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.
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.