Researchers have garnered compelling evidence in support of the evolutionary functions of physical attractiveness and its role in our daily lives, while at the same time, having largely ignored the significant contribution of non-visual modalities and the relationships among them. Acoustic and olfactory cues can, separately or in combination, strongly influence the perceived attractiveness of an individual and therefore attitudes and actions toward that person.
Here, we discuss the relative importance of visual, auditory and olfactory traits in judgments of attractiveness, and review neural and behavioral studies that support the highly complex and multimodal nature of person perception. Further, we discuss three alternative evolutionary hypotheses aimed at explaining the function of multiple indices of attractiveness.
In this review, we provide several lines of evidence supporting the importance of the voice, body odor, and facial and body appearance in the perception of attractiveness and mate preferences, and therefore the critical need to incorporate cross-modal perception and multisensory integration into future research on human physical attractiveness.
Physical attractiveness plays a central role in the assessment of human mate value. This has made it a widely examined topic in contemporary psychology and biology. The variables that determine mate value, such as health, sexual maturity and reproductive potential, are often not directly observable.
However, numerous studies have shown that these indices of mate value predict measures and ratings of physical attractiveness for review see, Grammer et al. Sexual selection is therefore thought to have shaped psychological mechanisms whose function it is to extract and process information related to good health and reproductive ability Singh and Randall, While physical attractiveness has been extensively examined in a mating context, attractiveness also plays an important role in various non-sexual social contexts such as friendship formation Wang et al.
It has also been examined as a potential risk factor for various mental disorders Davis et al. Researchers have garnered compelling evidence in support of the evolutionary functions of physical attractiveness and its role in our daily lives, although the overwhelming focus has been on the contribution of visual cues Eagly et al.
However, while visual cues are indeed strong predictors of overall attractiveness judgments Douglas and Shepard, ; Sorokowski et al. Together, vision, audition, and olfaction form the key telereceptive senses that process both proximal and distant sensory information in the external environment, and which, in combination, increase the efficiency of our actions and reactions when processing critical social cues Aglioti and Pazzaglia, In this paper, we argue that a more balanced approach that integrates research across these three modalities will provide stronger evidence regarding the complex factors underlying human attractiveness and the degree to which attractiveness influences human life.
Several empirical studies demonstrate that the perception of attractiveness is multimodal. At the neural level, multiple modalities in person perception are integrated in the superior temporal sulcus STS; Campanella and Belin, At a functional level, facial, vocal, and olfactory attractiveness have all been linked to traits indicative of sex hormone levels and health e.
Indeed, attractiveness judgments often co-vary across modalities Rikowski and Grammer, ; Saxton et al. Despite a growing body of research concerning the attractiveness of vocal and olfactory cues, these studies remain scarce compared to the vast number of studies examining visually assessed physical attractiveness, most of which focus on the face.
The amount of information one can gauge about a person solely from her or his scent and voice is impressive. For example, humans can use olfactory cues present in body odor to assess sex Schleidt et al.
Humans also have the capacity to recognize kin via body odor Weisfeld et al. Thus, the importance of modalities other than vision in social perception should not be neglected in scientific research. While multisensory integration in human perception is uncontroversial, the number of researchers examining this phenomenon in social communication remains relatively small, and the mechanisms underpinning it remain unclear.
Brain imaging studies suggest that the neural response to combined visual—olfactory cues in the right middle temporal cortex and left superior parietal cortex is super-additive — higher than the sum of visual and olfactory cues presented in isolation Royet et al.
There is also growing evidence that the STS region of the brain preferentially processes social information garnered from both the face for review see, Allison et al. Perceptual experiments examining visual and auditory adaptation effects further suggest that mental representations of faces and voices overlap cross-modally Little et al.
There are several evolutionary explanations regarding the potential adaptive functions of multisensory integration in person perception. Following this model, individuals pay attention to several traits or modalities because, in combination, multiple traits provide a better estimate of general condition than any single trait.
The theory states that these signals can be perceived at a distance through different channels vision, audition, or olfaction and are useful not only for attracting mates, but also for deterring predators and intimidating rivals Miller, a.
The considerations about indicators of fitness go far beyond physical traits and include, for example, intelligence and humor e. These theories are not all mutually exclusive and the degree to which they apply to multiple indicators of attractiveness is likely to vary across traits. Some studies suggest that information gauged from multiple modalities can have both independent and additive effects on judgments of attractiveness, such that voices, faces, bodies, and body odors can provide some partly redundant information about mate quality, but also some non-redundant information.
