Do you walk in a room and immediately zero in on the guy brooding in the corner? A study conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia (the findings were released this week in the American Psychological Association's journal Emotion) proved some gender stereotypes are true(ish). The researchers showed 1,000 adults pictures of the opposite sex in various emotional states and asked them to rate their attractiveness.

Before we get in to what women find attractive, let's stop on men for a second. Images shown depicted women displaying the following facial expressions: happiness, pride, shame, and neutral. Men found the images of women smiling to be most attractive. The researchers believe their findings enforce that smiling is more feminine and that a smiling woman looks like she's happy to see her man.

What did women respond to? They looked at the same emotional poses of men, preferring the ones of those where they were looking full of pride. Pride could be interpreted as a man's ability to successfully provide for his family. Least attractive to the women in the study were the smiling men. There were some variables in age; while women both young and old responded best to pride, younger ladies found shame similarly attractive. Older women found shame almost as unattractive as those smiling guys.

"Shame says I'm a bad guy, but I know I screwed up so you can trust me," Jessica Tracy, the psychologist who headed the study, told The Vancouver Sun. "Older women may already have learned it's not such a good idea to go for [the bad guy]."

This totally explains the appeal of Mad Men's Don Draper who exudes confidence and pride and rarely smiles; the most sullen of them all, Twilight's Edward Cullen; and a host of other glum heartthrobs we'd be happy to look at photos of—in the name of science of course.

So what do you think? Does a cocky guy get your heart racing, or is a smile the first thing you notice?