Telling someone you fancy 'I really like you' could make him or her find you more attractive, research suggests.

Making eye contact and smiling have a similar effect, says Aberdeen University psychologist Dr Ben Jones.

His study, involving 230 men and women, found such social cues - which signal how much others fancy you - play a crucial role in attraction.

The work will appear in Psychological Science and will be presented at the BA Festival of Science in Liverpool.

Romantic success

Dr Jones said singletons could use his findings to help prevent wasting time chatting up people who were clearly not interested.

"Combining information about others' physical beauty with information about how attracted they appear to be to you allows you to allocate your social effort efficiently," he said.

In other words, avoid wasting time on attractive individuals who appear unlikely to reciprocate.

In the study, 230 men and women were asked to look at flash cards picturing a face with different expressions - making eye contact or not and smiling or not.

The volunteers were then asked to rate how attractive the faces were.

The preference for the attractive face was much stronger when people were judging those faces that were looking at them and smiling.

Dr Lynda Boothroyd, a psychologist at the University of Durham, said: "We like it when attractive people seem to be behaving positively towards us.

"And we seem to end up with people who are on our level in terms of attractiveness.

"Maybe one of the ways you learn your level of attractiveness is through how other people behave towards you." 

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