translated from Spanish: Why do we see the most attractive people when we drink alcohol?

The effect of “beer glasses” refers to this alteration of the perception caused by alcoholic beverages and that makes us see the people more attractive than they usually would seem to us. Until now, research on this issue was ambiguous and yielded mixed results. But new research suggests that this phenomenon relates to how our attention varies under the effects of alcohol.

To explore this, psychologists at Edge Hill University (England) conducted an experiment in pubs and bars located around campus and asked more than 120 heterosexual participants to respond to a stimulus (in this case, indicate on a notebook if the letter “T” was correct or inverted) and in turn ignore the series of faces that were displayed on the screen at the same time. While previous studies were limited to participants’ responses to how attractive they find others, this is the first to use indirect care measures, overcoming some of the limitations of the other approach.

The results, published in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, showed that while sober people became more distracted by more “attractive” faces, attention on those they had taken were also distracted by photos of faces attractive and not so much.” We know that attractive faces may divert attention from the task at hand, but our research suggests that alcohol has the ability to lessen this effect; to level the playing field,” explains Dr. Monk, lead author of the study. One noteworthy thing was, moreover, that this effect was also present in those slightly intoxicated participants; suggesting that it doesn’t take much alcohol for people to put on their “beer glasses.” Most people have heard of the effect of beer glasses, and our research provides evidence that shows that there is some truth in this anecdotal wisdom,” Professor Derek Heim concluded.

Original source in Spanish