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169General discussion10In order to navigate our romantic environment, we have to be able toexpress attraction, detect it in others, and adjust our behavior so that wemaximize our chances of forming romantic bonds. We notice an attractivepotential partner faster, and our attention lingers on them more than on aless attractive partner. We tend to judge attractive people more favorablythan others, an effect that in the literature is known as “what is beautiful isgood” (Dion et al., 1972). This cognitive bias likely increases the likelihoodthat we approach attractive potential partners. Finally, when we approachour romantic interest, we are more likely to imitate them, which mightincrease our chances of establishing a romantic bond.In the present dissertation, I examined, in a series of studies, the effects ofattraction on social cognition. Specifically, I examined how attraction influences our attention and judging others’ intentions, and how inter-individualcoordination (IIC) might facilitate the formation of romantic bonds. Figure1 displays an overview of the topics examined in each chapter. In the finalchapter, I attempt to integrate the key chapter findings and discuss theoretical implications. Crucially, I also highlight potential new directions forfuture research.Summary of key findingsIn Chapter 2 (Figure 1; red arrow), we examined how attractive faces modulate attention and social cognition. In Experiment 1, using the dot-probetask, participants were presented with attractive or unattractive faces pairedwith an intermediate-attractive face. The results showed that participantsresponded faster to the probe when presented at the same location as anattractive face. In contrast, participants responded slower when the probewas presented at the same location as an unattractive face. In Experiment2, we examined whether a similar effect can be found when the stimuli usedare symmetrical (an index of attractiveness) compared to asymmetrical ororiginal portraits (without a symmetry manipulation). We found no effectof symmetry on reaction times, indicating that symmetry did not modulate attention. In Experiment 3, we investigated whether attractivenessmodulates social gaze cueing using a modified Posner task (Deaner et al.,2007). The results showed that attractiveness did not manipulate gaze cueing; however, attractive faces did overall enhance reaction time, indicatingthat people responded faster to attractive than unattractive faces. However,this finding could be due to the longer stimulus presentation (300ms) compared to previous studies (e.g., B. C. Jones et al., 2010, where 200 ms butnot 400 ms produced an effect). This suggests that attractiveness effectson attention might be best captured by paradigms designed to influencebottom-up attention, rather than allowing top-down effects to emerge. Thefindings of this study illustrate that attractiveness modulates attention andIliana Samara 17x24.indd 169 08-04-2024 16:36