ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Aligning the smiles of dating dyads causally increases attraction.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Machine and deep learning in facial expression recognition: a survey based on facial action units.Scientific reports · 2026Review
- Spatiotemporal dynamics and substates underlie emotional signalling in facial movements.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Diagnostic status influences rapport and communicative behaviours in dyadic interactions between autistic and non-autistic people.PloS one · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Social interaction research is lacking an experimental paradigm enabling researchers to make causal inferences in free social interactions. For instance, the expressive signals that causally modulate the emergence of romantic attraction during interactions remain unknown. To disentangle causality in the wealth of covarying factors that govern social interactions, we developed an open-source video-conference platform enabling researchers to covertly manipulate the social signals produced by participants during interactions. Using this platform, we performed a speed-dating experiment where we aligned or misaligned the facial smiles of participants in real time with face transformation algorithms. Even though participants remained totally unaware that their faces were being manipulated, aligning their smiles causally enhanced the romantic attraction they felt toward each other, compared to unaligned scenarios. Manipulations also influenced how participants synchronized and vocally reacted to each other. This paradigm causally manipulates the emergence of romantic attraction in free social interactions. Moreover, our methodology opens the possibility to perform causal inferences during free social interactions.
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Registered trials
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