Abstract: What happens when we unexpectedly see an attractive potential partner? Previous studies in laboratory settings suggest that the visualization of attractive and unattractive photographs influences the perception of time. The major aim of this research is to study time perception and attraction in a realistic social scenario, by investigating if changes in subjective time measured during a speed dating are associated with attraction. The duration of the dates was variable and participants had to estimate the time that passed. Among other measures, participants also rated the potential partners in terms of their physical attractiveness before and after the dates and reported if they would like to exchange contact with them. Results showed that, in a real speed dating situation, when there is a perception of the partner as being physically more attractive, women tend to overestimate the duration of that meeting, whereas men tend to underestimate its duration. Such changes may reflect evolutionary adaptations which make the human cognitive system more responsive in situations related to reproductive fitness.
Discussion
The main objective of this research was to study time perception and attraction in a realistic social scenario by investigating if changes in subjective time measured during a speed dating session were related with attraction. The duration of the dates was variable and participants had to estimate the time that passed. Participants were asked to rate potential partners in terms of their physical attractiveness before and after the dates and to report if they wanted to exchange contacts with them. Our data suggest, consistently with our hypotheses, that the estimated time of the dates were associated with the physical attractiveness of the potential partners perceived by participants.
More specifically, our results showed that the more females rated a potential partner as physically attractive, the longer they perceived the duration of the date. That goes along with the popular idea that “time slows down whenever you are around” (Swift, 2010). This may be due to a bigger allocation of women’s cognitive resources to process more information of the meeting (Loftus et al., 1987) and of the potential partner they are interested in. More specifically, even though physical attractiveness is important in a potential partner, for women there are other characteristics that may have a higher value, such as good economic prospects (Buss and Barnes, 1986; Bech-Sørensen and Pollet, 2016). Therefore, searching for cues of positive traits in a potential mate requires the use of cognitive resources. Besides that, research has shown that when women perceive the partner as attractive, they tend to be more motivated to make a good impression on the partner and pay more attention to the things they say that might influence this impression (Dong and Wyer, 2014). According to Ornstein’s storage size model (Ornstein, 1969; Sasaki and Yamada, 2017), when people store more information in memory, they tend to perceive the duration of that interval of time as being longer. Furthermore, women may consider the experience with a partner who they consider physically attractive as positive in an emotional way. This result is also consistent with that study of Kellaris and Kent (1992) in which time did seems to slow downs when participants were exposed to positively valenced music, compared to participants exposed to negatively valenced music. The authors suggested that when people receive positive emotional information they tend to invest more cognitive resources in listening to music. Therefore, they tend to perceive the received stimulus information as larger and remember the event as being longer. Besides that, a study conducted by Zhang et al. (2017) showed a reliable sex differences in temporal distortion with an emotional stimulus. Women, compared to men, tended to overestimate the durations of emotional words.
However, for men, our results showed that time does not seems to slow down whenever someone attractive is around. In fact, the more males rated a female participant as physically attractive, the shorter they perceived the duration of the speed date. This seems to be consistent with the idea that “time flies when you are having fun.” Research has shown that men’s preferences for potential mates are based mostly in physical attractiveness (Lippa, 2007; Todd et al., 2007; Eastwick et al., 2011). Therefore, when they have a meeting with a potential partner that they perceive as being physically attractive, they do not need to spend much cognitive resources searching for other cues, feeling automatically motivated to be with her. Consequently, they will tend to estimate the time that passed as being shorter. This result also suggests that time perception in males during the dates may be affected by motivation because, according to previous literature, positive approach motivation causes the perception of time to be shorter (Glabe and Poole, 2012). Besides that, the subjective perception of the passage of time seems to be an important component to evaluate the experience of boredom (Danckert and Allman, 2005). So, when males are interested and motivated in the date with a physical attractive potential partner, they tend to estimate the date duration as shorter and, on the other hand, this time underestimation reinforces the perception of an interesting date (Sackett et al., 2010). Underestimation of the duration of the date may prolong approach-motivated behavior (Glabe and Poole, 2012) and this increases the probability of a successful mating. On time, Einstein said “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”
According to Trivers’ (1972) theory, the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring is the key variable controlling the operation of sexual selection. Sexual intercourse for a male is a small investment, but for a female can produce a 9-month investment, at least. For a female, this investment requires more choosiness in the partner choice. Besides that, prior research showed that females tend to be more selective (Kurzban and Weeden, 2005) and more discriminating (Todd et al., 2007) than males. Therefore, it is expected that females allocate more attention to capturing a greater number of characteristics of the potential partner in addition to physical attractiveness, such as intelligence, personality, earning prospects and other signs suggesting he could be good partner in the future. This process seems to imply an exhaustive evaluation in the first meeting which requires the allocation of a lot of cognitive resources. On the other hand, men are attracted by fewer characteristics of the partner compared to females (Luo and Zhang, 2009). So, males do not use so much energy and resources in cognitive processing of information and focus more energy in having fun with the partners they perceived as being more attractive. Such changes may reflect evolutionary adaptations which make the human cognitive system more responsive in situations related to reproductive fitness.
Williams (2012) suggested that sex differences in timing might be due to the effects of circulating estrogen in adult females versus testosterone in adult males. Besides that, gonadal hormones had been found to influence sexual motivation (Wallen, 2001). In men, testosterone increases interest in a woman, engagement in self-presentation, smiling and making eye contact (Roney et al., 2006; Meij et al., 2011; Thornhill et al., 2013). Meij et al. (2011) suggested that during encounters with the opposite sex, testosterone may promote the display of affiliative behaviors that increase a man’s mating prospects and during social contact with a potential partner testosterone is linked to the initiation of courtship behaviors. On the other hand, in women, estradiol seems to be a significant positive predictor of sexual desire (Puts et al., 2013; Roney and Simmons, 2013).
