Love at First Sight

Evolved traits such as intuitive skills have allowed individuals to quickly evaluate a suitable sexual Having determined that someone is attractive at first sight, an individual may become emotionally attached to that person and communicate their affection via a copulatory gaze, in which the individual gazes into the other person's eyes for many seconds (Fisher, 1992). In this opinion piece, I discuss why an individual can become attracted to and emotionally attached to another person in an instant at first sight and I propose how such feelings may be requited and thus how love at first sight between two people can occur if the receiver of such attraction has similar attributes to the individual. A person's perceived attractiveness can vary depending on the individual who is perceiving their attractiveness. Studies on attraction have shown that people are strongly sexually attracted researchers having found that subjects rated pictures of faces morphed with their own face as being more attractive (Penton-Voak et al., 1999). In work by Zaidel et al. (2003), subjects found that those faces that were more attractive, were also more trustworthy. An individual's personality and trustworthiness can be perceived in the subtle nonverbal behavioral information of such primary facial features as the eyes (Argyle, 1988; Little and Perrett, 2007) and we can perceive from someone's face whether they are happy, sad, well or ill (Rhodes and Zebrowitz, 2002; Ekman and Friesen, 2003). We can sometimes even perceive sexual orientation (Rule et al., 2009) and perhaps intelligence (Zebrowitz et al., 2002; Kanazawa, 2011). As such, I believe it is our ability to perceive another individual's personality that can allow us to be attracted to someone before we have even spoken to them. Researchers have shown that interpersonal attraction is positively correlated to personality similarity, with positive people preferring to be with other positive people (Byrne and Griffitt, 1973), and individuals are also attracted to others who are similar in culture, economic status and socialness (Byrne et al., 1966; Berscheid et al., 1971; Buss and Barnes, 1986). As such, in my opinion, since an individual is generally attracted to someone who they believe they can trust and perhaps be in a happy relationship with, and usually, since that person is someone who has a personality similar to their own, those people who look similar to the individual are perceived as having a similar personality to that individual, and are therefore perceived …