Page 123 - Demo

Individual attractiveness preferences predict attention1215and an effect of the probe picture for men but not for women. For men, these results are in line with our previously described effects of attractiveness on immediate attention. Given that we found a robust association between attractiveness and immediate attention for men, and that we know that date outcome is strongly associated with attractiveness (Luo & Zhang, 2009; Roth, Samara, & Kret, 2021), it is not surprising that date outcome and immediate attention are associated as well. Of course, physical attractiveness ratings do not perfectly predict date outcome; other processes such as physiological linkage (Prochazkova et al., 2022), nonverbal behavior (Hall & Xing, 2015), attachment styles (Schindler et al., 2010) and perceived similarity (Tidwell et al., 2013) all explain date outcome to some extent as well. Still, the association between attractiveness rating and date outcome might have been strong enough to explain the association between date outcome and RT in the immediate attention task.In the preferential looking task, we found that both men and women divided their attention based on the attractiveness of the stimuli they were presented with. This is in line with previous work (Leder et al., 2016), but also contrasts with other work that found a gender difference, with men showing a stronger association between voluntary attention and attractiveness than women (Mitrovic et al., 2018). However, it is important to note that participants in our study were all interested in a relationship, i.e., they were motivated to find a partner, while other studies tested both non-committed and committed participants (Mitrovic et al., 2018). As has been suggested, motives can substantially affect cognitive processes (Kenrick et al., 2010). On top of that, participants in our study were aware that they would later meet the people they saw during the tasks, possibly strengthening their motivation even further.The preferential looking task consisted of trials with a prolonged exposure to the stimuli compared to the dot-probe task. Therefore, participants were able to freely look upon the stimuli and gather more relevant information from the stimuli compared to the dot-probe task. Given that women might need more contextual information in order to appraise a potential partner (Laan & Janssen, 2007), this could possibly also explain why we do not find any sex differences in the preferential looking task, while we do find some evidence for sex differences in the dot-probe task. Future research should further investigate the concordance between immediate and voluntary attention to attractiveness and their relationship to gender.Tom Roth.indd 121 08-01-2024 10:41