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ORIGINAL PAPER1
2 Reported Sexual Desire Predicts Men’s Preferences for Sexually
3 Dimorphic Cues in Women’s Faces
4 Benedict C. Jones • Anthony C. Little •
5 Christopher D. Watkins • Lisa L. M. Welling •
6 Lisa M. DeBruine
7 Received: 21 July 2010 / Revised: 17 December 2010 / Accepted: 17 December 2010
8 ! Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
9 Abstract Recent studies investigating the relationship
10 between sexual desire and sexual attraction have found that
11 heterosexual women’s reported sexual desire is positively cor-
12 relatedwith their reported attraction to both own- and opposite-
13 sex individuals, but that heterosexual men’s reported sexual
14 desire is positively correlated with their reported attraction to
15 opposite-sex individuals only. These findings have led to the
16 proposal that sexual desire is a generalized energizer of sexual
17 attraction in heterosexual women (i.e., influences women’s
18 attraction to both men and women), but only energizes hetero-
19 sexual men’s sexual attraction to women. Here we show that
20 heterosexual men’s scores on the Sexual Desire Inventory-2
21 were positively correlated with their preferences for exagger-
22 ated sex-typical shape cues in opposite-sex, but not own-sex,
23 faces. Together with previous research showing that hetero-
24 sexual women’s reported sexual desire is positively correlated
25 with their preferences for exaggerated sex-typical shape cues in
26 both own- and opposite-sex faces, our findings present novel
27 converging evidence for sex-specific relationships between
28sexual desire and attractiveness judgments of own- and oppo-
29site-sex individuals.
30
31Keywords Sexual desire ! Sex drive !
32Attraction ! Mate choice ! Face perception
33
34Introduction
35Recent work by Lippa (2006, 2007) has investigated the rela-
36tionship between sexual desire and attraction by studying the
37nature of the relationships between men’s and women’s
38reported sexual desire and their reported attraction toown-and
39opposite-sex individuals. In these studies, sex-specificity of
40sexual attraction was assessed by having participants sepa-
41rately rate the attractiveness of own- and opposite-sex indi-
42viduals, rather than using the Kinsey scale. Lippa’s studies
43found that heterosexual women’s reported sexual desire was
44positively correlated with their reported attraction to both
45men and women, but that heterosexual men’s reported sexual
46desire was positively correlated with their reported attraction
47to women only. These results led Lippa to propose that sexual
48desire is a generalized energizer of sexual attraction in heter-
49osexual women (i.e., increases the sexual attractiveness of
50bothmen andwomen), but only energizes heterosexualmen’s
51sexual attraction to women.
52Further evidence in support of Lippa’s (2006, 2007) pro-
53posal comes from studies of the relationship between hetero-
54sexual women’s reported sexual desire and their preferences
55for sexually dimorphic characteristics in men’s and women’s
56faces (Welling, Jones, & DeBruine, 2008). Consistent with
57Lippa’s proposal that sexual desire is a generalized energizer
58of sexual attraction in heterosexual women, Welling et al.
59(2008) found that reported sexual desire was positively cor-
60relatedwith the strength of heterosexualwomen’s preferences
A1 B. C. Jones ! C. D. Watkins ! L. M. DeBruine
A2 School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen,
A3 Scotland, UK
A4 A. C. Little
A5 Department of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK
A6 L. L. M. Welling
A7 Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University,
A8 University Park, PA, USA
A9 B. C. Jones (&)
A10 Face Research Laboratory, School of Psychology, The William
A11 Guild Building, King’s College, University of Aberdeen,
A12 Aberdeen AB24 2UB, Scotland, UK
A13 e-mail: ben.jones@abdn.ac.uk
123
Journal : Large 10508 Dispatch : 29-12-2010 Pages : 5
Article No. : 9721 h LE h TYPESET
MS Code : JONES_12-20_2 h CP h DISK4 4
Arch Sex Behav
DOI 10.1007/s10508-010-9721-1
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61 for bothmasculine characteristics inmen’s facesand feminine
62 characteristics in women’s faces.
