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68Chapter 3et al., 2017). Regarding the effect of attractiveness on immediate attention,this effect is comparable to a previous study that did not take idiosyncraticpreferences into account (Roth et al., 2022). In that study, people had anattentional bias of 9 ms to attractive faces when paired with neutral faces,but had a 6 ms attentional bias to neutral faces when these were pairedwith unattractive faces. Overall, this indirectly translates to an 15 ms attentional bias to attractive faces compared with unattractive faces. While itis important to note that this is an indirect comparison, and that the methods are slightly different, this effect size fits well with our current finding.In conclusion, contrary to our expectation, taking idiosyncratic preferencesinto account did not increase the magnitude of previously recorded effectsof attractiveness on immediate attention. Instead, the size of the effect ofconsensus ratings and idiosyncratic ratings on immediate attention seem tobe rather similar.Our hypothesis regarding date outcome and immediate attention werepartly supported. Specifically, we found an overall effect of the distractorpicture on RT, and an effect of the probe picture for men but not for women.For men, these results are in line with our previously described effects ofattractiveness on immediate attention. Given that we found a robust association between attractiveness and immediate attention for men, and thatwe know that date outcome is strongly associated with attractiveness (Roth,Samara, & Kret, 2021a; Luo & Zhang, 2009), it is not surprising that dateoutcome and immediate attention are associated as well. Of course, physical attractiveness rating does not perfectly predict date outcome; otherprocesses such as physiological linkage (Prochazkova et al., 2022), nonverbal behavior (Hall, Xing, & Brooks, 2015), attachment styles (Schindler,Fagundes, & Murdock, 2010) and perceived similarity (Tidwell, Eastwick,& Finkel, 2013) all explain date outcome to some extent as well. Still, theassociation between attractiveness rating and date outcome might have beenstrong enough to explain the association between date outcome and RT inthe immediate attention task.In the preferential looking task, we found that both men and womendivided their attention based on the attractiveness of the stimuli they werepresented with. This is in line with previous work (Leder et al., 2016), butalso contrasts with other work that found a gender difference, with menshowing a stronger association between voluntary attention and attractiveness than women (Mitrovic et al., 2018). However, it is important to notethat participants in our study were all interested in a relationship, i.e., theywere motivated to find a partner, while other studies tested both single andcommitted participants (Mitrovic et al., 2018). As has been suggested, motives can substantially affect cognitive processes (Kenrick et al., 2010). Ontop of that, participants in our study were aware that they would later meetthe people they saw during the tasks, possibly strengthening their motivation even further.Iliana Samara 17x24.indd 68 08-04-2024 16:35