For instance, faces and bodies appear to contribute independently to overall attributions of attractiveness, with faces explaining significantly more of the variation for both men and women than bodies Peters et al. In contrast, combining an attractive face with an attractive voice or scent can result in higher overall judgments of attractiveness than presenting any modality alone Ferdenzi et al.
Yet, even in the absence of visual cues, an attractive voice Pisanski and Feinberg, or an attractive body odor Gueguen, ; Sorokowska, b can elicit prosocial behavior or generate positive impressions in others, and can independently predict individual differences in reproductive and socioeconomic success e. Studies examining interactions among the modalities underscore the inevitable complexity of multimodal sensory integration when it comes to judging attractiveness.
Women, on the other hand, prefer an intermediate level of overall masculinity and appear to achieve an optimal average level of this dimension either by preferring an intermediate level of masculinity for each modality or trait e. Further, in studies of genetic complementarity between partners, an intermediate level of genetic dissimilarity is usually optimal. While people tend to find faces of others with genotypes similar to their own most attractive, they prefer the odors of those with dissimilar genotypes.
As such, face and odor preferences might be used in tandem to filter out unsuitable partners at either extreme to achieve optimal complementarity Roberts et al. The relative importance of each modality might also shift dynamically during relationship formation.
For example, visual and vocal characteristics are likely to be more important early on, whereas odor requires closer and more intimate physical contact.
Potential mates may utilize physical appearance as a first-pass screen, while smell potentially imparts additional information during subsequent inspection.
The relative importance of various traits or modalities may also vary contextually. For instance, Currie and Little as well as Confer et al. Men and women also differ in the relative importance they ascribe to various attributes of a potential mate.
The complexity of what people perceive as attractive highlights the need for more research on the multimodal nature of person perception, as challenging as this may be. The personal ads that men place when they are searching for women tend to focus on the preferred physical appearance of the desired partner.
These findings seem to be due to universal preferences of men and women, because similar patterns have been found across cultures, and also in ads seeking same-sex partners Buss, Age also matters, such that the preference for youthful partners is more important for men than for women.
Women have been found to be more likely to respond to personal ads placed by relatively older men, whereas men tend to respond to ads placed by younger women—men of all ages even teenagers are most attracted to women who are in their 20s.
Another research finding consistent with the idea that men are looking for cues to fertility in their partners is that across many cultures, men have a preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio i.
On the other hand, women prefer men with a more masculine-appearing waist-to-hip ratio similar waist and hip size; Singh, ; Swami, And when asked about their regrets in life, men are more likely to wish they had had sex with more partners, whereas women more often than men wished they had tried harder to avoid getting involved with men who did not stay with them Roese et al. These differences may be influenced by differential evolutionary-based predispositions of men and women.
Because they do not need to invest a lot of time in child rearing, men may be evolutionarily predisposed to be more willing and desiring of having sex with many different partners and may be less selective in their choice of mates. Women on the other hand, because they must invest substantial effort in raising each child, should be more selective.
But gender differences in mate preferences may also be accounted for in terms of social norms and expectations. Overall, on average, across the world as a whole, women still tend to have lower status than men, and as a result, they may find it important to attempt to raise their status by marrying men who have more of it. Men who, on average, already have higher status may be less concerned in this regard, allowing them to focus relatively more on physical attractiveness.
You might find yourself wondering why people find physical attractiveness so important when it seems to say so little about what the person is really like as a person. One reason that we like attractive people is because they are rewarding.
We like being around attractive people because they are enjoyable to look at and because being with them makes us feel good about ourselves. Attractiveness can imply high status, and we naturally like being around people who have it.
As we touched on earlier in our discussion of the what is beautiful is good heuristic, we may also like attractive people because they are seen as better friends and partners. These assumptions about the internal qualities of attractive people also show some cross-cultural consistency. For example, individuals from Eastern and Western cultures tend to agree that attractiveness signifies qualities like sociability and popularity.
The opposite was found in regards to traits stressing independence. One outcome of favorable evaluations of and behaviors toward attractive people is that they receive many social benefits from others.
We are all of course aware of the physical attractiveness stereotype and make use of it when we can. We try to look our best on dates, at job interviews, and not necessary, we hope! As with many stereotypes, there may be some truth to the what is beautiful is good stereotype.
These results are probably partly the result of self-fulfilling prophecies. Because people expect attractive others to be friendly and warm, and because they want to be around them, they treat attractive people more positively than they do unattractive people. However, as with most stereotypes, our expectations about the different characteristics of attractive and unattractive individuals are much stronger than the real differences between them.
