Is flirting real? Or just misunderstanding?

From the studies, women — some actresses and some volunteers from the neighborhood — were asked either to spontaneously pose a flirting saying (like what they would use at a bar to get attention from a potential partner) or to follow instructions based on present anthropological literature to what investigators specify as flirting.

The team found some girls are more effective than others in effectively communicating a flirtatious facial cue, though some men are much better at recognizing this cue. Beyond these individual differences, a few expressions were identified with many (if not all) men as flirting.

The researchers used the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to classify highly recognized flirtatious facial expressions. The coding revealed the best flirting cues include a face turned to one side and tilted down slightly, a slight smile, and eyes facing forward toward the suggested target.

“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.”

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

Eventually, is she flirting with me? – Yeah, she likes me. It may not just be a misunderstanding any more.