Page 15 - Demo

13General Introduction1Attraction as a motivational stateImagine a day with no emotions. Not feeling happy upon seeing your part,ner, excited when your favourite team wins or disappointed when you missthe train. Some would consider this a relief, whereas others a horrific sce,nario. But despite their initial reaction, all would eventually realize thatemotions help us make sense of the world around us. Emotions guide us.Our emotional responses inform us about what we should attend to, whetherour decisions align with our goals, and prepare our action response plan(Frijda, 1986). The influential somatic marker hypothesis (Damasio, 1994,1996), also illustrates that emotions, reflected in physiological changes, actas markers that ultimately influence decision-making. Therefore, emotionsare crucial in navigating our social environment.Emotion and motivation go hand in hand (Both, Everaerd, & Laan,2003). Indeed, humans want to act upon seeing stimuli associated withreward or threat (Schultz, 1998). Typically, stimuli associated with rewardtrigger an approach behaviour, whereas stimuli associated with a threat,an avoidance behaviour (e.g., Lazarus, 1991). One of the emotional statesassociated with reward is sexual arousal. For example, a common reactionupon seeing someone we are attracted to is that we might direct our attentiontowards them and try to be as physically close to them as possible. In otherwords, experiencing attraction leads us to increase our proximity to another(Montoya, Kershaw, & Prosser, 2018).In the sections below, I outline how attraction influences attention, socialperception, physiological and behavioral mimicry, and bond formation.Attention toward mate-relevant informationAttention is necessary for navigating our environment. Attention acts asa gatekeeper, ensuring that crucial information receives further processing,while simultaneously filtering out distracting information (e.g., Posner, 1980;Yantis & Jonides, 1990). Attraction also influences attention. Recent studieshave also shown that attractive stimuli capture attention, and the level ofcapture is also associated with trait levels of sexual desire (Prause, Janssen,& Hetrick, 2008).Attractiveness (i.e., attractive targets presented as stimuli) modulatesour attention (Sui & Liu, 2009). This is not surprising, given that visual at,tractiveness influences our partner choice (Asendorpf, Penke, & Back, 2011;Sidari et al., 2021; Roth, Samara, & Kret, 2021a), a decision that can heav,ily impact our well-being (Soons, Liefbroer, & Kalmijn, 2009). Like otheranimals, humans orient their attention to attractive individuals (Grammer,Fink, Møller, & Thornhill, 2003). Previous research has consistently shownthat attention is captured and held by attractive faces (Lindell & Lindell,2014; Maner et al., 2003; Maner, Gailliot, & DeWall, 2007). In Chapter 2,I investigate whether attractive faces modulate attention and gaze cuing.Crucially, since previous research has taken place in a typical laboratorysetting divorced from real-life dating decisions, in Chapter 3, I investigatewhether attractiveness modulates attention using eye tracking methods ina speed-dating setting. Speed dates are convenient for examining the characteristics defining a successful interaction from its start in an ecologicallyvalid manner (Finkel & Eastwick, 2008; Eastwick & Finkel, 2008b).Our emotional state modulates social perceptionEmotions are, in essence, a tendency to act (Frijda, 1986; Lang, 1994). Theyinform us about whether a specific goal has been attained and prepare anaction response plan fitting to the situation. For example, in one study (Bothet al., 2003) participants viewed a sexually arousing vs. a fear-inducing film(Laan, Everaerd, & Evers, 1995; van der Velde, Laan, & Everaerd, 2001)while their t-tendon reflex, reflecting a tendency to act (Bonnet, Decety,Jeannerod, & Requin, 1997), was measured. The results showed that thet-tendon reflex was activated in the highly arousing films (i.e., the sexuallyarousing, anxiety, and fear-inducing films) compared to the neutral films.This finding suggests that participants were more likely to act when sexuallyaroused and likely to approach the appetitive stimulus. In other words,sexual arousal prepares humans for approach behavior.Our emotional states influence not only our behavior but also our perception. Does our emotional state influence how we perceive the emotionalstates of others? Maner et al.’s (2005) influential study has suggested precisely that. In that study, participants watched a romantic, scary, or neutralvideo clip and then viewed a series of faces and indicated whether the targetfaces were feeling happy, sexually aroused, angry, or frightened. In fact, thetarget faces were neutral. The results demonstrated that participants projected their own emotional state onto the target faces. Men were more likelyto indicate that a target face of an attractive female was sexually arousedafter watching the romantic video clip, and participants in general that thetarget face of a black male was angrier. Thus, previous evidence suggeststhat people tend to project their own emotional state to others. However,it should be noted that in Maner et al. (2005) the stimuli used i.e., a filmdepicting an attractive white woman, combined with the finding that menwere more likely to indicate that only high-attractive white women and notblack women (independent of attractiveness level) were sexually aroused,might indicate that this result is not due to projection, but a recency effect.In other words, men responded based on the most recent example they hadin mind, instead of projecting their own emotional state onto the targetfaces. Furthermore, it is unclear how the stimuli used in that study wereIliana Samara 17x24.indd 13 08-04-2024 16:34