Being fertile doesn't just make you smell attractive, but it can affect how you look too. One study from a few years ago found that men would rate women's faces and voices as more attractive when their progesterone levels were low and oestrogen levels were high.
Some research has suggested our hormonal balance might impact who we fancy. For instance, men with high levels of testosterone may be more attracted to women with more feminine faces , meaning big eyes, high eyebrows, and a smaller jaw. But higher levels of testosterone may not make men seem any better looking. While testosterone and oestrogen are characterised as male and female respectively, they both play a role in men and women.
Testosterone, for instance, increases libido in pretty much everyone. Love is connected with several hormones that make us feel warm and fuzzy. Dopamine is the reward hormone that is released when we do something that makes you feel good, such as spending time with loved ones and having sex.
Norepinephrine is also released during attraction, and the combination makes you feel giddy. Attraction is also associated with higher levels of serotonin, the happy hormone.
And physical contact — hugging as well as sexual contact — has been shown to increase oxytocin, the love hormone. So it makes sense that spending more time with someone, enjoying their company, and touching them more would make you feel more attracted to them. If someone is kind, it can make them seem more attractive , and can also make them more likeable. A study showed that putting positive character traits against someone's photo meant people rated them as better looking.
Altruistic behaviour is also attractive, possibly because it was one of the qualities our ancestors favoured in a mate. One study found that women prefer men with low voices , especially just before they start ovulating.
There could be something inherently biological in this, as deeper voices have been linked to producing healthier children , and in the wild, lower pitch is associated with being bigger. According to another study , people who reported being more sexually experienced and sexually active were rated to have more attractive voices by strangers.
Research points to us being attracted to people who are similar to us — both physically and in personality. For example, research from St Andrews showed we are attracted to the features that our parents had when we were born, such as eye colour. This could be because we see them as our first caregiver, and associate positive feelings with their features. 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.
However, mood that is created by causes other than the other person can also influence liking. They had participants unexpectedly find a coin in a phone booth, played them some soothing music, or provided them a snack of milk and cookies at an experimental session.
In each of these cases, the participants who had been provided with the pleasant experience indicated more positive mood in comparison with other participants who had not received the positive experience—and they also expressed more liking for other things and other people. The moral of the story is clear—if you want to get someone to like you, put that person in a good mood.
Furthermore, it is pretty easy to do so—simply bringing flowers, looking your best, or telling a funny joke might well be enough to be effective. Although the relationship between mood and liking is very simple, the relationship between our current state of physiological arousal and liking is more complex.
In one part of the study, the men were asked to run in place for either a short time 15 seconds or a longer time seconds. Then the men viewed a videotape of either an attractive or an unattractive woman who was supposedly a sophomore at the college. In the video, she talked about her hobbies and career interests and indicated that she was interested in meeting people and did not have a boyfriend. The men, who thought that they would soon be meeting the woman, rated how romantically attracted they were to her.
Confirming that the experimental manipulation had created high and low levels of arousal, White and his colleagues found that the heart rate and other signs of physiological arousal were higher for the participants who had exercised longer. They did not find that the arousal created by running in place for seconds increased or decreased liking directly, but they did find an interaction between arousal level and the attractiveness of the woman being judged.
As you can see in the following figure, the men who had been aroused by running in place liked the attractive woman more and the unattractive woman less than the men who were less aroused. Arousal polarizes judgments. In this experiment, male college students rated an attractive or an unattractive woman after they had run in place for 15 seconds low arousal or for seconds high arousal.
The judgments under arousal are polarized. Data are from White, Fishbein, and Rutstein In another interesting field study, Dutton and Aron had an attractive young woman approach individual young men as they crossed a long, wobbly suspension bridge hanging over feet above the Capilano River in British Columbia. The woman asked each man to help her fill out a questionnaire for a class project. When he had finished, she wrote her name and phone number on a piece of paper and invited him to call if he wanted to hear more about the project.
Over half of the men who had been interviewed on the bridge later called her. In contrast, men who were approached on a low solid bridge by the same experimenter, or who were interviewed on the suspension bridge by men, called to learn about the project significantly less frequently.
Echoing our discussion of social cognition and affect, one interpretation of this finding is that the men who were interviewed on the bridge were experiencing arousal as a result of being on the bridge but that they misattributed their arousal as liking for the female interviewer.
When we are aroused, everything seems more extreme. This effect is not unexpected because the function of arousal in emotion is to increase the strength of an emotional response. Love that is accompanied by arousal sexual or otherwise is stronger love than love that has a lower level of arousal.
And our feelings of anger, dislike, or disgust are also stronger when they are accompanied by high arousal. As with mood states, arousal may sometimes come directly from the partner. Both very attractive and very unattractive people are likely to be more arousing than are people who are more average in attractiveness, and this arousal may create strong feelings of like or dislike.
In other cases, the arousal may come from another source, such as from exercising, walking across a high bridge, or a roller-coaster ride. The strong feelings that we experience toward another person that are accompanied by increases in arousal and sexual attraction are called passion, and the emotionally intense love that is based on passion is known as passionate love — the kind of love that we experience when we are first getting to know a romantic partner.
Again, there is a clear take-home lesson for you: If you like a person and think that the person likes you in return, and if you want to get that person to like you more, then it will be helpful to create some extra arousal in that person, perhaps by going to a scary movie, taking them up a tall building for dinner, or even meeting for a workout at the gym.
On the other hand, you need to be sure that the other person is initially positively inclined toward you. If not, arousing experiences could make matters even worse! Anderson, J. Was the Duchess of Windsor right?
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Female faces and bodies: N-dimensional feature space and attractiveness. Zebrowitz Eds. Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing. Griffin, A. Give yourself, and the mysterious ways of attraction, a little time. Her relationship column appears on Yahoo every Monday. To ask her a question, which may appear in an upcoming post, send an email to jen.
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