Estradiol is one of the natural estrogens and has been shown to increase striatal dopamine release, that may modify temporal perception and timing performance in a manner similar to indirect dopamine agonists such as amphetamine and cocaine (Pleil et al., 2011). Estrogen as a dopamine agonist facilitates striatal dopaminergic activity (Sandstrom, 2007), stimulating the dopaminergic transmission and, consequently, producing an overestimation of time intervals (Cheng et al., 2006). Pleil et al. (2011) investigated sex differences in the rapid and acute effects of estradiol on time perception in adult male and female rats. According to the authors, their results are consistent to the idea that there are multiple mechanisms of estrogen’s action in the striatum that modulate dopaminergic activity and are differentially organized by gonadal steroids during early brain development. Additionally, Becker (1999) found that striatal dopaminergic release is affected by estrogen only in females. The striatum is one of the components of the basal ganglia that have been suggested to be a fundamental component of the neural basis of timing (Ivry and Spencer, 2004) and multiple studies, specifically with patients with dopamine system disorders as Parkinson (Leranth et al., 2000; Michel et al., 2002), and schizophrenia (Seeman and Lang, 1990; Riecher-Rössler and Häifner, 1993; Michel et al., 2002) and others, found an interaction between gonadal steroid hormones such as estrogen in basal ganglia mechanisms (Hartesveldt and Joyce, 1986). Therefore, because of the fact that estrogen is a predictor of sexual desire and sexual motivation, this may increase their circulation in women during a speed date with physically attractive partners and, subsequently, increase dopamine release in striatum. Besides that, some studies found that women, on average, have higher presynaptic dopamine synthesis capacity (Laakso et al., 2002) and lower D2 receptor affinity (Pohjalainen et al., 1998) that suggests an increased endogenous dopamine in women’s striatum, comparing to men. So, neural sex differences in dopaminergic circuits in the striatum could explain this sex difference on the influence of physical attractiveness in time perception. It is thus possible that sexual hormones on males have an opposite effect in striatum (Myers et al., 2003).
Our results may diverge from Dong and Wyer (2014) study because sex differences in their study could be masked by lack of cues in the interaction that could influence attraction mechanisms. Specifically, the reduction of non-verbal information may influence the response of females more than males because, according to a vast literature (Mehrabian, 1972; Mehrabian and Ksionzky, 1972; Zahn, 1973, 1975), females are more sensitive to non-verbal information and males to a verbal information.
Our study also demonstrates that for the decision of exchanging or not contact with the partner, physical attractiveness seems to be an important factor for both sexes because when participants perceived the partners as physically attractive, they tended to exchange contacts with them. In addition, consistent with our second hypothesis, the physical attractiveness of the potential partner perceived by the participant changes according to the interest in exchanging contact with him/her. In other words, interest or not in the meeting with a potential partner and the desire or not to keep in contact in the future influences their perceived physical attractiveness. Particularly, when participants are interested in a potential partner at the end of the date, they perceive their physical attractiveness as being higher compared to the initial evaluation (i.e., before the date). When participants are not attracted to partners at the end of the date, expressing the desire not to exchange contacts with them, they not change their evaluation of the potential partner’s physical attractiveness. These results suggest that there may be an effect of other characteristics of the potential partner in the evaluation of physical attractiveness. This is supported by some laboratory studies that have shown that the evaluated attractiveness of opposite-sex people is influenced by their personality. For example, Lewandowski et al. (2007) found that when a person was presented with positive personality information about the person shown in a photograph, participants rated that person as more physically attractive and when photographs were paired with negative personality information the person depicted was rated as less physically attractive. These results are also consistent with Kniffin and Wilson’s (2004) naturalistic studies that showed that non-physical characteristics such as familiarity, liking, respect, talent, and effort have a great influence on physical attraction judgments.
Limitations and Future Research
First, previous studies found that preferences in mate selection are influenced by the type of desired relationship, short or long-term. Thus, in future research it seems relevant to question participants in the speed dating event about whether they would like to have a short or long-term relationship with the partners they show an interest in exchanging contacts with. Second, this research shows that in a realistic scenario where two people meet each other, changes occur in time perception and it seems plausible to us that other implicit cognitive processes are affected in this context. However, there are no studies about other implicit measures in speed dating events, such as memory or attention, and future research should focus on this theme. Third, in terms of time perception and attractiveness, our data were correlational, so do not provide evidence for a causal influence of physical attractiveness on timing. Our results suggest that the two variables are associated but it would be interesting to understand if there is a causal relation between them. Third, there were 32 (18.50%) exchanges of contact details but only three intimate relationships were formed and lasted at least 6 months. It would be interest to investigate in future studies which variables have contributed to the development of an intimate relationship after the speed-dating. Fifth, participants were relatively young people, which may represent a limitation of the present study. Research has shown that men tend to prefer females at the age at which fertility peaks in order to increase their reproductive success (Conroy-Beam and Buss, 2019). In future research, it seems important to understand if the results of this study are applicable to older ages, in particular in postmenopausal women. If time perception in dating situations is an adaptive mechanism for mating, this bias should no longer occur in post-reproductive, menopausal women (Cyrus et al., 2011). Finally, our results based on stepwise multiple regression analyses showed that the attraction felt toward the partner was the strongest and unique predictor of both men’s and women’s perceptions of date duration. These results support the idea that when individuals are exposed to opposite-sex persons to whom they feel an attraction, their timing system is affected – women tend to overestimate, whereas men tend to underestimate the passage of time. However, it is still important to notice the weak explanatory power of the models, which indicates that there are other contributing factors to time perception that need to be explored in future research.
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