Sexual attraction
The attraction may be enhanced by a person's body odor, sex pheromones, adornments, clothing, perfume or hair style.
[3] The ability of a person's physical and other qualities to create a sexual interest in others is the basis of their use in advertising, film, and other visual media, as well as in modeling and other occupations.
In evolutionary terms, the ovulatory shift hypothesis posits that female humans exhibit different sexual behaviours and desires at points in their menstrual cycle, as a means to ensure that they attract a high quality mate to copulate with during their most fertile time.
They influence gonadal hormone secretion, for example, follicle maturation in the ovaries in females and testosterone and sperm production in males.
[7] Research conducted by Donald G. Dutton and Arthur P. Aron in the 1970s aimed to find the relation between sexual attraction and high anxiety conditions.
Conclusively, it was shown that the male participants who were asked by the female interviewer to perform the thematic apperception test (TAT) on the fear-arousing bridge, wrote more sexual content in the stories and attempted, with greater effort, to contact the interviewer after the experiment than those participants who performed the TAT on the normal bridge.
This can involve physical aspects or interactive processes whereby people find and attract potential partners, and maintain a relationship.
In general, they found biological sex played a bigger role in the psychology of sexual attraction than orientation.
While gay and straight men showed similar psychological interest in casual sex on markers of sociosexuality, gay men showed a larger number of partners in behaviour expressing this interest (proposed to be due to a difference in opportunity).
Gray asexuality includes those who only experience sexual attraction under certain circumstances; for example, exclusively after an emotional bond has been formed.
The ovulatory shift hypothesis is the theory that female humans tend to exhibit different sexual behaviours and desires at points in their cycle.
Two meta-analyses published in 2014 reached opposing conclusions on whether the existing evidence was robust enough to support the prediction that women's mate preferences change across the cycle.
[15][16] A newer 2018 review does not show women changing the type of men they desire at different times in their fertility cycle.
The ornamentation effect is a phenomenon influenced by a stage of the menstrual cycle which refers to the way a woman presents herself to others, in a way to attract potential sexual partners.
