Page 121 - Demo

Individual attractiveness preferences predict attention1195post-date attractiveness, although the results are not unequivocal for immediate attention. Below, we discuss these findings and address possible implications and limitations of our study.Similar to previous work on (dis)agreements in attractiveness ratings, we found an ICC of approximately 0.4 for the pre-date attractiveness ratings (Bronstad & Russell, 2007; Hönekopp, 2006) , reinforcing the idea that individual attractiveness preferences can vary and should be taken into account when studying cognitive aspects of mate choice. Consistent with this idea, we found that individual attractiveness ratings predicted immediate attention in men. This finding extends previous work (Roth et al., 2022) on immediate attention and attractiveness that showed a general attentional bias for faces that were predefined as attractive in a large community sample, but found no effect of sex on this bias. Crucially, this previous study did not account for relationship status. Given that motivation can influence immediate attention (Ma et al., 2019; Ma, Zhao, et al., 2015; Maner, Gailliot, & DeWall, 2007), we only tested non-committed participants who were interested in a relationship, and as mentioned above we used their individual attractiveness ratings as predictor instead of pre-defined categories. Thus, we can conclude that men immediately attended towards faces that they rated as attractive, but we did not find the same result for women. Future research should aim to disentangle and quantify the effects of general attractiveness and individual attractiveness preferences on attention. For example, a recent study on dating behavior (Baxter et al., 2022) showed that both general and individual preferences uniquely contribute to date outcome, but whether this is also the 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 than women, which has also been found in previous immediate attention studies (Maner, Gailliot, & DeWall, 2007; Zhang et al., 2017) However, in our exploratory analysis of the interaction between pre-date attractiveness rating and gender, we found a robust gender difference only for the effect of probe picture attractiveness on reaction time. While the effect of distractor picture attractiveness was robust only for men, the difference between men and women itself was not robust. Therefore, we refrain from interpreting the differences between men and women as clear evidence for a sex effect, as previous studies have described the pitfalls of interpreting differences in post-hoc effects as evidence for a robust interaction (Gelman & Stern, 2006; Nieuwenhuis et al., 2011). With regard to the absence of Tom Roth.indd 119 08-01-2024 10:41