--- title: Why Reading Emotions is Key to Attraction description: Understanding a person's emotions is crucial for attraction, and requires matching signaling in the brain, a new study shows. canonical: https://time.com/4280521/what-causes-attraction/ author: Alexandra Sifferlin article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-04-04T20:00:05.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:55:59.080Z article:section: Health og:title: Why Reading Emotions is Key to Attraction og:description: Understanding a person's emotions is crucial for attraction, and requires matching signaling in the brain, a new study shows. og:url: https://time.com/4280521/what-causes-attraction/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why Reading Emotions is Key to Attraction twitter:description: Understanding a person's emotions is crucial for attraction, and requires matching signaling in the brain, a new study shows. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # This Factor Is Key to Your Attractiveness > Sponsored content. 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Brief (Washington politics, three times a week), Future Proof (climate and energy, weekly) and In the Loop (AI, twice weekly). All are free at time.com/newsletters and together reach more than 1.1 million engaged readers. #### Which TIME newsletter should I subscribe to? It depends on what you follow. For a daily briefing, The Brief. For health, Health Matters. For Washington politics, D.C. Brief. For AI and technology, In the Loop. For climate and energy as a business story, Future Proof. For culture recommendations, Worth Your Time. For how TIME's journalism gets made, Inside TIME. Readers can select any combination at time.com/newsletters. #### Are TIME's newsletters free? Yes. All seven TIME newsletters are free to join at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes TIME's newsletters? TIME journalists write them. Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ## Video: A 100-Year-Old Sex Therapist on Having Good Sex, Then and Now [Watch (HLS stream): A 100-Year-Old Sex Therapist on Having Good Sex, Then and Now](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/uJFYIrvP.m3u8) (3:13)  _Published 2014-08-20. A practicing sex therapist in New York City, Dr. Shirley Zussman has witnessed everything from the legalization of the contraceptive birth control pill to the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s to the rise of internet porn in the new millenium._ by [Alexandra Sifferlin](https://time.com/author/alexandra-sifferlin/) ## Alexandra Sifferlin Apr 4, 2016 8:00 PM UTC by [Alexandra Sifferlin](https://time.com/author/alexandra-sifferlin/) ## Alexandra Sifferlin Apr 4, 2016 8:00 PM UTC Humans are drawn to one another for countless reasons, and the fact that we’re often [drawn](http://time.com/4057616/yes-you-really-do-have-a-type-science-says/) to people who seem to “get us” emotionally is now borne out by a [new study published in the journal _PNAS_](http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1516191113): We are attracted to people whose emotions we can easily understand—and that may be due in part to matching neural circuitry. “Being able to comprehend another person’s intentions and emotions is essential for successful social interaction,” says study author Silke Anders, a professor of Social and Affective Neuroscience at the University of Lübeck. “To accomplish a common goal, partners must understand and continuously update information about their partner’s current intentions and motivation, anticipate the other’s behavior, and adapt their own behavior accordingly.” Anders and her fellow researchers wanted to learn whether there is a neural mechanism that underlines a person’s ability to read another’s emotions and become attracted to them. They had around 90 people watch video clips of women who facially expressed fear or sadness. After watching the videos, the people in the study were asked to judge how the women felt and asked how confident they were that they were reading her right. The researchers also measured the people’s brain activity through imaging. They found that the more certain a person was about how a woman was feeling, the more attracted they were to her. Higher levels of certainty and attraction were also associated with more activity in the area of the brain that processes rewards. This, the researchers say, suggests that the ability to read someone successfully activates the brain’s reward system and spurs attraction. “What I believe makes our findings really exciting is the fact that understanding and personal attraction seem to depend on both the sender’s brain and the perceiver’s brain, and on how well they match,” says Anders. “If the emotional signals sent by a sender—for example a facial expression of fear or sadness—can efficiently be processed by the perceiver’s brain, then their reward system will fire and they will feel attracted to the sender.” Anders says prior research has shown that the brains of people who have difficulty understanding others’ emotions differ from people who are particularly good at it. Differences in brain circuitry may be at least partially responsible for missed connections in this study too. “If communication does not work as smoothly as expected, this might not always mean that sender or perceiver are not interested in communicating, it could simply mean that the overlap of their neural vocabulary is not yet large enough,” she says. Whether emotional decoding and attraction can change if people work at it remains unknown. The study size was small, so more research will be needed, but Anders says she’d like to study how our understanding of others’ emotions changes over time, and whether the ability to successfully read people emotionally can grow with experience. ## Transcript Sexual pleasure is only one part of what men and women want from each other. They want intimacy, they want closeness, they want understanding, they want comfort, they want fun, and they want somebody who really cares about them beyond going to bed with them, and I think people are always seeking that. In every generation. [ MUSIC ] My name is Shirley Zussman. I just reached a hundred years of age, and I am a practicing sex therapist. I was invited with my husband to a lecture in New Jersey, in 1966. Masters and Johnson were the speakers. No body knew about them. Human sexual response had just been published, what I saw was a couple who will say that people had problems in an area in their lives that was very important and they were recognizing that it was all not just. Glamorous and wonderful to be sexual. One had to almost had to learn how to be a good partner and to endure the pleasure not only for yourself but for each other. And I thought we can do that. Why can't we do that? And we applied for training with Masters and Johnson at that time. The patients that came to us were people who read the paper. The only way they do anything about the work that was being done there. And the problems they came with, was somewhat different than the problems they come with today. Mostly, women came because would put out orgasmic, they didn't know how to achieve an orgasm, but they wanted one. It was so over that ,. Goal they had for themselves and how do I get there. That was one Masters and Johnson's contribution that there was a relatively simple way to start learning about your body. In other words, get, get to know your, who you are sexually and physically and that was. And encouragement for masturbation for learning what makes you feel good. I see a big change in the we view casual sex. In the 60's I think it was not just casual it was frantic. I'm shocked at the lack of connection with people; because of iPhones, even I love my iPhone. There is so much less actual physical connection, there's less touching, there's less talking, there's less holding, there's less looking, [ INAUDIBLE ]. People get pleasure from looking at each other. But the most common problem, I would say, in the sex therapy that I live in, is a lack of desire. You have to look at your priorities. You have to decide what is important to make you feel good about yourself and your life. And to help make your partner feel good and to establish something that is gratifying that really fills a need that we all have to be close to somebody. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4280521/what-causes-attraction/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4280521/what-causes-attraction/"},"headline":"This Factor Is Key to Your Attractiveness","datePublished":"2016-04-04T20:00:05.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:55:59.080Z","description":"It has to do with your emotions","url":"https://time.com/4280521/what-causes-attraction/","keywords":["Research","emotions"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Alexandra Sifferlin","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/alexandra-sifferlin/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/research/","name":"Research"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4280521/what-causes-attraction/","name":"This Factor Is Key to Your Attractiveness"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"A 100-Year-Old Sex Therapist on Having Good Sex, Then and Now","description":"A practicing sex therapist in New York City, Dr. Shirley Zussman has witnessed everything from the legalization of the contraceptive birth control pill to the AIDs epidemic in the 1980s to the rise of internet porn in the new millenium.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/uJFYIrvP/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-08-20T13:40:15.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/uJFYIrvP.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/4280521/what-causes-attraction/","duration":"PT3M13S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/4280521/what-causes-attraction/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```