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78Chapter 4judging highly attractive women but not medium attractive women as moresexually aroused is not surprising. The finding that only highly attractiveWhite women were judged as sexually aroused and not highly attractiveBlack women could be explained by the fact that only data from Whiteparticipants were analyzed in Maner et al.’s (2005) study. It has been shownthat White participants rate White women as more attractive than Blackwomen (Lewis, 2011), which might have blunted the effect for highly attractive Black target faces.A widely discussed finding in Maner et al.’s (2005) study was that participants in the fear condition rated Black men as angrier than White mencompared to participants in the control condition (e.g., see Haselton & Nettle, 2006). However, considering that the authors analyzed data only fromWhite American participants it is unclear whether these findings would generalize to another non-US population.There are several issues with the methods of Maner et al. (2005). First,it is not clear whether a validation study of the target faces was conducted,meaning that the suitability of the target faces cannot be assessed. Therefore, it is unclear whether the reported effects are due to the employedmanipulation or other confounding factors. A straightforward solution tothis issue would be to use stimuli from a validated database, for example,the Chicago Face Database (CFD; D. S. Ma et al., 2015). Also, the data(1-9 Likert scale responses) were analyzed using metric models (e.g., modelsunderlying the t-test, ANOVA, etc.). Such models are not appropriate forordinal data, as the often-poor model fit can result in inflated Type I orType II errors, as well as effect inversions (see Liddell & Kruschke, 2018,for an extensive explanation). Furthermore, the effect reported regardinghighly attractive White women being reported as more sexually aroused bymen in the mate-search condition compared to control (and the other targetstimuli) could be the result of the recency effect (Baddeley & Hitch, 1993;Broadbent & Broadbent, 1981). In other words, as the woman in the romantic video clip was White, it could be that men rated highly attractiveWhite women as sexually aroused not because of the projection of theirown emotional state, but because they had just observed the protagonist(a highly attractive White woman) being sexually aroused. The question iswhether this result would remain consistent if the woman in the romanticclip was Black. In conclusion, whether the effects reported in Maner et al.(2005) result from these methodological decisions and whether they wouldreplicate with different stimuli sets and different samples remains unclear.Here, we aimed to conceptually replicate the study by Maner et al.(2005). We conducted two separate experiments for romantic arousal andfear. In addition to the romantic arousal video with a White female protagonist employed by Maner et al. (2005), we also included a romantic arousalvideo with a Black female protagonist. If the effects reported in Maner et al.(2005) were due to priming effects, then we should observe that men whoIliana Samara 17x24.indd 78 08-04-2024 16:35