Men are drawn to a wider range of women when they are feeling stressed out, according to research into the psychology of sexual attraction.
People are usually attracted to partners with similar facial features to their own, but after a brief but stressful experience, men's preferences changed to include a wider variety of women, the study found.
Johanna Lass-Hennemann , who led the study at the University of Trier in Germany, said the findings echo research suggesting that animals lose their normal mating preferences when they are under stress.
Scientists suspect the appeal of similar-looking partners may be linked to our tendency to have more trust in a familiar face, a factor that is important for long-term relationships.
Under stress, however, the importance of pairing up with someone similar-looking seems to vanish. Lass-Hennemann speculates that stress might increase men's tendency to "outbreed", or reproduce with more genetically dissimilar women, with the potential benefit that any children born from the relationship might be better equipped to cope with a stressful environment.
