Male participants in a prior study reported their use of affect, clothing style, and attractiveness cues after completing the sexual-interest judgment task.
Judgments of uncertainty and attraction were affected by both the graphic from of avatar and by the consistency between the context of impression formation and the attractiveness cues of the avatar.
Across men, usage of attractiveness cues is strongly associated with neglect of affective cues, but use of these two cues is relatively independent of the use of cues of dress or environmental context, suggesting that an underlying structure may govern utilization of these cues.
When judging women's sexual interest, men focused on environmental cues, attractiveness, and provocativeness of clothing independently of expressed emotional cues, and men's risk for sexual aggression moderated the degree to which they focused on some of these dimensions.
Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that current condition is more relevant to male mate value than past disease resistance, and hence that temporally fluctuating traits (such as colour) contribute more to male attractiveness than stable cues of sexual dimorphism.
It does, however, contrast with the significant relationship between colour cues and attractiveness in these faces, and supports a shift in emphasis in physical attractiveness research toward the study of such condition-dependent cues.
Global facial symmetry along the vertical axis would not have been affected by our manipulations, nor would skin health, facial attractiveness, and many structural cues to facial adiposity.
As such methods eliminate variation in other, potentially competing cues to attractiveness, they force participants (often in a forced-choice paradigm) to attend to masculinity alone, and cannot be used to gauge its importance in realistic contexts.
It would also be valuable to explore whether similar results are obtained when ratings are taken in a naturalistic setting in the presence of other cues to attractiveness and sexual behaviour.
Previous work has demonstrated that oxygenated blood colour makes faces appear healthier [32], and facial attractiveness is often based on cues of health [42].
To date, however, there has been little rigorous assessment of whether, in the presence of variation in other cues, masculinity predicts attractiveness or not.
