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Chapter 5120a robust effect in women, in accordance with our findings, previous work has shown that the neural activity of men and women might differ in response to faces varying in attractiveness. Van Hooff et al. (2011) investigated the neural underpinnings of processing attractiveness. They found higher late positive eventrelated potential (ERP) amplitudes (250–600 ms post cue) in men than women. Crucially, this ERP has been linked to appraisal of facial attractiveness (Werheid et al., 2007). This finding suggests that men might appraise attractiveness differently than women, which could translate into observable differences in processes involving immediate attention (van Hooff et al., 2011). Future research should further investigate the neural underpinnings of appraising attractiveness and how these translate to behavior.Previous studies on immediate attention and attractiveness heavily relied on consensus attractiveness ratings (Ma et al., 2019; Ma, Zhao, et al., 2015; Maner, Gailliot, & DeWall, 2007; Roth et al., 2022). Here, we examined whether taking the idiosyncratic preferences into account rather than general attractiveness ratings would increase the magnitude of the effect sizes found in the dot-probe task as compared to previous literature. We found that people in general responded 7 ms faster between the least and highest attractiveness rating. However, the difference between the two most extreme conditions (a very unattractive probe picture paired with a very attractive distractor picture, and the other way around) would be ~ 15 ms. This effect size is similar to those that have been typically reported in dot-probe studies (van Rooijen et al., 2017). Regarding the effect of attractiveness on immediate attention, this effect is comparable to a previous study that did not take idiosyncratic preferences into account (Roth et al., 2022). In that study, people had an attentional 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 paired with unattractive faces. Overall, this indirectly translates to a ~ 15 ms attentional bias to attractive faces compared with unattractive faces. While it is 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 preferences into account did not increase the magnitude of previously recorded effects of attractiveness on immediate attention. Instead, the size of the effect of consensus ratings and idiosyncratic ratings on immediate attention seem to be rather similar.Our hypothesis regarding date outcome and immediate attention were partly supported. Specifically, we found an overall effect of the distractor picture on RT, Tom Roth.indd 120 08-01-2024 10:41