Adult individuals frequently face difficulties in attracting and keeping mates, which is an important driver of singlehood. In the current research, we investigated the mating performance (i.e., how well people do in attracting and retaining intimate partners) and singlehood status in 14 different countries, namely Austria, Brazil, China, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey, the UK, and Ukraine ( N = 7,181). We found that poor mating performance was in high occurrence, with about one in four participants scoring low in this dimension, and more than 57% facing difficulties in starting and/or keeping a relationship. Men and women did not differ in their mating performance scores, but there was a small yet significant effect of age, with older participants indicating higher mating performance. Moreover, nearly 13% of the participants indicated that they were involuntarily single, which accounted for about one-third of the singles in the sample. In addition, more than 15% of the participants indicated that they were voluntarily single, and 10% were between-relationships single. We also found that poor mating performance was associated with an increased likelihood of voluntary, involuntary, and between-relationships singlehood. All types of singlehood were in higher occurrence in younger participants. Although there was some cross-cultural variation, the results were generally consistent across samples.

Experiment 1 demonstrated a new kind of dual-task interference effect. The primary task was a speeded left-right discrimination of stimulus position (R1). The un speeded secondary task consisted of reporting verbally whether the stimuli were the same or different (R2). Stimulus exposure time was either 150 or 2000 msec. Two groups of subjects performed the primary task only, whereas two other groups performed both tasks and were instructed to emit R1 before R2. It was reasoned that the decision would be made to emit R1 before R2, and that this decision would produce a lengthening of R1. The results supported this prediction. Experiment 2 showed that the interference effect also occurred when the subjects were not explicitly instructed to emit R1 before R2, and was not due to either the mere presence of the second task or to response grouping. Experiments 3 and 4 compared two possible models for explaining the interference effect, i.e. the capacity-sharing model and the postponement model. As predicted by the postponement model, task difficulty did not interact, or interacted underadditively, with task overlap (Experiment 3), and the interference effect was not influenced by the amount of processing resources devoted to the primary task (Experiment 4). It was concluded that this new type of interference effect is best explained by the version of the postponement model that locates the bottleneck at the decision stage.