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67How attractiveness preferences influence attention3as predictor instead of pre-defined categories. Thus, we can conclude thatmen immediately attended towards faces that they rated as attractive, butwe did not find the same result for women. Future research should aim todisentangle and quantify the effects of general attractiveness and individualattractiveness preferences on attention. For example, a recent study on dating behavior (Baxter et al., 2022) showed that both general and individualpreferences uniquely contribute to date outcome, but whether this is alsothe case for attentional processes remains unknown.It is tempting to interpret our results on immediate attention as evidence for the notion that men are more attuned towards attractiveness thanwomen, which has also been found in previous immediate attention studies(Maner, Gailliot, & DeWall, 2007; Zhang et al., 2017). However, in ourexploratory analysis of the interaction between pre-date attractiveness rating and gender, we found a robust gender difference only for the effect ofprobe picture attractiveness on reaction time. While the effect of distractorpicture attractiveness was robust only for men, the difference between menand women itself was not robust. Therefore, we refrain from interpretingthe differences between men and women as clear evidence for a sex effect,as previous studies have described the pitfalls of interpreting differences inpost-hoc effects as evidence for a robust interaction (Gelman & Stern, 2006;Nieuwenhuis, Forstmann, & Wagenmakers, 2011). With regard to the absence of a robust effect in women, in accordance with our findings, previouswork has shown that the neural activity of men and women might differin response to faces varying in attractiveness. Van Hooff and colleagues(2011) investigated the neural underpinnings of processing attractiveness.They found higher late positive event-related potential (ERP) amplitudes(250-600 ms post cue) in men than women. Crucially, this ERP has beenlinked to appraisal of facial attractiveness (Werheid, Schacht, & Sommer,2007). This finding suggests that men might appraise attractiveness differently than women, which could translate into observable differences inprocesses involving immediate attention (van Hooff et al., 2011). Futureresearch should further investigate the neural underpinnings of appraisingattractiveness and how these translate to behavior.Previous studies on immediate attention and attractiveness heavily relied on consensus attractiveness ratings (Roth et al., 2022; Y. Ma et al.,2015, 2019; Maner, Gailliot, & DeWall, 2007). Here, we examined whethertaking the idiosyncratic preferences into account rather than general attractiveness ratings would increase the magnitude of the effect sizes found in thedot-probe task as compared to previous literature. We found that people ingeneral responded 7 ms faster between the least and highest attractivenessrating. However, the difference between the two most extreme conditions (avery unattractive probe picture paired with a very attractive distractor picture, and the other way around) would be 15 ms. This effect size is similarto those that have been typically reported in dot-probe studies (van RooijenIliana Samara 17x24.indd 67 08-04-2024 16:35