Page 108 - Demo

Chapter 5106After completing the tasks, participants went on a maximum of ten 4-min speed-dates (Lee et al., 2020; Perilloux et al., 2012). Men and women were seated at opposite sides of a table, their view of their partner occluded by a barrier. At the start of each date, the barrier was removed, and following the ring of the bell, participants had a four-minute date with their partner. After 4 min, participants indicated the date outcome, i.e., whether they would be interested in going on another date with them (yes/no); their prediction about whether their partner would be interested to go on another date with them (yes/no); and whether they knew their partner before the date (yes/no). Furthermore, we asked participants to indicate how attractive they found their partner (7-point scale) and how attractive they considered them as a long-term mate (7-point scale). It should be noted that these questions referred to attractiveness in general, and not specifically physical attractiveness. Participants had one minute to fill in the questionnaire after each date. Next, male participants rotated to their next prospective partner. After completing all possible date combinations, participants were debriefed about the purposes of the study.Data processingDot-probeIn total, 58 participants completed the dot-probe task. In the second female group, we could not collect dot-probe data due to a technical issue. In total, we had 5220 datapoints for the dot-probe task before data filtering. One participant did not complete the pre-date attractiveness rating task. Therefore, we excluded this participant’s data (90 trials) from the analysis that investigated the effect of attractiveness on immediate attention, leaving us with data from 57 participants. Next, we excluded outliers by subject: as a lower boundary, we used 200 ms for anticipatory reaction times (Whelan, 2008). We calculated the upper limit by subject following Leys and colleagues (Leys et al., 2013): we calculated the median absolute deviation (MAD) per subject and the median RT per subject. We then used a moderately conservative criterion to exclude trials: if the RT was slower than the subject’s median RT+ 2.5 * MAD, we excluded the trial. These outlier criteria resulted in the exclusion of 299 trials (5.83%). Hereafter, we centralized the RTs by subject. This was done to make it easier to set a prior for the Intercept. All factorial predictors were sum coded, and pre-date attractiveness ratings were centered at 4 because this was the middle option.Tom Roth.indd 106 08-01-2024 10:41