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105Underlying factors of the sexual overperception bias 5example, men that were shown sexually arousing stimuli were more likely toindicate that attractive women were sexually aroused than not (Maner et al.,2005) and sexually aroused participants are more likely to engage in riskysexual practices (Ariely & Loewenstein, 2006; Skakoon-Sparling & Cramer,2021; Skakoon-Sparling et al., 2016). Thus, our findings might suggest thatin situations where men were not interested in their partner, this biasingemotional state was not present, thus allowing them to accurately detectthat their partner is not interested in them. Indeed, previous research hassuggested that cues signaling disinterest might be easier to detect than cuessignaling interest, especially in zero-order acquaintance settings (Hall et al.,2015). Given that the concordance between bodily and subjective arousal isnot as robust in women, it is not surprising that women were not necessarily biased as much as men in terms of detecting attraction. In conclusion,our findings extend previous evidence showing that accuracy does not onlydepend on sex or projecting one’s own emotion on a partner, but accuracyis in fact dependent on an interplay between these two factors.The estimation model complemented the results of the accuracy models.Interestingly, we found that both men and women were likely to overperceiveattraction when they were interested in their partner compared to whenthey were not. Crucially, when men were interested in a partner, theyoverperceived interest more than women, which likely explains the decreasedaccuracy exhibited in men. These findings are partially consistent with EMT(Haselton & Buss, 2000). EMT predicts that men would be more likelyto overperceive attraction than women. However, our findings highlightthat perhaps the effect of being attracted to a given partner should beincorporated as an additional parameter in EMT (A. J. Lee et al., 2020),because if men are not interested, they are in fact very likely to be accurateregarding attraction. Thus, our findings support and further extend theEMT framework by showing that the addition of interest in a given partnermight be crucial in predicting overperception.Curiously, we found no effect of sexual desire on attraction detectionaccuracy. Our results are inconsistent with previous findings (A. J. Lee etal., 2020; Perilloux et al., 2012). One reason for this discrepancy could bethat previous studies focused on short-term mating strategies, whereas weexamined overall sexual desire. It is well known that sociosexuality—theinclination to form short-term relationships (Kinsey et al., 1948)—differsbetween men and women (Clark, 1989). Importantly, given that sexual desire and sociosexuality are highly correlated (O’Connor et al., 2014), weexpected to observe similar findings as Lee et al. (2020). However, in ourdataset we found no difference in sexual desire between sexes, whereas in Leeet al. (2020) sociosexuality was significantly higher for men than women (seealso Roth, Samara, & Kret, 2021b). Either due to the differences in instruments or the differences in sample characteristics, we did not find an effectof sexual desire on attraction detection accuracy. Future research shouldIliana Samara 17x24.indd 105 08-04-2024 16:36