Page 103 - Demo

Individual attractiveness preferences predict attention1015should be noted that attractiveness categories were predefined based on ratings by a different participant sample in this study (Ma, Correll, et al., 2015).Such an approach is typical in studies investigating attractiveness, where traditionally researchers have focused on average ratings of general attractiveness. This approach is based on the notion that people strongly agree on which features and characteristics are attractive (Langlois et al., 2000). However, recent research has emphasized that it is important to disentangle shared and idiosyncratic contributions to judgments (Martinez et al., 2020) because ample evidence shows that beauty is—at least partly—in the eye of the beholder, as agreement on attractiveness is about 50% (Bronstad & Russell, 2007; Hönekopp, 2006). Importantly, such individual preferences can also influence date success, i.e., willingness to meet again after a first date (Baxter et al., 2022). These inter-individual variations are possibly the result of differences in environments (Germine et al., 2015), such as culture (Zhan et al., 2021) and close social relationships (Bronstad & Russell, 2007). Nevertheless, most traditional laboratory studies did not take idiosyncratic preferences of participants into account, even though there can be considerable inter-individual variation in judging attractiveness. Taking these individual differences into consideration might reveal more pronounced effects of attractiveness on cognition. Thus, in the present study, we aimed to examine whether and the manner in which idiosyncratic attractiveness preferences influence immediate attention.When it comes to voluntary attention, that is, where attention is allocated when able to do so freely, multiple studies have found that participants focus their attention on their sex of interest, or on the most attractive person of their sex of interest, depending on the design. For instance, Dawson & Chivers (2016, 2018) presented sexually explicit stimuli to participants that contained same-sex or opposite-sex people and found that heterosexual participants fixated more on the opposite-sex stimuli. Mitrovic et al. (2016)extended these findings by presenting same-sex and opposite-sex stimuli varying in attractiveness to heterosexual and homosexual participants. They found that participants attended most to the attractive faces corresponding to their sexual preference. Follow-up studies modified this paradigm by using the participants’ own attractiveness ratings of the stimuli, instead of predefining stimuli as attractive or unattractive, and yielded similar results: people spent more time looking at faces that they found attractive (Leder et al., 2016; Mitrovic et al., 2018). Thus, a plethora of studies shows that people selectively attend to the more attractive face they are presented with.Tom Roth.indd 101 08-01-2024 10:41