The predictors and effects of slow and fast life strategies in the university students
Creators: name: Flegr, Jaroslav
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Medicine and Health Sciences
subject: Education
subject: Life Sciences
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences

description: During a written test from the advanced course of evolutionary biology students will be asked to attribute the most suitable color to 22 terms, related to slow or fast life-history strategies: to consider, to schedule, to wait up, the future, don't take risks, cautiously, coolheaded, slowly, to postpone, save up, don't rush it, condom, immediately, promptly, the present, quickly, don't hesitate, to hurry up, to risk up, just now, in a flash, adventurer, risky game, unprotected sex – in Czech: rozvažovat, naplánovat, počkat si, budoucnost, neriskovat, opatrně, rozvážný, pomalu, odložit, spořit, neuspěchat, condom, ihned, okamžitě, přítomnost, rychle, nezaváhat, spěchat, risknout, právě nyní, bleskově, dobrodruh, riskantní hra, nechráněný sex. After that, they will sort the colors from the most to the least nice (in Czech: od té nejsympatičtější/nejkrásnější (nahoře) po tu nejméně sympatickou). The same test will run before and after the biology test and the approach to a particular term will be computed on the basis of niceness of color attributed to particular terms in two runs of the test by an individual student. Based on niceness attributed to slow or fast life history terms we will compute the affinity of particular students to the slow or fast strategy. In another part of the questionnaire, the students will respond to the questions about their physical and mental health (their responses will be used for computing indices of health as means of corresponding Z-scores from individual questions). We will ask the students also about their and their parents’ Rh factors and we will use their Rh phenotype and genotype (Rh negativity and heterozygosity with Rh-positive allele originating from the father) as predispositions to worse health. They will also respond to six questions on the tendency to delay gratification and six questions on the tendency to risk. They will also respond to the questions related to their sexual life which will be used for computing indices of sexual appetence and sexual activities. We will also ask them how much and when they want their children. We will test the following hypotheses: 1] Students expressing the signs of the fast life history strategy (e.g. lower investment to the prevention of medical problems, unhealthy lifestyle, lower reported life expectancy) will attribute nicer colors to the term related to the slower life strategy and less nice to the terms related to the slower life strategy. 2] Students reporting worse health will express signs of the faster life strategy – they will report higher sexual appetence and higher will to have their own children soon. 3] Students with genetic predispositions for worse health (Rh negativity and heterozygosity with Rh-positive allele originating from the father) will express signs of the faster life strategy – they will report higher sexual appetence and higher will to have their own children soon. 4] Students reporting worse health will express signs of the faster life strategy in the chromasociation test – they will attribute nicer colors to the terms related to the fast life history strategy. 5] Students with genetic predispositions for worse health (Rh negativity and heterozygosity with Rh-positive allele originating from the father) will express signs of the faster life strategy in the chromasociation test – they will attribute nicer colors to the terms related to the fast life history strategy. The principal method for testing the hypothesis will be partial Kendall correlation tests with sex and age controlled, a one-sided test will be used for testing one-sided hypotheses and the correction for multiple tests will be done with the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure with a false discovery rate preset to 0.2. The expected number of participants will be 130-160. The collection of data will be performed on May 9, 2022. When less than 40 male subjects will take part in the test, the study will be repeated in 2023. In the exploratory part of the study, we will test the effect of life-history strategy on various personality factors of students, including aggressiveness measured with Meili’s test and 9-items BDI-based questionnaire and political approaches measured with a 4-factors, 16-items inventory. We will also explore the effects of various factors (including life history strategy on the performance of students in the test, IQ, memory, and the information processing speed) on the performance of the students in the test from evolutionary biology (on the number of correct answers in the test). Also, we will test the performance of our new variant of the Maili’s selective memory test designed to measure the aggressiveness of students and their sexual sadism and masochism.