ArticlePloS one2017
Misattribution of musical arousal increases sexual attraction towards opposite-sex faces in females.
Article in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Dynamic brain connectivity predicts emotional arousal during naturalistic movie-watching.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Music as an Evolved Tool for Socio-Affective Fiction.Emotion review : journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion · 2024Article
- How music-induced emotions affect sexual attraction: evolutionary implications.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Love songs and serenades: a theoretical review of music and romantic relationships.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Facial attractiveness in the eyes of men with high arousal.Brain and behavior · 2023Article
- Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Improving sexual dysfunction through guided imagery music (GIM): A clinical trial study.Journal of education and health promotion · 2023Article
- Musicality in human vocal communication: an evolutionary perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Darwin's sexual selection hypothesis revisited: Musicality increases sexual attraction in both sexes.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Evolution of Artistic and Athletic Propensities: Testing of Intersexual Selection and Intrasexual Competition.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The sexual selection of creativity: A nomological approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
- Article
- The scent of attraction and the smell of success: crossmodal influences on person perception.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2021Review
- Human Genomics and the Biocultural Origin of Music.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Body sway predicts romantic interest in speed dating.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Article
- The Influence of Mating Context on Creativity: Insights from Simulated Dating Scenarios.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.