Welcome to Thunderdome

Francesca is a smart, accomplished attractive woman in her mid-30s. A professor of art history and archeology at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., she's the last person you'd expect to act like an insecure middle schooler over some boy she likes.

You'd be wrong.

"I obsess. I use the quantity of contact with my partner as an index of my self-esteem for the day," she said, asking that her last name not be used. "It is rather creepy, now that I think about it, but I'll look to see where someone checked in on [the social network site] Foursquare to find a justification for their silence."

The results: Women did tend to like the men who found them most attractive. The men who were deemed most attractive of all, however, were the ones who were ambiguous on whether they liked the women a lot or just an average amount.