Smiles, Pride and Attraction: The UBC Study

The saying that nice guys finish last is a familiar way of explaining disappointment in romance. A research group in British Columbia examined a related question in a controlled setting: how does a facial expression of emotion affect whether strangers find someone sexually appealing?

The work came out of a social psychology laboratory at UBC devoted to emotion and the self. Psychologist Jessica Tracy directed it, and graduate student Alec Beall co-authored the paper. Their findings were published in the journal Emotion.

How the study was set up

Over a thousand adults took part. Each viewed hundreds of photographs of people of the opposite sex and rated how sexually appealing they found them. The pictured individuals displayed one of four expressions: happiness, pride, shame, or a neutral face. Pride, shame and happiness were chosen because researchers regard them as widely recognized displays across cultures.

Beall explained that participants were not asked whether a pictured person would make a good partner. The aim was to capture immediate reactions of physical, sexual attraction.

What the results showed

Most women in the sample gave their lowest attraction ratings to smiling men. Men who seemed confident and dominant, or gloomy and ashamed, scored higher. Most men, by contrast, found cheerful women the most appealing and scored women with a proud, self-assured look lowest.

The team acknowledged that further study would be needed to explain these patterns fully.

The proposed explanation

The researchers offered a theory built on earlier work. Previous studies indicate that people tend to read a smile as a sign of low dominance, and that happiness is perceived as a relatively feminine-looking expression. Tracy said the pattern appears to echo conventional gender roles and social values built up over generations, at least in Western societies.

The bad boy image in popular culture

Commentary around the study connected it with the long-running screen archetype of the brooding, self-assured outsider. Cultural critics note that the figure is a fixture of film and fashion, though the study itself did not examine film characters.

What the research does not cover

Studies of this kind measure quick reactions to still photographs, not behaviour in real encounters, and they say little about long-term compatibility or about what people value in committed relationships. The sample was framed around opposite-sex attraction, so it does not speak to the experience of gay, lesbian, bisexual or non-binary people. The authors themselves tied their conclusions to specific cultural contexts, which leaves open whether the same ratings would appear elsewhere or in later generations.