Misattribution of musical arousal increases sexual attraction towards opposite-sex faces in females

Abstract

Several theories about the origins of music have emphasized its biological and social functions, including in courtship. Music may act as a courtship display due to its capacity to vary in complexity and emotional content. Support for music’s reproductive function comes from the recent finding that only women in the fertile phase of the reproductive cycle prefer composers of complex melodies to composers of simple ones as short-term sexual partners, which is also in line with the ovulatory shift hypothesis. However, the precise mechanisms by which music may influence sexual attraction are unknown, specifically how music may interact with visual attractiveness cues and affect perception and behaviour in both genders. Using a crossmodal priming paradigm, we examined whether listening to music influences ratings of facial attractiveness and dating desirability of opposite-sex faces. We also tested whether misattribution of arousal or pleasantness underlies these effects, and explored whether sex differences and menstrual cycle phase may be moderators. Our sample comprised 64 women in the fertile or infertile phase (no hormonal contraception use) and 32 men, carefully matched for mood, relationship status, and musical preferences. Musical primes (25 s) varied in arousal and pleasantness, and targets were photos of faces with neutral expressions (2 s). Group-wise analyses indicated that women, but not men, gave significantly higher ratings of facial attractiveness and dating desirability after having listened to music than in the silent control condition. High-arousing, complex music yielded the largest effects, suggesting that music may affect human courtship behaviour through induced arousal, which calls for further studies on the mechanisms by which music affects sexual attraction in real-life social contexts.

Assessing the Role of Emotional Mediation in Explaining Crossmodal Correspondences Involving Musical Stimuli

“…It is a fact widely acknowledged that music induces emotion in the listener (e.g., Juslin and Sloboda, 2010;Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008;Marin and Bhattacharya, 2010;North and Hargreaves, 2008; though for an exception in the case of musical anhedonia, see Mas-Herrero et al, 2014). Furthermore, an extensive body of research has also demonstrated how listening to music can influence people's judgments concerning a variety of other stimuli that they may happen to be evaluating at around the same time (e.g., Logeswaran and Bhattacharya, 2009;Marin et al, 2012Marin et al, , 2017Tannenbaum, 1956;Zuckerman, 1949). However, beyond its effect on mood/emotion, and any crossmodal effects on stimulus evaluation, there is also a growing body of scientific research suggesting that people experience crossmodal correspondences between short musical excerpts and a range of visual stimuli.…”

Body sway predicts romantic interest in speed dating

“…This effect might be attenuated, however, if participants are actively engaged in another task like having a conversation, as in the present case. An alternative possible explanation for the relation between groovy music and romantic interest is that groove-enhanced arousal levels might be misattributed to romantic interest (Marin et al, 2017;Bowling et al, 2018). Again, this possibility would need to be explored in future research.…”

Géneros musicales preferidos por universitarios de la ciudad de Medellín, Colombia

“…en las mujeres, disminuye el nivel de cortisol, y en los hombres aumenta el nivel de alfa-amilasa, y se produce una menor secreción de cortisol. De otro lado, la música repercute en la función reproductiva; se ha evidenciado que las mujeres, cuando están en el periodo de fertilidad, se inclinan por la música que contiene composiciones más estructuradas; incluso, la música se relaciona con la atracción sexual, siendo diferente la forma de percibirla por parte de los hombres, respecto a las mujeres (Marin, Schober, Gingras & Leder, 2017).…”