Men’s Memory for Women’s Sexual-interest and Rejection Cues TERESA A. TREAT 1 * , RICHARD J. VIKEN 2 , JOHN K. KRUSCHKE 2 and RICHARD M. MCFALL 2 1 Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, USA 2 Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University USA Summary: The current work characterizes young men’s memory for young women’s heterosocially relevant affective cues (e.g. sexual interest and rejection) and examines characteristics of both the woman being perceived and the male perceiver as predictors of memory. Undergraduate men (n ¼ 232) completed similarity-ratings and recognition-memory tasks with photos of undergraduate women who varied in attractiveness, provocativeness of clothing and expression of sexual interest. Participants also completed a control memory task and a measure relevant to the risk of exhibiting sexually aggressive behaviour, as well as indicating how many serious relationships they had experienced. Multilevel regression techniques revealed that (a) men’s memory for women’s sexual interest improved when women were sexually interested at encoding, attractive and dressed provocatively; (b) men who reported more frequent serious relationships showed better memory for women’s sexual interest and (c) men at risk of exhibiting sexually aggressive behaviour showed worse memory for women’s sexual interest. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Men’s memory for women’s heterosocially relevant affect (e.g. sexual interest and rejection) is a surprisingly under- studied area of inquiry, given the hypothesized centrality of affective processing to social interactions, intimate relation- ships and sexual aggression among acquaintances (e.g. Abbey, McAuslan, & Ross, 1998; Casey, Garrett, Brackett, & Rivers, 2007; Mayer, Roberts, & Barsade, 2008; McFall, 1990). Nonverbal affective cues, particularly sexual-interest and rejection cues, frequently are used to communicate to a current or potential partner the likelihood that initial or continued sexual overtures will be received positively (e.g. Abbey, 1982; Fichten, Tagalakis, Judd, Wright, & Amsel, 1992; Muehlenhard, Koralewski, Andrews, & Burdick, 1986). Heterosocial competence requires not only accurate perception of these affective cues, however, but also recognition of changes in the cues, such as from positive to negative. Memory provides critical support for successful change detection, via adequate storage and retrieval of affective information. Successful initiation and maintenance of serious romantic relationships, for example, necessitate detection and retention of the fluctuations in a partner’s emotions. Moreover, decreased attention and sensitivity to young women’s affective cues have been linked to an increased risk of sexually coercive or aggressive behaviour towards acquaintances among college-aged males (see review by Farris, Treat, Viken, & McFall, 2008). Above and beyond impoverished encoding of women’s affect, however, insufficient storage or retrieval of women’s affective cues may decrease the likelihood that high-risk men recognize and respond appropriately to women’s changing affect. In sum, careful characterization of the correlates of memory for young women’s sexual interest may advance our understanding of the role of affective processing in both normative and problematic heterosocial interactions. The present work uses multilevel modelling techniques to distinguish two classes of influences on men’s memory: characteristics of the woman being perceived, and charac- teristics of the male perceiver. Researchers typically ignore either item- or participant-specific influences on cognitive processing by aggregating across either items or participants when conducting analyses (Rouder & Lu, 2005). Random- regression methods, however, allow researchers to integrate the stimulus-level analyses characteristic of cognitive psychology with the participant-level analyses that are more typical in social or clinical psychology. This approach provides a more complete picture of the multiple influences on cognitive processing, and it also enhances the power to detect them (Baayen, Tweedie, & Schreuder, 2002). In the current case, we anticipated that variation in men’s memory for women would depend less on the characteristics of the women than on the characteristics of the male participants themselves, given the marked individual differences in men’s processing of women’s affect that have been observed in past work. The use of hierarchical linear modelling methods allowed us to examine women-specific effects after controlling for participant effects, however, thus enhancing our power to detect influences of women’s characteristics on men’s memory. We asked whether young men better retain women’s level of sexual interest if the women (a) display sexually interested or uninterested affect at study; (b) are dressed more or less provocatively and (c) are more or less normatively attractive. We focused on sexual interest and rejection cues, rather than a fuller range of affective cues, because detection of sexual interest and rejection is of central importance in heterosocial interactions and sexual coercion (Farris et al., 2008). We also used full-body photos of women, rather than head shots, as a burgeoning field of research demonstrates the role of non- verbal postural cues to emotion (e.g. deGelder, 2006). No prior work, to our knowledge, has examined whether men’s memory for women’s sexual interest is influenced by women’s initial affective state (e.g. interested or rejecting) or other contextual factors, such as women’s clothing style or attractiveness. Farris, Viken, Treat, and McFall (2006), however, evaluated whether men’s sensitivity to women’s affect varied as a function of the specific cue being emitted, Applied Cognitive Psychology , Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 25: 802–810 (2011) Published online 5 October 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.1751 *Correspondence to: Teresa A. Treat, Department of Psychology, University of Iowa, 11 Seashore Hall E, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. E-mail: teresa-treat@uiowa.edu Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.