The influence of groove on sexual attraction: Evidence for an effect of misattributed arousal in males but not females

Abstract

First described by Schachter & Singer (1962), the phenomenon of misattributed arousal (arousal perceived as coming from a wrongly presumed source and irrelevantly influencing evaluations of it) has been widely documented, with two recent studies, Marin, Schober, Gingras, & Leder (2017) and Chang et al. (2021), providing suggestive evidence of music as a source of misattributed arousal with an enhancing effect on sexual attraction. The aim of the present study was to provide more unambiguous evidence of such a musical arousal effect. In an online experiment simulating a face-to-face dating event, participants (41 females and 43 males) rated the attractiveness of opposite-sex faces in a series of slideshows presented twice, once accompanied by a high-groove drum track and the other time by a low-groove drum track. They then rated the drum tracks for groove. While whole-sample analyses yielded no significant findings, subsample analyses showed that the groove ratings of the male participants, though not the female participants, positively predicted their attractiveness ratings, in partial support of the arousal hypothesis. We discuss possible reasons for the pattern of findings, including sex differences in groove response and more generally in the evaluation of cues of physiological arousal.