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belgareth
08-15-2008, 05:03 AM
People Really Do Look Better When You Drink
Charles Q.

Choi (cqchoi@nasw.org)
Special to

LiveScience
LiveScience.com (http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/livescience/sc_livescience/byline/peoplereallydolookbetterwhenyo

udrink/28607482/SIG=10sog4vj6/*http://www.livescience.com)Thu Aug 14,

3:11 PM ET


For the first time, scientists have proven that "beer goggles" are real - other people really do

look more attractive to us if we have been drinking.

Surprisingly, the beer goggles effect was not limited to

just the opposite sex among the ostensibly straight volunteers recruited for the study - they also rated people from

their own sex as more attractive.

Scientists in England gave 84 heterosexual college students chilled

lime-flavored drinks that were either non-alcoholic or given a dose of vodka equivalent in alcohol to a large glass

of wine or a pint-and-a-half of beer.

After 15 minutes, the volunteers were shown photos of 40 other college

students from both sexes. Both men and women who drank booze found these faces more attractive, "a roughly 10

percent increase in ratings of attractiveness," said researcher Marcus Munafo, an experimental psychologist at the

University of Bristol in England.

The researchers also asked volunteers to rate their mood, "and there were no

differences on those measures in the alcohol group compared to the no-alcohol group," Munafo added. "This suggests

that the effect we observed wasn't due to a general change in mood."

It did not escape Munafo that the results

are rather obvious.

"Everyone knows about beer goggles," Munafo said. "But some of our results suggest that

there's more going on than we might have thought."

The discovery that the effect is not specific to the

opposite sex was surprising. One possibility is that alcohol generally makes us see things as more attractive, but

when this occurs in social situations, such as at a bar, "this might become targeted at opposite-sex faces," Munafo

said. By repeating the experiment with video clips shot at bars, the scientists hope to recreate those social cues

and see what happens.

"The main question is whether these effects are specific to faces, or whether we would

rate anything as more attractive after a drink," Munafo said.

Future research could expose people who have been

drinking to landscapes or the faces of puppies and other animals, "to see if alcohol has a more general effect on

perceiving beauty in the environment."

Low dose

"It's also surprising to see this effect is happening at

lower doses than you might think," Munafo said. "We're trying to build up a more complete picture of what happens

when people go out for a drink, and we're interested in certain behaviors that are more common after drinking, such

as unsafe sex, or violence. If this effect is happening at lower doses than expected, it might be helpful for people

who are predisposed to such behaviors to anticipate those situations and prevent them."

The scientists would

also want to vary the levels of alcohol that volunteers receive, "but there are practical and ethical constraints

around how much alcohol we can give people in the lab!" Munafo told LiveScience.

Munafo and his colleagues

detailed their findings online August 6 in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.