s Why We Love: The nature and chemistry of romantic love (New York: Henry Holt, 2004). For the groundbreaking study on smell, see C. Wedekind, et al., “MHC-dependent mate preferences in humans,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 260 (1995): 245-249. For women’s preference of creativity over wealth at peak fertility, see M. Haselton and G. Miller, “Women’s fertility across the cycle increases short-term attractiveness of creative intelligence,” Human Nature 17:1 (March, 2006): 50-73. For one study on men’s smell preference for women nearing their peak fertility, see R. Thornhill, et al., “Major histocompatibility complex genes, symmetry, body scent attractiveness in men and women,” Behavioral Ecology 14:5 (September, 2003): 668-678. For the lemon-scented rats, see T. J. Fillion and E. M. Blass, “Infantile experience with suckling odors determines adult sexual behavior in male rats,” Science 231 (1986): 729-731. For a possible genetic cause to promiscuity, see Edmund Rolls, The Brain and Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For a study on prairie voles and vasopressin, see C. Sue Carter, et al., “Physiological substrates of mammalian monogamy: The prairie vole model,” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 19:2 (1995): 303-314.

For marital mavens, I am obviously a big John Gottman fan. He has written several accessible books, including Gottman, et al., Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage: America’s Love Lab Experts Share Their Strategies for Strengthening Your Relationship (New York: Crown, 2006) and Gottman and Nan Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from America’s Foremost Relationship Expert (New York: Crown, 1999). Ted Huston’s PAIR project can be found on the web at http://www.utexas.edu/research/pair/ourresearch/index.html. For our general ineptitude at judging marital satisfaction, see R. Ebling and R. Levenson, “Who are the marital experts?” Journal of Marriage and Family 65:1 (February, 2003): 130- 142. For the benefits of perceiving one’s partner as better than he or she is, see S. Murray, “The quest for conviction: Motivated cognition in romantic relationships,” Psychological Inquiry 10:1 (1999), 23-33. For the value of wearing rose-colored glasses when viewing one’s husband, see M. Hawkins, et al., “Marital sentiment override: Does it influence couples’ perceptions?” Journal of Marriage and Family 64:1 (February, 2002): 193-201. For the tendency of partners to look more like each other over time, see R. B. Zajonc, et al., “Convergence in the physical appearance of spouses,” Motivation and Emotion 11:4 (December, 1987): 335-346.

This list includes only a few general overviews and the studies that receive more in-depth exploration in Decoding Love. I have left out a great deal of outstanding work, much of it appearing as articles in scholarly journals. In all honesty, I have been a pygmy standing on the shoulders of giants, and I have greatly appreciated the boost.

Index

affairs. See infidelity

age

preferences

shrinkage of dating pool

Albee, Edward

Allen, Woody, Annie Hall

Are Men Necessary? (Dowd)

Aron, Arthur

arousal

misinterpretation of signals

preceding desire

priming with fear

sensuality of viewed images

arranged marriages

attraction

expectations

men’s misinterpretations