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26Chapter 2hance bonding. However, it has not been established whether this translates to mimicking the gaze direction of attractive faces. Previous studieshave reported that familiarity (Deaner et al., 2007) and facial masculinity(B. C. Jones et al., 2010; Ohlsen et al., 2013) enhance gaze cueing. It isnot known, however, whether people are following the gaze direction of anattractive other more readily than that of an unattractive other. These previously observed effects of familiarity and facial masculinity might generalizeto facial attractiveness of both males and females as well.Age and sex of the perceivers might modulate biases towards attractiveness. Previous studies on age and attractiveness perception have found thatolder people are less selective when it comes to rating faces on attractiveness:overall, they give higher attractiveness ratings than younger people (Ebneret al., 2018; Kiiski, Cullen, Clavin, & Newell, 2016). This bias also translates to memory: younger people show better memory for attractive facesthan older people (Lin et al., 2020). These results are in line with the ideathat attractiveness is of reduced relevance for older people. In contrast, foryounger people it might be a salient social signal that they for example useto identify suitable mates. Similarly, attractiveness might be a more salientsignal for men than for women. This is reflected in the fact that men reportthat they find attractiveness more important when it comes to mate choicethan women (Bech-Sørensen & Pollet, 2016; Sprecher, Sullivan, & Hatfield,1994), and that men will take more effort to see attractive opposite-sex facesthan women (Hayden et al., 2007). Thus, the bias for attractive faces maydiffer between age groups and sexes.In the present study, we investigated attractiveness biases in a largewestern community sample of adults with a wide age range. We examined(a) whether people have an attentional bias towards attractive faces andunattractive faces, compared to intermediately attractive faces in a dotprobe task, (b) whether subtle differences in facial symmetry, a trait thathas been linked to attractiveness, modulates attention in a dot-probe task,and (c) whether facial attractiveness modulates gaze following in a modifiedPosner cuing task. Unattractive and asymmetrical faces are added as acontrol as they form another “extreme” category of a face type that is, likevery attractive or symmetrical faces, not very common.In Experiment 1, if participants would selectively attend to more attractive faces, we expected faster RTs on trials in which the probe appearedbehind the attractive face (in the attractive vs. intermediate condition),and possibly the intermediate face (in the unattractive vs. intermediatecondition). However, if participants would selectively attend to both attractive and unattractive faces because both deviate from the average face,we expected faster RTs on trials in which the probe appeared behind theattractive face (in the attractive vs. intermediate condition), and unattractive face (in the unattractive vs. intermediate condition). We had similarexpectations for Experiment 2: if facial symmetry is a salient social signal,Iliana Samara 17x24.indd 26 08-04-2024 16:34