Dr Barnaby Dixson
School of Psychology
The University of Queensland
Australia

I am a human behavioural ecologist that has spent my career applying cross-disciplinary methods from anthropology, evolutionary biology and psychology to my research on human mate preferences. I have conducted extensive cross-cultural research on facial and bodily attractiveness among people from Bakossiland in rural Cameroon, Samoa, and Vanuatu. My lab research has used viewing time paradigms, eye-tracking and electroencephalography to uncover the mechanisms that underpin mate preferences for facial morphology. I have also tested how individual differences in hormones underpin variation in women’s attractiveness judgments of facial masculinity and beardedness in men. My current research aims to characterize how social factors and the strength of social networks impacts on maternal and infant health using large data sets from longitudinal studies in Australia and New Zealand and field research in the Pacific.