RESEARCH ARTICLE Reverse Correlating Love: Highly Passionate Women Idealize Their Partner’s Facial Appearance

A defining feature of passionate love is idealization—evaluating romantic partners in an overly favorable light. Although passionate love can be expected to color how favorably indi-viduals represent their partner in their mind, little is known about how passionate love is linked with visual representations of the partner. Using reverse correlation techniques for the first time to study partner representations, the present study investigated whether women who are passionately in love represent their partner’s facial appearance more favor-ably than individuals who are less passionately in love. In a within-participants design, het-erosexual women completed two forced-choice classification tasks, one for their romantic partner and one for a male acquaintance, and a measure of passionate love. In each classi-fication task, participants saw two faces superimposed with noise and selected the face that most resembled their partner (or an acquaintance). Classification images for each of high passion and low passion groups were calculated by averaging across noise patterns select-ed as resembling the partner or the acquaintance and superimposing the averaged noise on an average male face. A separate group of women evaluated the classification images on attractiveness, trustworthiness, and competence. Results showed that women who feel high (vs. low) passionate love toward their partner tend to represent his face as more attrac-tive and trustworthy, even when controlling for familiarity effects using the acquaintance re-presentation. Using an innovative method to study partner representations, these findings extend our understanding of cognitive processes in romantic relationships