Research Shows How Physical Attraction Works

Research from Florida State University shows that there is such a thing love, or at least attraction, at first sight. They say that no matter what reason one person has for sizing up another, be it seeking a mate, or sizing up a rival, a good looking person will capture a person's attention almost instantly and it can make it impossible for the person to turn their eyes away.

They conducted a series of three experiments and found that the participants, all of whom were heterosexual men and women, fixated on people who were considered to be highly attractive within the first half second of seeing them.

Those who were single fixated on the opposite sex, but those who were in a committed relationship behaved a little bit differently. They were more interested in checking out the beautiful people of the opposite sex, checking out the competition, so to speak, while those who were single were looking for a mate.

The research was based on the idea that our brains have been designed to pick up on signs of physical beauty in others first for the purpose of finding a mate and once that mate has been found, to protect him or her from the competition. Of course there are always exceptions to the rule and there were some people in committed relationships who had trouble pulling their attention away from the opposite sex. And when they looked at potential rivals, it caused feelings of insecurity.

They conducted the research like this: There were 120 in the first study, 160 in the second and 162 in the third. They all completed questionnaires designed to determine the extent to which they were motivated to look for members of the opposite sex. They then took part in a series of special "priming" activities and then were shown photos of highly attractive men and women and average looking men and women.

They flashed a photo of one of the faces in one quadrant of a computer screen then the participants were required to shift their attention away from that fact and look at some other part of the screen. By using a precise measure of reaction time, they were able to deduce that it took longer to turn their vision from the photos of the highly attractive people.