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General discussion2059the use of hygienic products and fragrances and attitudes towards natural body odour (Ferdenzi et al., 2020). However, recent work shows that variation in odour awareness is not well-explained by cultural differences, which suggests that there might be large individual differences in the importance of body odour for mate choice irrespective of culture (Sorokowska et al., 2018). In short, while multimodal perception of attraction might be at work during the early stages of inter-personal contact, my work suggests that existing models are not specific enough and require more finetuning. In addition, Chapter 4 and 5 provide evidence for the notion that biases in attention are associated with this first attraction filter. This is in line with the idea that evolutionary relevant stimuli should receive preferential attention (Cosmides & Tooby, 2013). In Chapter 4 I have shown that an immediate bias towards generally attractive faces is present in a wide community sample, irrespective of sex and age of the perceiver. The results of Chapter 5 are somewhat in contrast with this result. More specifically, when testing adolescents that were motivated to find a partner, only men showed a robust immediate attentional bias towards more attractive opposite-sex stimuli. When considering voluntary attention, however, I identified a strong attentional bias towards attractive opposite-sex stimuli in both men and women. The results with regard to immediate attention are somewhat unexpected, because the attentional biases reported in Chapter 4 and 5 are very similar in effect size despite the fact that participants in Chapter 4 cover a wide age range and might have been in a relationship already, whereas the participants in Chapter 5 were all single and motivated to find a partner. This is in contrast with motivational approaches to cognition (Kenrick et al., 2010; Schaller et al., 2017), that suggest that motivational states bias cognitive processes in a functional way towards motivationally salient information. If that would be the case, one would have expected participants in the speed-date study to show a stronger attentional bias towards opposite-sex stimuli than participants from the community sample, because participants in the speed-date study were motivated to look for a partner. Thus, the findings of this thesis seem to point more towards a domain-general mechanism underlying bias towards attractive faces than a domain-specific mechanism that becomes only apparent in the context of mate choice (Principe & Langlois, 2012; Trujillo et al., 2014).Tom Roth.indd 205 08-01-2024 10:42