Although it is a very important variable, finding someone physically attractive is of course often only the first stage in developing a close relationship with another person. If we find someone attractive, we may want to pursue the relationship.
And if we are lucky, that person will also find us attractive and be interested in the possibility of developing a closer relationship. At this point, we will begin to communicate, sharing our values, beliefs, and interests, and begin to determine whether we are compatible in a way that leads to increased liking. Relationships are more likely to develop and be maintained to the extent that the partners share external, demographic characteristics, and internal ones like values and beliefs.
Research across many cultures has found that people tend to like and associate with others who share their age, education, race, religion, level of intelligence, and socioeconomic status Watson et al. One classic study Newcomb, arranged for male undergraduates, all strangers, to live together in a house while they were going to school. The men whose attitudes were similar during the first week ended up being friends, whereas those who did not initially share attitudes were significantly less likely to become friends.
Similarity leads to attraction for a variety of reasons. For one, similarity makes things easier. You can imagine that if you only liked to go to action movies but your partner only liked to go to foreign films, this would create difficulties in choosing an evening activity. Things would be even more problematic if the dissimilarity involved something even more important, such as your attitudes toward the relationship itself.
These dissimilarities are going to create real problems. Romantic relationships in which the partners hold different religious and political orientations or different attitudes toward important issues such as premarital sex, marriage, and child rearing are of course not impossible—but they are more complicated and take more effort to maintain.
In addition to being easier, relationships with those who are similar to us are also reinforcing. Imagine you are going to a movie with your very best friend. The movie begins, and you realize that you are starting to like it a lot. At this point, you might look over at your friend and wonder how she is reacting to it.
One of the great benefits of sharing beliefs and values with others is that those others tend to react the same way to events as you do. Odds are that if you like the movie, your friend will too, and because he or she does, you can feel good about yourself and about your opinions of what makes a good movie.
Sharing our values with others and having others share their values with us help us validate the worthiness of our self-concepts. Many people want to have friends and form relationships with people who have high status. They prefer to be with people who are healthy, attractive, wealthy, fun, and friendly.
But their ability to attract such high-status partners is limited by the principles of social exchange. It is no accident that attractive people are more able to get dates with other attractive people, for example.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and although it seems surprising to us when one partner appears much more attractive than the other, we may well assume that the less attractive partner is offering some type of perhaps less visible social status in return.
There is still one other type of similarity that is important in determining whether a relationship will grow and continue, and it is also based on the principles of social exchange and equity.
The finding is rather simple—we tend to prefer people who seem to like us about as much as we like them. Imagine, for instance, that you have met someone and you are hoping to pursue a relationship with that person. You begin to give yourself to the relationship by opening up to the other person, telling him or her about yourself and making it clear that you would like to pursue a closer relationship. You make yourself available to spend time with the person and contact him or her regularly.
You hope that he or she feels the same amount of liking, and that you will receive the same type of behaviors in return. If the person does not return the openness and giving, the relationship is not going to go very far. Relationships in which one person likes the other much more than the other likes him or her can be inherently unstable because they are not balanced or equitable. An unfortunate example of such an imbalanced relationship occurs when one individual continually attempts to contact and pursue a relationship with another person who is not interested in one.
It is difficult for the suitor to give up the pursuit because he or she feels passionately in love with the other, and his or her self-esteem will be hurt if the other person is rejecting. Such situations are not uncommon and require that the individual who is being pursued make it completely clear that he or she is not interested in any further contact.
There is a clear moral to the importance of liking similarity, and it pays to remember it in everyday life. If we act toward others in a positive way, this expresses liking and respect for them, and the others will likely return the compliment. Being liked, praised, and even flattered by others is rewarding, and unless it is too blatant and thus ingratiating, as we saw when we discussed self-presentation we can expect that others will enjoy it.
In sum, similarity is probably the most important single determinant of liking. And there is no question that such individual characteristics matter. But social psychologists realize that there are other aspects that are perhaps even more important. Consider this:. There are about 7 billion people in the world, and you are only going to have the opportunity to meet a tiny fraction of those people before you marry.
Although meeting someone is an essential first step, simply being around another person also increases liking. People tend to become better acquainted with, and more fond of, each other when the social situation brings them into repeated contact, which is the basic principle of proximity liking. Festinger, Schachter, and Back studied friendship formation in people who had recently moved into a large housing complex.
