What’s The Measure of Attractiveness?

New research by Silke Anders, a professor of Social and Affective Neuroscience at the University of Lübeck, indicates that most people are drawn to people who understand their emotions the best.[1] So basically, if someone ‘gets’ us, we find them attractive. And the opposite is also true. The more certain we are of thinking that we know what the other person is feeling; the more attracted we are to him, or her. It’s about the sending of emotional signals and of perceiving them – which sounds pretty simple in theory but is often not. Most of us tend to hide the visual cues of our emotions and become pretty adept at it. But it’s this very quality that becomes a roadblock in our levels of attractiveness. To be more attractive to others, we need to be more of an open book than a secretive one and let people see what we are feeling by facial cues.

Can This Quality Be Adapted?

To make yourself more attractive to others, you need to project your emotions as clearly as possible. The more comprehensible emotions that you project to others, the more your levels of attractiveness increase – if a person is able to judge what you are feeling accurately because of your clear emotional projection, then his or her brain’s reward system fires up and in doing so – makes you more attractive  in that person’s eyes. Remember that this is not an advice to let the waterworks flow; just don’t try to be stoic all the time. Let those lips droop when sad, or those eyes sparkle in happiness – the more people are able to read you, the more attractive they will find you.

A Last Bit of Advice

Instead of letting the whole world and sundry see what we are feeling, perhaps it better to let our guard down when with someone that we find attractive, and who we want to perceive our attractiveness. And once in a relationship, it’s a good thing to keep working at our emotional projection then too – for we want our significant others to keep perceiving our attractiveness in a good, healthy way… Featured photo credit: Rocksana Rocksana via unsplash.com