Science Beauty is in the hand of the beholder I n our daily lives, we engage in various activities involving different body movements. We inspect products and advertisements with our eyes, but test products or browse through websites with our hands. Consider two types of adverts, both featuring a model; one is a print ad that mostly aims to capture the visual attention of the consumer without further involvement, whereas the other is a banner ad that encourages the consumer to move their hand to click on it. Alternatively, imagine a shelf where the consumer looks at a product versus when they need to reach for the product. Does this difference looking versus reaching mean the decision processes are different? According to our research, recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the answer is yes. Our research involved examining how we move our eyes and hands, specifically in response to beauty. In the lab, participants engaged in a very simple numerical task similar to how consumers would compare prices in the presence of faces of varying degrees of attractiveness. For each trial, participants were presented with three, two-digit numbers: the first one (basis) was located at the bottom of the screen and the other two (targets) at the top left and right corners of the screen. They were asked to click on the target that was numerically closer to the basis. Next to each target, one face was presented. Participants were asked to ignore the faces and execute the task correctly and fast. We arranged the pairs of faces according to three conditions: congruent (the correct number was paired with an attractive face), incongruent (the correct number was paired with an unattractive face), and control (the correct number was paired with one of the two moderate faces). The images were taken from a standardised and validated database of Southeast Asian faces. Attractive and unattractive faces were selected based on the ratings of a different sample, where faces with an average rating of 0.5 standard deviations above (below) the mean among both female and male raters were categorised as attractive (unattractive). Moderate faces are those 48 A group of scientists has investigated if people make decisions differently depending on whether the process is visual or involves the hands with ratings falling in between the range of mean +- 0.5 standard deviations. Seventy participants (54% females) from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore completed the task while we tracked their mouse movements, and a second set of participants including 63 people (58% females) from the same university took part in the eye-tracking study. We found that the hand and eye respond to facial