Flirting 101

Flirting is considered a form of social art and has a long history. For example, during the Victorian era, as a part of socialization people were taught how to flirt, how to identify flirting, and how to respond. Although flirting never died out, as people's relationships changed, flirting also changed.

Misunderstandings about flirting can potentially result in awkwardness or, in a worst-case scenario, issues such as accusations of sexual harassment. How can we figure out what other people mean when they smile at us? Is there a unique, identifiable facial expression representing flirting—and if there is, what does it convey, and how effective it is?

Although flirting is mentioned a lot in the general media, and examples are everywhere, there is relatively little scientific work on the topic of flirting, its underlying mechanisms, and function.

In a new paper we recently published in The Journal of Sex Research, we examined exactly that: Does flirting have a particular facial cue effectively used by women to indicate interest in a man, and can man identify it? There are very few scientific articles out there that have systematically studied this well-known phenomenon. None of these studies have identified the flirting facial expression and tested its effects. So together with Parnia Haj-Mohamadi, a doctoral student in psychology at KU, and Erika L. Rosenberg of the University of California, Davis we set to figure things out.

Is she flirting with you? Or just being polite?

Source: Alexander Jawfox/Unsplash

We found that internal states — such as being romantically or sexually interested in someone — can be conveyed to others nonverbally through facial expression.

In other words—flirting works.

Across six studies, we found most men were able to recognize a certain female facial expression as representing flirting. It has a unique morphology and it’s different from expressions that have similar features—for example, smiling—but aren’t identified by men as flirting expressions.

In the studies, women, some professional actresses, and some volunteers from the community were asked either to spontaneously pose a flirting expression (similar to what they’d use at a bar to get attention from a potential mate), or to follow instructions based on existing anthropological literature for what researchers define as flirting.

We found some women are more effective than others in effectively conveying a flirtatious facial cue, while some men are better at recognizing this cue. Beyond these individual differences, a few expressions were identified by most (if not all) men as flirting.

We used the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to classify the morphology of highly recognized flirtatious facial expressions. The coding showed the most effective flirting cues include a head turned to one side and tilted down slightly, a slight smile, and eyes turned forward toward the implied target.

After identifying these most-recognized expressions of flirting, we used them in experimental studies.

Men were shown a flirting expression or control expression (for example, a happy or neutral expression). The experiments showed the flirtatious facial expressions, as compared with happy or neutral expressions, led to faster identification of sex words by men in the study.

Our findings support the role of flirtatious expression in communication and mating initiation. For the first time, not only were we able to isolate and identify the expressions that represent flirting, but we were also able to reveal their function—to activate associations with relationships and sex.

The new paper puts flirting in the same category as well-studied emotions, and provides researchers with tools to further study the functions of flirting. It can also give sometimes-clueless men, like the one in the example above, a more concrete way to figure out if a woman is truly flirting.