Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 106, Issue 3, March 2008, Pages 1487-1496
Cognition

Brief article
Seductive eyes: Attractiveness and direct gaze increase desire for associated objects

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.05.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Recent research in neuroscience shows that observing attractive faces with direct gaze is more rewarding than observing attractive faces with averted gaze. On the basis of this research, it was hypothesized that object evaluations can be enhanced by associating them with attractive faces displaying direct gaze. In a conditioning paradigm, novel objects were associated with either attractive or unattractive female faces, either displaying direct or averted gaze. An affective priming task showed more positive automatic evaluations of objects that were paired with attractive faces with direct gaze than attractive faces with averted gaze and unattractive faces, irrespective of gaze direction. Participants’ self-reported desire for the objects matched the affective priming data. The results are discussed against the background of recent findings on affective consequences of gaze cueing.

Introduction

People have an automatic tendency to shift their attention to the same location looked at by another person. The development of this skill – known as “joint attention” (see, for example, Friesen & Kingstone, 1998) – is considered a fundamental component of social development. Recently, an interesting line of research has emerged that studies the impact of joint attention on evaluative judgements of objects that are looked at. Work of Bayliss, Paul, Cannon, and Tipper (2006) has demonstrated that we tend to like things that other people look at more than objects that are not looked at. Moreover, it was shown that the evaluation of these cued (e.g., “looked at”) objects was qualified by facial cues that signal the valence of these objects (Bayliss, Frischen, Fenske, & Tipper, 2007). That is, cued objects were liked more when the face was smiling than when the face looked disgusted. In contrast, evaluations of uncued objects were not affected by facial expression. In the present research we aim to demonstrate that in a specific case of uncued objects, namely when gaze is directed at the participant, affective features of the face can affect object evaluations.

Direct gaze is an important social cue that signals another persons interest and willingness to engage in social interaction. Therefore, observing direct gaze can be a rewarding experience, which is reflected by the activation of neural dopamine systems that are involved in the processing of reward (Aharon et al., 2001, Kampe et al., 2001). It is important to note that the reward value of direct gaze interacts with affective features of the face, like attractiveness (Aharon et al., 2001, Kampe et al., 2001) and facial expression (Jones et al., 2006, O’Doherty et al., 2003). For instance, direct gaze is rewarding when the face is attractive, not when the face is unattractive (Kampe et al., 2001). Moreover, reward value is enhanced when attractive faces are smiling rather than showing a neutral expression (O’Doherty et al., 2003).

The primary function of neural reward activation is to produce motivated, goal-directed behavior whenever a relevant cue for a reward is encountered (Berridge & Robinson, 1998). This explains why reward activation can spread to neutral objects that are frequently paired with rewarding stimuli through classical conditioning (Berridge and Robinson, 1995, Berridge and Robinson, 1998, Schultz, 2006). Given the high reward value of observing attractive and smiling faces with direct gaze, it is likely that objects that are consistently paired with these faces will acquire reward value themselves. An experiment by Bayliss, Frischen, and colleagues (2007, Experiment 2) touched on this hypothesis by presenting objects next to stimulus faces with direct gaze that either smiled or looked disgusted. No differences in evaluations of the objects presented in the two facial expression conditions were found. A possible explanation for this null-effect is that the used paradigm was designed primarily to examine how emotional expression modulates the evaluation of objects of joint attention, rather than to examine conditioning effects. As explained above, there is good reason to believe that the reward value of observing smiling (or attractive) faces with direct gaze can enhance object evaluations in a conditioning experiment. Therefore, we sought to extend the research of Bayliss and colleagues by adopting a conditioning paradigm.

A critical feature of the Bayliss studies is that the objects are rated immediately after each trial of the final pairing. Thus, the participants were most likely aware of the contingency between the facial expression and the objects at the moment of object rating. This could hamper reinforcement learning in at least two ways. First, explicit knowledge about the facial expression–object contingencies enabled participants to rather explicitly infer the relation between the facial expression and the object (e.g., “The face smiled without looking at the object, therefore the smile was unrelated to the object”). Because an explicit rating scale was used to assess object evaluations, explicit inferences may explain the variance of the ratings to a considerable extent. Second, recent research suggests that explicit learning of contingencies and more implicit reinforcement learning (like classical conditioning) take place in two distinct neural areas that interact competitively. In other words, the more participants explicitly memorize facial expression–object contingencies, the less likely it is for conditioning to occur (e.g., Frank et al., 2006, Jolij and Lamme, 2005).

We paired novel objects (pictures of unknown peppermint brands) with faces that varied in gaze direction (directed at the participant or averted from the participant) and attractiveness. We tried to overcome the impact of explicit attributions in two ways. First, object evaluation was assessed after the entire acquisition phase, instead of after each acquisition trial, to reduce explicit memory for the facial expression–object contingencies. Second, in addition to an explicit evaluative scale, we included an implicit attitude measure, i.e., an affective priming task (Fazio et al., 1986, Fazio, 2001), which measures object ratings less obtrusively and taps more into spontaneous evaluations rather than explicit inferences.

Based on the research discussed above, we expected attractiveness and gaze direction to interact such that only association with attractive faces displaying direct gaze would increase the evaluation of associated objects, not attractive faces displaying averted gaze, nor unattractive faces. As previous research has shown that cued objects were liked more than uncued objects (Bayliss & Paul et al., 2006), we included two averted gaze conditions: one condition in which gaze direction was directed at the object and another in which gaze direction was directed away from the object.

Section snippets

Participants and design

Seventy-six students from Radboud University Nijmegen participated (31 males, no gender effects were found across all analyses), receiving course credits or 2 Euros in return. Initially, the experiment had a 2 (attractiveness: attractive or unattractive) × 3 (gaze direction: direct or averted toward object or averted away from the object) within participants design. However, analysing the data of both the affective priming task and the explicit evaluation scale indicated no differences between

Manipulation check

The data of the manipulation check were subjected to a 2 (attractiveness: attractive vs. unattractive) × 2 (gaze direction: direct vs. averted) repeated measures ANOVA. This revealed a main effect of attractiveness, indicating that participants rated the attractive faces (M = 5.46) as more attractive than the unattractive faces (M = 1.93), F(1, 75) = 728.31, MSE = 1.30, p < .01, ηp2=.91. Apart from that, there was a significant main effect of gaze direction, indicating that faces with direct gaze (M = 3.76)

Discussion

The results of both an implicit and explicit attitude measure support our hypothesis that object evaluations are enhanced by associating them with attractive faces displaying direct gaze, not attractive faces displaying averted gaze. These findings fit well with previous research demonstrating that observing attractive faces with direct gaze activates a neural reward centre, whereas observing attractive faces with averted gaze does not (Kampe et al., 2001). The present study takes these

References (16)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (0)

Writing this article was supported in part by VENI-Grant 451-04-063 from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to Rob Holland.

View full text