It might not be entirely clear what “mindfulness” means – but it appears that people know it when they see it; and they like it.
Loosely defined as “living in the moment'” scientists have found that people are more attracted to those they consider to look “mindful” than those deemed “non-mindful.”
That’s because they associate mindful faces with desirable attributes such as “attractiveness, competence and rationality” – while the non-mindful are viewed as being “stressed, neurotic and immoral”, a new study has found.
Keen as always to increase our readers’ romantic prospects, i asked the study’s lead author whether taking up meditation or other mindfulness routines, such as breathing exercises or focusing on our surroundings, might make them more attractive to others.
Unfortunately, it may not be quite so simple as it seems that the relationship between mindfulness and attractiveness falls into the “chicken-and-egg” category.
“Based on the paper, it would not be appropriate to say that engaging in mindfulness or meditation makes one more attractive,” Professor Geoffrey Haddock, of Cardiff University, told i.
But what does seem clear is that seeming to have those qualities that mindfulness seeks to cultivate does make a person more attractive – as they appear “more likeable, possessing higher self-transcendence values and performing more moral behaviours compared to a less-mindful face”, the study found.
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“We do find that a target described as being mindful is evaluated more positively than someone described as less mindful,” Professor Haddock said.
Mindfulness experts, who were not involved in the study, were not surprised by its findings.
“Practicing mindfulness meditation can lead to feelings of greater calm, lower stress, openness, and offer a heightened awareness of the present moment,” said Gemma Griffith, of the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice at Bangor University.
“These states of mind may well be reflected in facial expressions. The results of this study suggest that people responded more positively to pictures of people rated as ‘mindful’.
“This helps us to understand what impressions people might have about mindfulness, which might have implications for whether or not people are likely to engage in mindfulness practice themselves,” she said.
Ultimately, however, the only way to be certain that getting down on that mat every morning could make you more attractive is to do a full-blown randomised trial – in which a large number of similar people are randomly assigned to two or more groups to make sure there isn’t any other explanation for a given outcome, thereby proving cause and effect beyond any reasonable doubt.
Tim Whitfield, a psychiatry academic at University College London, said: “The only way to surely establish whether mindfulness practice – as opposed to a person’s disposition – makes us sexier is to run a randomised study with a mindfulness and a control group, and then to ask blinded raters to rate the before versus after sexiness.
“If the mindfulness group ‘got sexier’ than the control group, this would be stronger evidence for the claim.”
The study is published in the Royal Society Open Science.