Influence of sexual desire on judgments of attractiveness

This study examined impact of the women‟s sexual desire level on judgments of attractiveness and beauty of men‟s faces and voices. Firstly we collected the men‟s and women‟s faces and voices to create GENEVA ATTRACTIVNESS DATABASE (GEAD) and in the current study we use the men‟s stimuli collected for the population of women with different sexual desire level. We tested two different groups: clinical group (low sexual desire, N = 16) and control group (normal sexual desire, N = 21 and high sexual desire hyper sexuality, N = 20). Results suggest that the sexual desire is positively correlated with judgments of attractiveness but negatively correlated with judgments of beauty. As expected, the clinical group with low sexual desire was significantly different from control group in judgments of attractiveness but not in judgments of beauty. Overall, results suggest that there is some dissociation between judgments of attractiveness and beauty in accordance with sexual desire level. Therefore, future studies should investigate cognitive processes involved in the pathology of desire more in depth to better understand low sexual desire