Identifying a Facial Expression of Flirtation and Its Effect on Men

ABSTRACT

Internal states may be conveyed to others nonverbally through facial expression. We investigated the existence of a particular facial cue that may be effectively used by women to indicate interest in a man. Across six studies, men generally recognized a female facial expression as representing flirting. Flirtatious expressions receiving low recognition by men differed in morphology from the highly recognized flirting expressions. The discrepancies are indicative of individual differences among women in effectively conveying a flirtatious facial cue and among men in recognizing this cue. The morphology of the highly recognized flirtatious facial expressions, coded using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), included: a head turned to one side and tilted down slightly, a slight smile, and eyes turned forward (toward the implied target). Results from experimental studies showed that flirtatious facial expressions, as compared with happy or neutral expressions, led to faster identification of sex words by men. These findings support the role of flirtatious expression in communication and mating initiation.

Notes

¹ In addition to determining the components of a recognizable flirtatious expression, we also wanted to ensure that each poser had a highly rated picture for the “happy” and “neutral” expressions as well. Due to this requirement, some posers were dropped from consideration after Study 2.

² A pretest on recognition was conducted in which two of the 11 pictures from Study 3 were rated as being neutral and were not included in the final study.

³ The goal of using the lexical decision task was to determine whether priming flirting would result in faster responses to sex-related words compared to a neutral, unrelated word. After data collection was complete, we realized that the lexical-decision task did not include non-words, as noted in the instructions. We do not expect this omission to affect the findings reported, given that the objective of this study focused on semantic accessibility rather than semantic processing. Nonetheless, Study 6 was conducted as a follow-up study that included non-words in addition to sex and neutral words to address this limitation.