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171General discussion10Figure 1. Graphical illustration of the topic of each chapter. Chapters 2 and 3examined the influence of attraction on attention. Chapters 4 and 5investigated how sex moderates the relationship between attraction and socialcognition (specifically, the sexual overperception bias). Chapter 7 provided atheoretical overview of this relationship and extended it to the formation ofromantic bonds. Chapter 6 examined whether people that are not involved in adate are able to detect attraction in others. Chapters 8 and 9 examined whetherinter-individual coordination (IIC) is associated with attraction and facilitatesthe formation of romantic bonds. The gray dashed lines connecting Attention toSocial Cognition and IIC to Social Cognition reflect suggestions for futurestudies elaborated on in the Methodological considerations and future directionssection.that traditional metrics of attractiveness (i.e., symmetry) might not be asimportant as previously thought, but other parameters such as averageness,might be more important in judging a face as attractive (e.g., see A. Jones& Jaeger, 2019). Importantly, we did not find evidence that attractivenessalso modulates gaze cueing, even though this might be due to the stimuluspresentation duration.In Chapter 3 (Figure 1; red arrow), we examined the relationship be,tween attention and attractiveness, and willingness to date a potential part,ner. We used a manual reaction time task (i.e., dot-probe task) and apreferential-looking task (incl. eye tracking) to obtain a more fine-tunedunderstanding of the automatic or voluntary processes underlying this rela,tionship. Regarding the dot-probe task, we found that men were more likelyto be distracted by and attend to images of women they found attractive.Interestingly, even though both men and women were distracted by imagesof people with whom they would like to go on another date, only men re,Figure 1. Graphical illustration of the topic of each chapter. Chapters 2 and 3examined the influence of attraction on attention. Chapters 4 and 5investigated how sex moderates the relationship between attraction and socialcognition (specifically, the sexual overperception bias). Chapter 7 provided atheoretical overview of this relationship and extended it to the formation ofromantic bonds. Chapter 6 examined whether people that are not involved in adate are able to detect attraction in others. Chapters 8 and 9 examined whetherinter-individual coordination (IIC) is associated with attraction and facilitatesthe formation of romantic bonds. The gray dashed lines connecting Attention toSocial Cognition and IIC to Social Cognition reflect suggestions for futurestudies elaborated on in the Methodological considerations and future directionssection.that traditional metrics of attractiveness (i.e., symmetry) might not be asimportant as previously thought, but other parameters such as averageness,might be more important in judging a face as attractive (e.g., see A. Jones& Jaeger, 2019). Importantly, we did not find evidence that attractivenessalso modulates gaze cueing, even though this might be due to the stimuluspresentation duration.In Chapter 3 (Figure 1; red arrow), we examined the relationship be,tween attention and attractiveness, and willingness to date a potential part,ner. We used a manual reaction time task (i.e., dot-probe task) and apreferential-looking task (incl. eye tracking) to obtain a more fine-tunedunderstanding of the automatic or voluntary processes underlying this rela,tionship. Regarding the dot-probe task, we found that men were more likelyto be distracted by and attend to images of women they found attractive.Interestingly, even though both men and women were distracted by imagesof people with whom they would like to go on another date, only men re,sponded faster to images of women with whom they would like to go onanother date. In the preferential-looking task, the results showed that menand women tend to look more at an image of a partner they found attractiveand with whom they would like to go on another date.In Chapter 4 (Figure 1; green arrow), I zoomed in on how people’semotional state affects their interpretation of others’ emotional state in order to better understand how attraction may arise. This functional projection hypothesis was initially posed in the seminal work by Maner et al.(2005), which I replicated in this chapter. In Experiment 1, male participants viewed either a romantic video segment depicting a White heroine ora Black heroine or a neutral video segment. Then, participants were presented with a series of female White and African American neutral facesthat were rated as high or average in attractiveness. They were asked to indicate whether the people they viewed were sexually aroused, afraid, happy,or angry. The results showed that independent of the video condition, menindicated highly attractive White women as more sexually aroused than allother faces (also called the sexual overperception bias). In the original study,Maner et al. (2005) found that men that had watched a romantic film weremore likely to interpret the expressions of highly attractive White women assexually aroused than men that had watched a neutral film, and comparedto medium-attractive White women, highly-attractive Black women, andmedium-attractive Black women. Therefore, our results partially replicatedthe findings of Maner et al. (2005) and furthermore show that the sexualoverperception bias might also arise due to a transient arousal state. In Experiment 2, male and female participants watched a fearful or neutral videosegment and were presented with a series of male and female White andAfrican American neutral faces. In contrast with Maner et al. (2005), whofound that Black men were rated as angrier compared to all other stimuli,we found that independent of the video condition, participants were morelikely to indicate that White men were angrier than all other stimuli. Thisdiscrepancy between our findings and the findings by Maner et al. (2005)could be due to the fact that we used a different stimulus set, did not control for participants’ ethnicity, and, importantly, the different ethnicity ofthe samples in our and the original study, as our study was conducted inthe Netherlands. In contrast, the original study was conducted in the US.In Chapter 5 (Figure 1; green arrow), I investigated the factors underlying the sexual overperception bias. Using responses from a large speeddating study, where people went on a maximum of 10 dates with a member ofthe opposite sex, I examined whether people were more likely to overperceiveattraction in their potential partners as a function of sex, projection of theirown interest, self-rated attractiveness, or trait sexual desire. The resultsshowed that men were more likely to indicate that their partner was interested in another date only when they themselves felt attracted to their partner. Men detected their partners’ interest more accurately when they wereIliana Samara 17x24.indd 171 08-04-2024 16:36