Page 69 - Demo

Multimodal mate choice673dicrepancies between different types of body odour highlight the difficulties of studying the effects of olfaction on human mate choice (Ferdenzi et al., 2020), and future studies could consider incorporating both natural and diplomatic samples.Importantly, some important questions about multimodal attractiveness and initial attraction remain. For example, a question that we have not investigated is how cross-modal interactions shape attraction. Given our sample is relatively small, we could not examine such complex relationships. Nonetheless, investigating such dynamics might be vital to grasp the complex dynamics of multimodal attractiveness (Groyecka et al., 2017). For example, having an attractive voice and an attractive face might especially increase dating success, or unattractiveness on one modality might reduce the positive effect of the other modality (Demattè et al., 2007). We suggest that large-scale studies using a similar design to our studies are necessary to further elucidate these complex interactions. Another example concerns the context-dependent importance of the different modalities. Visual and vocal attractiveness might be especially important during first interactions in which close contact is rare. Olfactory attractiveness, however, may be important during more advanced stages of the relationship (Groyecka et al., 2017), when close contact is more common, or during first interactions with close physical contact. Altogether, investigating cross-modality interactions and context-dependence are essential to understand how multimodal attractiveness shapes initial attraction.In conclusion, our results corroborate the importance of visual attractiveness in early stages of mate choice. At the same time, the static attractiveness ratings for auditory and olfactory attractiveness did not substantially predict date outcome. This suggests that especially visual attractiveness is relatively important during speed-dates, while auditory and olfactory attractiveness are less important. Nonetheless, these modalities might come into play in other stages of the developing relationship or in other contexts. Furthermore, attractiveness of voice and smell may be more strongly influenced by dynamics during an interaction, rendering static attractiveness ratings to be less predictive. Altogether, our findings illustrate that the coupling of multimodal rating tasks and speed-date paradigms is a fruitful method of studying multimodal human mate choice. Applying such methods with large-scale samples allows for disentangling the effects of different factors on date outcome, and could further aid in understanding how human mate choice is affected by sight, sound, and scent.Tom Roth.indd 67 08-01-2024 10:41