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Chapter 236et al., 2015) and men (Ma et al., 2019) had trouble disengaging from attractive opposite-sex faces. In line with these findings, Zhang et al. (2017) found a similar bias among singles using attractive and unattractive bodies in an attentional disengagement task. Thus, attractiveness seems to hold attention and impede attentional disengagement among single participants.It should be noted that most of the aforementioned studies found a delayed disengagement effect only after participants were primed with either romantic words or words related to mate choice. Moreover, most studies found delayed disengagement from attractive faces only in single participants. This concords with the notion that top-down control plays an important role in attentional disengagement (Theeuwes, 2010). More specifically, individual mating motivations can modulate attentional disengagement: when individuals are motivated to look for a mate (e.g., through priming mating motivation), they will be slower to disengage from attractive faces. Conversely, if participants are motivated to retain an existing relationship, they will disengage more quickly from attractive faces, regardless of the priming condition.Voluntary attentionWhen examining the impact of attractiveness on attention over a longer time span, eye-tracking studies have consistently shown that humans tend to gaze longer at sexually preferred or attractive stimuli. Typically, these studies employ a preferential looking paradigm in which two images are presented simultaneously while participants’ eye movements are tracked. Dawson & Chivers (2016) conducted a study that involved presenting participants with sexually explicit pictures and videos of same-sex and opposite-sex individuals. Their results indicated that heterosexual men and women fixated more on static opposite-sex stimuli. However, when using video stimuli in which two opposite-sex individuals were present, they found that men fixated more on the opposite-sex stimulus, whereas women exhibited a same-sex bias (Dawson & Chivers, 2018). Thus, while previous research has established that heterosexual men generally show an opposite-sex bias, the pattern for women is more complex and nuanced.Another line of inquiry focuses on how specifically attractiveness influences voluntary attention. For example, Mitrovic et al., (2016) examined whether attractiveness influences voluntary attention as a function of participants’ sexual orientation by presenting participants with naturalistic stimuli (i.e., everyday scenes containing facial stimuli). The researchers presented homosexual and Tom Roth.indd 36 08-01-2024 10:41