63 Although Welling et al. (2008) presented converging evi-
64 dence for Lippa’s (2006, 2007) suggestion that sexual desire is
65 a generalized energizer of sexual attraction in heterosexual
66 women, they did not test for similar correlations between sex-
67 ual desire and men’s face preferences. To address this latter
68 issue, we investigated the relationship between heterosexual
69 men’s reported sexual desire, assessedusing theSexualDesire
70 Inventory-2 (SDI-2; Spector, Carey, & Steinberg, 1996), and
71 their preferences for feminine characteristics in women’s
72 faces and masculine characteristics in men’s faces. Given
73 Lippa’s proposal that sexual desire only energizes heterosex-
74 ual men’s sexual attraction to women, we predicted that het-
75 erosexual men’s sexual desire would be positively correlated
76 with their preferences for feminine characteristics inwomen’s
77 faces, but not their preferences formasculine characteristics in
78 men’s faces.
79 Method
80 Participants
81 A total of 70 heterosexual adult men took part in the study
82 (age: M= 26.1 years, SD= 6.3 years, range= 18–44years).
83 Themenwere recruited for an online study of face preferences
84 by following links from lists of web-based studies (e.g., psy-
85 chology.org). Participants were not compensated for par-
86 ticipating.
87 Measures and Procedure
88 Following previous studies of systematic variation in percep-
89 tions ofmasculine and feminine faces (e.g., Jones et al., 2007;
90 Welling et al., 2007, 2008), we used prototype-based image
91 transformations to objectively manipulate sexual dimor-
92 phism of 2D shape in digital face images. Although different
93 methods for manipulating the masculinity of face images
94 have been used in some other studies (e.g., Johnston, Hagel,
95 Franklin, Fink, & Grammer, 2001), these methods have been
96 shown to produce perceptual effects that are equivalent to
97 those produced using the methods employed in our current
98 study (DeBruineet al., 2006;DeBruine, Jones,Smith,&Little,
99 2010).
100 First, male and female prototype (i.e., average) faces were
101 manufactured using established computer graphic methods
102 (Rowland & Perrett, 1995; Tiddeman, Burt, & Perrett, 2001).
103 Prototypes are composite images that are constructed by aver-
104 aging the shape, color, and texture of a group of faces, such as
105 male or female faces. These prototypes can then be used
106 to transform images by calculating the vector differences in
107 position between corresponding points on two prototype
108images and changing the position of the corresponding points
109on a third image by a given percentage of these vectors.
110Here, 50% of the linear differences in 2D shape between
111symmetrized versions of a male and a female prototype were
112addedtoorsubtracted fromface imagesof20youngWhitemale
113adults (age: M=19.5years, SD=2.3 years) and 20 young
114White female adults (age:M=18.4years, SD= .7 years). This
115process created masculinized and feminized versions of the
116individual face images that differ in sexual dimorphism of 2D
117shape and that are matched in other regards (e.g., identity, skin
118color, and texture) (Rowland & Perrett, 1995). Examples of
119masculinized and feminized face images are shown in Fig. 1.
120Thus, 40 pairs of images were produced in total (each pair
121consisting of a masculinized and a feminized version of the
122same individual). Previous studies have demonstrated that this
123method for manipulating masculinity of 2D face shape affects
124perceptions of facial masculinity in the predicted manner
125(DeBruine et al., 2006; Jones et al., 2010; Welling et al., 2007,
1262008). The 20 pairs of male faces and 20 pairs of female faces
127used in our study were the same set of stimuli that were used in
128Study 2 of Welling et al. (2008).
129Each participant completed a face preference test in which
130they were shown the 40 pairs of faces (see above) and were
131asked to indicate which face in each pair they thought was
Fig. 1 Examples of masculinized (left) and feminized (right) versions
of female and male faces used in our study
Arch Sex Behav
123
Journal : Large 10508 Dispatch : 29-12-2010 Pages : 5
Article No. : 9721 h LE h TYPESET
MS Code : JONES_12-20_2 h CP h DISK4 4
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