Hi all,

This week Amanda Hahn will be giving our BERG talk. Amanda is a postdoc at The University of Glasgow who takes a strong evolutionary approach to her research.  She will speak to us about her research on motivational salience of facial attractiveness (see abstract below).

After the talk we plan on heading to town for dinner (most likely at Brea). Please let me know if you would like to join us for the meal so that I can appropriately reserve a table.

Cheers,

Kelly

 Abstract:

People will expend more effort to view attractive faces than they will to view unattractive faces, suggesting that facial attractiveness holds motivational salience. Using a key-press paradigm to measure the extent to which individuals will expend effort to alter the viewing time of face images, we find that attractiveness has a greater effect on the motivational salience of opposite-sex faces than own-sex faces in both men and women. We also find evidence for individual differences in the motivational salience of own-sex attractiveness. Men, but not women, who score higher on a measure of relationship jealousy will expend more effort to view (i.e., ‘monitor’), attractive own-sex individuals. Increased monitoring of attractive own-sex individuals among men reporting greater relationship jealousy may function to facilitate efficient allocation of mate-guarding effort. The sex difference in the link between relationship jealousy and monitoring of attractive own-sex individuals may occur because, unlike women, men are susceptible to paternity uncertainty costs if their mate engages in extra-pair sex.