They found not only that people became friends with those who lived near them but that people who lived nearer the mailboxes and at the foot of the stairway in the building where they were more likely to come into contact with others were able to make more friends than those who lived at the ends of the corridors in the building and thus had fewer social encounters with others. The mere exposure effect refers to the tendency to prefer stimuli including, but not limited to, people that we have seen frequently.
Consider the research findings presented in Figure 7. At the end of the term, the students were shown pictures of the confederates and asked to indicate if they recognized them and also how much they liked them. As predicted by the mere-exposure hypothesis, students who had attended more often were liked more.
Richard Moreland and Scott Beach had female confederates visit a class 5, 10, or 15 times or not at all over the course of a semester. Then the students rated their liking of the confederates. The mere exposure effect is clear. Data are from Moreland and Beach The effect of mere exposure is powerful and occurs in a wide variety of situations Bornstein, This also is expected on the basis of mere exposure, since people see their own faces primarily in mirrors and thus are exposed to the reversed face more often.
Mere exposure may well have an evolutionary basis. When the stimuli are people, there may well be an added effect—familiar people are more likely to be seen as part of the ingroup rather than the outgroup, and this may lead us to like them even more.
Keep in mind that mere exposure applies only to the change that occurs when one is completely unfamiliar with another person or object and subsequently becomes more familiar with him or her. Thus mere exposure applies only in the early stages of attraction. Later, when we are more familiar with someone, that person may become too familiar and thus boring. You may have experienced this effect when you first bought some new songs and began to listen to them. If this has happened to you, you have experienced mere exposure.
But perhaps one day you discovered that you were really tired of the songs—they had become too familiar. You put the songs away for a while, only bringing them out later, when you found that liked them more again they were now less familiar. People prefer things that have an optimal level of familiarity—neither too strange nor too well known Bornstein, Because our relationships with others are based in large part on emotional responses, it will come as no surprise to you to hear that affect is particularly important in interpersonal relationships.
The relationship between mood and liking is pretty straightforward. We tend to like people more when we are in good moods and to like them less when we are in bad moods. This prediction follows directly from the expectation that affective states provide us with information about the social context—in this case, the people around us.
Positive affect signals that it is safe and desirable to approach the other person, whereas negative affect is more likely to indicate danger and to suggest avoidance. Moods are particularly important and informative when they are created by the person we are interacting with.
When we find someone attractive, for instance, we experience positive affect, and we end up liking the person even more. Interpersonal attraction refers to positive feelings about another person. It can take many forms, including liking, love, friendship, lust, and admiration. Many factors influence whom people are attracted to.
They include physical attractiveness, proximity, similarity, and reciprocity:. Researchers have proposed that romantic love includes two kinds of love: passionate love and compassionate love. These two kinds of love may occur together, but they do not always go hand in hand in a relationship:. Some researchers study the influence of childhood attachment styles on adult relationships. Many researchers believe that as adults, people relate to their partners in the same way that they related to their caretakers in infancy.
See Chapter 4 for more information on attachment styles. There are both similarities and differences among cultures in romantic attraction. This means that we not only believe that good-looking people are more physically attractive, we expect them to have other desirable characteristics as well and tend to behave more positively towards them.
However, in real life people also use common sense to estimate whether a prospective partner will find us attractive, and therefore they don't automatically go for the most attractive person around, but choose a partner who matches their own level of physical attractiveness. This is referred to as the matching hypothesis. As a result, people often settle for a partner who has roughly the same level of physical attractiveness. Exam Hint: Research studies can be presented as both knowledge and evaluation in the exam; however, it is important that students are clear with how they are using research in their answer.
The idea of halo effect was supported by Palmer and Peterson , who asked participants to rate attractive and unattractive people in terms of how politically competent and knowledgeable they believed them to be.
It was found that attractive people were consistently rated higher on these characteristics compared to unattractive ones. Original research into the matching hypothesis was conducted by Elaine Walster who first proposed the matching hypothesis and her colleagues in They invited first-year students at the University of Minnesota to attend a dance party. They were randomly matched to a partner; however, when students were picking up their tickets, they were secretly judged by a panel in terms of attractiveness.
During the intervals at the dance party, and 4 to 6 months later, students were asked whether they found their partner attractive and whether they would like to go on a second date with them. Contrary to the matching hypothesis predictions, students expressed higher appreciation of their partner if the partner was attractive, regardless of their own level of attractiveness.
However, Feingold found supportive evidence for the matching hypothesis by carrying out a meta-analysis of 17 studies using real-life couples. Exam Hint: The first evaluation point demonstrates how research see above can be used to write effective evaluation.
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