IC News

As Valentine’s Day approaches, conversations about love tend to fill the air—in movies, in music, in late-night texts, and in the quiet hopes people carry into relationships. What makes someone the right partner? What traits matter most? And are those preferences universal, or deeply personal?

At Ithaca College, those questions became more than cultural curiosity. They became research.

Through an ambitious international study involving more than 10,000 participants across 43 countries, undergrads in Professor of Psychology Leigh Ann Vaughn’s Personal and Social Research course explored one of the most enduring mysteries of human connection: what people truly want in a romantic partner—and how those preferences shape relationship satisfaction.

For psychology major Emma Heinze ’26, the opportunity was academically exciting.

“It was such a cool thing to be a part of,” Heinze said. “To contribute to something that big—something that wasn’t just happening at Ithaca, but happening across the world—made it feel so real."

That experience reflects what undergraduate research looks like at Ithaca College: immersive, collaborative, and deeply student-centered.

The study emerged through a global, distributed network of over 1,400 researchers in 71 countries called the Psychological Science Accelerator. The consortium is designed to support what Vaughn calls “big team science,” large-scale research projects that span cultures, institutions, and continents. “The Psychological Science Accelerator helps put people who want to do big team science in touch with people who also want to do big team science,” Vaughn explained.

When Vaughn saw the project’s topic—romantic partner preferences—she immediately knew it would resonate with her students.

“This was one that I jumped on,” she said. “And when I saw the topic, I thought, well, my research team students are going to love this. And they did!”

The project asked a deceptively simple question: What do people look for in a romantic partner? And does satisfaction come from finding someone with generally positive traits—or from finding someone who matches your unique, personal preferences?

The findings were both affirming and fascinating.

“For the most part, people are looking for people who have nice traits,” Vaughn said. “They want people who are warm, trustworthy, good-looking, and have an appealing personality.

Across cultures, those fundamentals held steady.

“As it turns out,” Vaughn added, “people of all kinds are looking for people with the same traits, wherever they are.”

At Ithaca College, Vaughn’s Social and Personality Research Team played a key role in collecting and analyzing data. Students helped gather responses, troubleshoot methods, and eventually explore the massive dataset from alongside researchers worldwide. For students, it was an opportunity to contribute to research at an international scale contributors.

“It was really interesting to watch them work with this very large dataset,” Vaughn said, “and just the excitement of learning that they were contributing to something so big.”

That excitement was exactly what Heinze felt.

“I’ve always loved learning about people,” she said. “But doing research made it feel different—like I wasn’t just studying psychology, I was actually helping create knowledge.” 

The student team has presented the data twice already—at the Eastern Psychological Association, and then the Ithaca College Whalen Symposium.

The entire experience has set a course for Heinze’s future: “I realized I really enjoyed the research process and that I want to be a researcher, which informed my decision to pursue a PhD post-grad. The whole experience helped me feel confident in myself as a future researcher.” Heinze is waiting on admission decisions at the time of this writing.

The study has already been cited more than 20 times in its first year—a strong indicator of its scholarly impact. Vaughn is curious whether dating platforms like Match or Hinge may eventually take interest as well.

But perhaps the most meaningful impact is closer to home: the way students like Heinze discover their own ability to contribute to the world of research.

At Ithaca College, undergraduates don’t wait until graduate school to do meaningful work. They start now—with faculty mentors beside them, global questions in front of them, and the confidence that their curiosity matters.

And in the process, they learn something else, too:

That across cultures, across continents, across datasets of 10,000 people …

Most of us are looking for the same thing.

Warmth. Trust. Connection.

And maybe, just maybe …

Someone who smells good.