We showed that the looking time spent on faces is a valid covariate of beauty by testing the relation between facial attractiveness and gaze behavior. We presented natural scenes which always pictured two people, encompassing a wide range of facial attractiveness. Employing measurements of eye movements in a free viewing paradigm, we found a linear relation between facial attractiveness and gaze behavior: The more attractive the face, the longer and the more often it was looked at. In line with evolutionary approaches, the positive relation was particularly pronounced when participants viewed other sex faces.

One of the key behavioral effects of attractiveness is increased visual attention to attractive people. This effect is often explained in terms of evolutionary adaptations, such as attractiveness being an indicator of good health. Other factors could influence this effect. In the present study, we explored the modulating role of sexual orientation on the effects of attractiveness on exploratory visual behavior. Heterosexual and homosexual men and women viewed natural-looking scenes that depicted either two women or two men who varied systematically in levels of attractiveness (based on a pre-study). Participants’ eye movements and attractiveness ratings toward the faces of the depicted people were recorded. The results showed that although attractiveness had the largest influence on participants’ behaviors, participants’ sexual orientations strongly modulated the effects. With the exception of homosexual women, all participant groups looked longer and more often at attractive faces that corresponded with their sexual orientations. Interestingly, heterosexual and homosexual men and homosexual women looked longer and more often at the less attractive face of their non-preferred sex than the less attractive face of their preferred sex, evidence that less attractive faces of the preferred sex might have an aversive character. These findings provide evidence for the important role that sexual orientation plays in guiding visual exploratory behavior and evaluations of the attractiveness of others.

A controversial hypothesis, named the Sexualized Body Inversion Hypothesis (SBIH), claims similar visual processing of sexually objectified women (i.e., with a focus on the sexual body parts) and inanimate objects as indicated by an absence of the inversion effect for both type of stimuli. The current study aims at shedding light into the mechanisms behind the SBIH in a series of 4 experiments. Using a modified version of Bernard et al.´s (2012) visual-matching task, first we tested the core assumption of the SBIH, namely that a similar processing style occurs for sexualized human bodies and objects. In Experiments 1 and 2 a non-sexualized (personalized) condition plus two object-control conditions (mannequins, and houses) were included in the experimental design. Results showed an inversion effect for images of personalized women and mannequins, but not for sexualized women and houses. Second, we explored whether this effect was driven by differences in stimulus asymmetry, by testing the mediating and moderating role of this visual feature. In Experiment 3, we provided the first evidence that not only the sexual attributes of the images but also additional perceptual features of the stimuli, such as their asymmetry, played a moderating role in shaping the inversion effect. Lastly, we investigated the strategy adopted in the visual-matching task by tracking eye movements of the participants. Results of Experiment 4 suggest an association between a specific pattern of visual exploration of the images and the presence of the inversion effect. Findings are discussed with respect to the literature on sexual objectification.

No abstract

Facial attractiveness captures and binds visual attention, thus affecting visual exploration of our environment. It is often argued that this effect on attention has evolutionary functions related to mating. Although plausible, such perspectives have been challenged by recent behavioral and eye-tracking studies, which have shown that the effect on attention is moderated by various sex- and goal-related variables such as sexual orientation. In the present study, we examined how relationship status and sociosexual orientation moderate the link between attractiveness and visual attention. We hypothesized that attractiveness leads to longer looks and that being single as well as being more sociosexually unrestricted, enhances the effect of attractiveness. Using an eye-tracking free-viewing paradigm, we tested 150 heterosexual men and women looking at images of urban real-world scenes depicting two people differing in facial attractiveness. Participants additionally provided attractiveness ratings of all stimuli. We analyzed the correlations between how long faces were looked at and participants’ ratings of attractiveness and found that more attractive faces—especially of the other sex—were looked at longer. We also found that more sociosexually unrestricted participants who were single had the highest attractiveness-attention correlation. Our results show that evolutionary predictions cannot fully explain the attractiveness-attention correlation; perceiver characteristics and motives moderate this relationship.