Tania Reynolds

Assistant Professor

Photo: Tania Reynolds
Email: 
tareyn@unm.edu
Education: 
PhD, Florida State University
Personal Website
 
Curriculum vitae
 

Research Area/s:

Evolution and Development

Research Interests:

  • Women's intrasexual competition and cooperation
  • Biases in social and moral evaluations
  • Social and sexual selection
  • Life history theory

Profile:

Accepting students?  Dr. Reynolds is not accepting students for Fall 2025.

 

Dr. Tania Reynolds received her PhD in Social Psychology at Florida State University. After, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University. 

Her research applies an evolutionary lens to examine social behavior and cognition. Her work examines how people compete to attract and retain social and romantic partners, and how these pressures may differ among men and women. Specifically, she has investigated how pressure to attract romantic partners contributes to women’s competitive gossip and body dissatisfaction. Her work has examined how men’s involvement in ancestral warfare contributes to male anti-gay bias. That is, men may be using one another’s sexual orientation as a proxy for the traits advantageous in physical combat. In work funded by the NSF, Dr. Reynolds examined how women’s reproductive hormones (e.g., progesterone) correspond to their social anxiety. This link may suggest the hormone progesterone promotes interpersonal vigilance to prepare socially for the demands of pregnancy. Her work also examines how gender stereotypes of men as perpetrators and women as victims undermine concern for male suffering.

Selected Publications

Reynolds, T. A., & Palmer-Hague, J. (2022). Did you hear what she did to me? Female friendship victimization disclosures offer reputational advantages. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology101, 104311.

Reynolds, T. (2021). Our grandmothers’ legacy: Challenges faced by female ancestors leave traces in modern women’s same-sex relationships. Archives of Sexual Behavior (target article).

Reynolds, T., Howard, C., Sjastad, H., Okimoto, T., Baumeister, R. F., Aquino, K., & Kim, J. (2020). Man up and take it: Gender bias in moral typecasting. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Reynolds, T., Zhu, L., Aquino, K., & Strejcek, B. (2020). Dual pathways to bias: Evaluators’ ideology and ressentiment independently predict racial discrimination in hiring contexts. Journal of Applied Psychology.

Reynolds, T., Baumeister, R. F., & Maner, J. K. (2018). Competitive reputation manipulation: Women transmit romantic rivals’ social information strategically. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 78, 195-209.

Reynolds, T., Makhanova, A., McNulty, J. K., Eckel, L. A., Nikonova, L., & Maner, J. K. (2018). Progesterone and women’s interpersonal anxiety across the menstrual cycle. Hormones and Behavior,102, 38-40.

Reynolds, T., & Meltzer, A. (2017). Adopting a dyadic perspective to better understand the association between physical attractiveness and dieting motivations and behaviors. Body Image, 22, 48-52.

Winegard, B.*, Reynolds, T.*, Baumeister, R. F., & Plant, E. A. (2016). The coalitional value theory of anti-gay bias. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 10, 245-269. 

Reynolds, T., Winegard, B. M., Baumeister, R. F., & Maner, J. K. (2015). The long goodbye: A test of grief as a social signal. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences9, 20-42.

Courses Taught

PSYC 2330:  Psychology of Human Sexuality

PSYC 331:  Psychololgy of Personality

PSYC 342:  Evolution and Human Behavior

Lab

Grad Students

  • Jegason Diviant