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2008-08-15 04:29:32
Charles Q. Choi
Special to LiveScience
LiveScience.comThu Aug 14, 3:11 PM ET
For the first time, scientists have proven that "beer goggles" are real - other
people really do look more attractive to us if we have been drinking.
Surprisingly, the beer goggles effect was not limited to just the opposite sex
among the ostensibly straight volunteers recruited for the study - they also
rated people from their own sex as more attractive.
Scientists in England gave 84 heterosexual college students chilled
lime-flavored drinks that were either non-alcoholic or given a dose of vodka
equivalent in alcohol to a large glass of wine or a pint-and-a-half of beer.
After 15 minutes, the volunteers were shown photos of 40 other college students
from both sexes. Both men and women who drank booze found these faces more
attractive, "a roughly 10 percent increase in ratings of attractiveness," said
researcher Marcus Munafo, an experimental psychologist at the University of
Bristol in England.
The researchers also asked volunteers to rate their mood, "and there were no
differences on those measures in the alcohol group compared to the no-alcohol
group," Munafo added. "This suggests that the effect we observed wasn't due to
a general change in mood."
It did not escape Munafo that the results are rather obvious.
"Everyone knows about beer goggles," Munafo said. "But some of our results
suggest that there's more going on than we might have thought."
The discovery that the effect is not specific to the opposite sex was
surprising. One possibility is that alcohol generally makes us see things as
more attractive, but when this occurs in social situations, such as at a bar,
"this might become targeted at opposite-sex faces," Munafo said. By repeating
the experiment with video clips shot at bars, the scientists hope to recreate
those social cues and see what happens.
"The main question is whether these effects are specific to faces, or whether
we would rate anything as more attractive after a drink," Munafo said.
Future research could expose people who have been drinking to landscapes or the
faces of puppies and other animals, "to see if alcohol has a more general
effect on perceiving beauty in the environment."
Low dose
"It's also surprising to see this effect is happening at lower doses than you
might think," Munafo said. "We're trying to build up a more complete picture of
what happens when people go out for a drink, and we're interested in certain
behaviors that are more common after drinking, such as unsafe sex, or violence.
If this effect is happening at lower doses than expected, it might be helpful
for people who are predisposed to such behaviors to anticipate those situations
and prevent them."
The scientists would also want to vary the levels of alcohol that volunteers
receive, "but there are practical and ethical constraints around how much
alcohol we can give people in the lab!" Munafo told LiveScience.
Munafo and his colleagues detailed their findings online August 6 in the
journal Alcohol and Alcoholism.