Social gaze on single and couple targets: exploring the top-down influences of sex, relationship status, love and lust state

Abstract

Objectives. Previous studies shown that partnered and committed individuals selectively attended less to attractive alternatives, relative to single individuals, implying a social cognitive mechanism in relationship maintenance. Similar studies evidenced that social gaze on face and body region was determined by one’s love and lust intentions. These inspires the present study to aim at exploring the social gazes in an eye-tracking protocol, along with evidenced, top-down, individual factors. Hypothesized were the moderating effects of respectively viewer sex, relationship status, and love-and-lust state on the social gazes. Methods. 91 participants were recruited into the experiment. They were randomly assigned to three experimental conditions – love, lust and neutral, with sexes and relationship status balanced. 30 photographs of single models and couple models, with controlled attractiveness were presented in the eye-tracking session. Results. Mixed-design ANOVAs were conducted to test the moderation effect of viewer sex, relationship status, and conditions, along with bottom-down factor – target sexes, target attractiveness, and face and body region. Along with subgroup analyses, it is revealed that when viewing single target, female gazed at the face and body region differentially by the sex of the target, and partnered males down-regulate gazes distributed on the female targets in a couple. Discussion. The results provided partial support to the proposed hypothesis. The sex-specific gaze patterns were discussed with the evolutionary perspective in mate selection and relationship maintenance. As this study was a pioneer application of social gaze in interpersonal context in eye-tracking environment, more related studies concerning the face and body preferences are needed.