Multimodal Cues Modulated By Males’ Attraction Perception To Female In Speed Dating

Attraction perception plays an essential role in developing a romantic relationship.It refers to a positive emotional experience produced by a perceiver’s comprehensive evaluation of other people’s appearance,voice,and other information,which may affect mate selection.In a real between-sex interaction,information is exchanged through verbal and nonverbal multi-channel approaches.Multimodal cues,such as voice,body movements,and language use,are correlated with the real-time emotional state of communicators.However,previous studies on attractiveness mainly focused on unimodality and rarely captured multimodal emotional cues associated with attraction perception in romantic relationships.Therefore,this research focuses on detecting the multimodal cues with the fluctuation of males’ attraction perception in speed dating,specifically,answering two questions: 1)During speed dating,how does males’ attraction perception modulate nonverbal cues such as physiological responses（heart rate and electromyography signals）and acoustic cues? 2)How does males’ attraction perception modulate verbal cues（the word frequency of emotional and social words and the number of words in language use）in a conversation with a potential romantic partner?Thirty-four male students were recruited from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and participated in the speed dating experiment.Two female students with different attractiveness rated by independent raters acted as random daters.The male had a face-to-face conversation during the ten-minute speed dating with two female confederates respectively and completed an attractiveness assessment after dating,with more than one week between two dates.And the dating order was balanced among all participants.A wearable heart rate real-time monitoring device and a wireless electromyography sensor were used to collect physiological signals during the experiment.A voice recording device with a sampling rate of 44 k Hz was used to record speech.The speech data were processed by a MATLAB batch script,and the acoustic feature values related to emotions were extracted.The male speech was transcribed into text,segmented by the NLPIR Chinese Word Segmentation,and categorized by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count（LIWC）,focusing on the word count and specific lexical categories in language output.Based on the paired-sample t tests results of males’ verbal and nonverbal cues in the two situations,the differences of multimodal cues in different attraction perceptions for men in speed dating contexts were investigated.The results showed that under the condition of high attraction perception,the mean and standard deviation of short-term energy,the standard deviation of Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient and linear predictor cepstral coefficient increased significantly.In addition,under this condition,the mean value of the male surface electromyography signal was significantly higher,and the standard deviation was significantly lower,showing higher physiological arousal and stability.Compared with the low attraction perception,the number of words of males was significantly higher in high attraction perception,and males tended to use more positive emotional words and fewer negation words.Theoretically,by exploring the multimodal emotional cues of attraction perception,it is helpful to reveal the expression pattern of emotion perception in the context of romantic relationships.Practically,the research results provide references for the influence of mate selection motivation on verbal communication in real situations and related research on intelligent emotion recognition.