Page 59 - Demo

Multimodal mate choice573asked to pull their hair back, remove their glasses, remove large pieces of jewelry, and display a neutral facial expression. The photographs were not edited further.The audio stimuli were recorded in a separate sound-proof room. A researcher recorded audio stimuli separately for each participant. Participants were asked to read out loud the Dutch equivalent of the RAINBOW passage (Van Lierde et al., 2001) using a Shure MV5 microphone set at flat mode (i.e., no equalization or compression) and Audacity® (sample rate:44.1 kHz). Participants were instructed to sit approximately 30 cm away from the microphone, and to speak with normal pace, volume, and tone. If the participant made a mistake while reading the text, the recording was repeated from the start. Stimulus collection occurred in parallel for men and women, and lasted approximately 1 h.In addition, each participant brought a worn t-shirt which was used as olfactory stimulus. To standardize the preparation of the olfactory stimuli, we asked participants to wear the t-shirt during the night before the experiment, and put it in a closed plastic bag in the morning. Furthermore, we asked them to follow specific guidelines (Roberts et al., 2008) before and during wearing the t-shirt: a) not use perfumed products; b) avoid excessive consumption of alcohol and tobacco; c) not consume spicy foods; d) refrain from sexual activity; e) sleep alone.Following stimulus collection, participants performed six cognitive tasks, three of which were the rating tasks for sight, sound, and scent (see below). The task-related section of the experiment lasted approximately 1 h. Thereafter, all participants were asked to proceed to the speed-date room, where they had a maximum of 10 speed-dates. The speed-dating phase of the study lasted for a maximum of 1 h. After the end of the experiment, participants were thanked for their participation, received a zoo ticket, and were debriefed.Rating tasksIn all rating tasks, participants rated the stimuli on a 1–7 scale. First, they answered the question “How attractive do you find this person’s face/voice/scent?”. Second, they answered the question “How suitable do you find a person with these looks/this voice/this scent as a long-term partner?”. For all three modalities, the rating tasks were presented on a desktop computer via E-Prime 3.0 (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA). Participants could rate the stimuli by using numeric keys 1 to 7. Stimulus order was randomized for all participants. In addition, the task order was randomized, so that not all participants rated the different modalities in the same order.Tom Roth.indd 57 16-01-2024 08:15