Studying Flirtatious Faces

Originally published October 1st, 2020

Every once in a while, a long-forgotten research project gets reborn. Such is the case of the project that began with my former colleague at U.C. Davis, social psychologist and relationships researcher, Omri Gillath, and I started chatting about flirting behavior years ago. He asked me if an expression of flirting had been identified by research and what was known about its functions. I scoured the literature and found some interesting descriptions by the Austrian ethologist, Eibl- Eibesfeldt and found a few other ideas here and there, but not much systematic research. On the basis of these leads and armed with FACS, we set out to study flirting faces. We did a few studies, got some cool initial findings, then hit some dead ends and (after moves to new jobs and babies, etc.) the project was resurrected at the University of Kansas. Thanks to Parnia Haj-Mohamadi, who was completing her post-doc with Omri at KU, we gathered enough data to share our findings in a peer-reviewed publication in The Journal of Sex Research. 

Taken together, our multiple studies describe a recognizable form of a female flirtatious facial expression and also points to one of its functions --  to prime sexually-related cognitive frameworks. Translation – such expressions from women get men thinking about sex (whether they realize it or not). This is a first published work on the topic. Though our findings are limited by many factors (the ethnicity of the women in the images, and we did not have information on the sexual orientation of the men who viewed the images), but it is a fascinating start to a new line of research.

I was surprised at all the popular press this piece received, but any topic related to sex is popular. Many of the press pieces did not accurately describe the science (this is not a new problem!), but “Science Daily” clearly and briefly explained what we did and what it means in this article.

And for those of you who are so inclined, here a link to the official publication online in the Journal of Sex Research.

If you are interested in receiving a PDF reprint of the scientific paper, please reach out to me at erika@erikarosenberg.com.

Wishing you all the best,

Erika