Gender differences in the motivational processing of facial beauty☆
Section snippets
Participants
For clarity of presentation, study participants are referred to as “men” and “women” and facial images as “male” and “female”. Study subjects comprised healthy individuals, as determined by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV-TR Axis I Disorders (SCID-I/NP; First, Spitzer, Gibbon, & Williams, 2002). Their self-reported heterosexual status was confirmed with the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (KSOG; Klein, Sepekoff, & Wolf, 1985) that assessed the sexual self (attraction, fantasy, and
Results
Men and women groups were similar with respect to age [M = 28.7, SD = 8.4 vs. M = 25.0, SD = 3.3; t(33) = 1.60, p = .10] and years of education [M = 15.7, SD = 1.5 vs. 15.8 , SD = 1.5; t(33) = −0.20, p = .84)]. Fig. 2 displays the rating and net key-press data for each category. Overall, the two groups did not differ in the attractiveness ratings [group effect: F(1, 33) = 2.92, p = .10], but beautiful faces’ ratings significantly exceeded those of the average faces [Faces Type effect: F(3, 99) = 127.90, p < .0001] with men
Discussion
The results of the current study provide empirical laboratory-based evidence for the motivational value of beauty. Our interpretation that the observed gender differences are related to motivational drives of the viewers (Senior, 2003) rather than to social acceptance or desirability of prolonged viewing behavior towards opposite sexes is supported by recent work demonstrating stronger fMRI activations within motivational/reward regions by female than by male faces for heterosexual men and by
Acknowledgment
The authors thank Dr. Alumit Ishai for her insightful comments on the manuscript.
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2016, Personality and Individual DifferencesCitation Excerpt :In Study 2, attractiveness had a positive effect on key-press scores for men's faces, indicating that more attractive men's faces were more rewarding to women. This pattern of results is consistent with previous research that also reported positive effects of attractiveness on this measure of the reward value of men's faces (Hahn et al., 2014, 2015; Levy et al., 2008; Wang et al., 2014). While both studies show that women generally discriminate men's faces along the attractiveness dimension, we found no evidence that the relationships between attractiveness and memory for men's faces or attractiveness and the reward value of men's faces were significantly different for partnered and unpartnered women or for partnered women who scored above or below the median on a combined relationship happiness and commitment score.
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This work was supported by Grant D.A. #017959 (I.E.) from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.