Heritabilities of Facial Measurements and Their Latent Factors in Korean Families

Abstract

Genetic studies on facial morphology targeting healthy populations are fundamental in understanding the specific genetic influences involved; yet, most studies to date, if not all, have been focused on congenital diseases accompanied by facial anomalies. To study the specific genetic cues determining facial morphology, we estimated familial correlations and heritabilities of 14 facial measurements and 3 latent factors inferred from a factor analysis in a subset of the Korean population. The study included a total of 229 individuals from 38 families. We evaluated a total of 14 facial measurements using 2D digital photographs. We performed factor analysis to infer common latent variables. The heritabilities of 13 facial measurements were statistically significant (p < 0.05) and ranged from 0.25 to 0.61. Of these, the heritability of intercanthal width in the orbital region was found to be the highest (h2 = 0.61, SE = 0.14). Three factors (lower face portion, orbital region, and vertical length) were obtained through factor analysis, where the heritability values ranged from 0.45 to 0.55. The heritability values for each factor were higher than the mean heritability value of individual original measurements. We have confirmed the genetic influence on facial anthropometric traits and suggest a potential way to categorize and analyze the facial portions into different groups.

Contribution of shape and surface reflectance information to kinship detection in 3D face images

“…These findings highlight the importance of shape and surface reflectance information in allocentric kin recognition and complement research showing that facial morphology and skin texture/tone cues are heritable (Clark, Stark, Walsh, Jardine, & Martin, 1981;Djordjevic, Zhurov, & Richmond, 2016;Frisancho, Wainwright, & Way, 1981;Kim et al, 2013;Tsagkrasoulis, Hysi, Spector, & Montana, 2017;Weinberg, Parsons, Marazita, & Maher, 2013;Williams-Blangero & Blangero, 1991). However, the current study was unable to distinguish whether kinship judgments were based on face similarities due to genetic or shared environmental sources.…”

“…Yet, this has never been directly examined. Face shape is highly heritable (Djordjevic, Zhurov, & Richmond, 2016;Kim et al, 2013;Tsagkrasoulis, Hysi, Spector, & Montana, 2017;Weinberg, Parsons, Marazita, & Maher, 2013). Genetic factors explain over 70% of the variance in facial traits such as face size, nose height, width and prominence, inter-ocular distance and lip prominence.…”

Heritability maps of human face morphology through large-scale automated three-dimensional phenotyping

“…More recent studies used facial photographs instead, due to the simplicity in which the images can be obtained. However, common traits such as the upper lip height, as well as nasal breadth and vertical eye distance, extracted from standard photographs, were only found to be moderately heritable, with estimates between 0.4 and 0.53 [24][25][26][27][28][29] . Given the almost perfect resemblance of identical twins, such heritability values appear surprising low.…”

Human kin detection

“…Because many traits, such as craniofacial features, are highly heritable, genetic similarity between individuals tends to be expressed as phenotypic similarity (Figure ). Evidence that similarities in adult or adolescent faces can be used as a kinship cue include the findings that, from photos, (1) pairs of parent/child, as well as pairs of siblings and grandparent/grandchild, are perceived as depicting people who belong to the same family more often than chance, and (2) pairs of aunt–uncle/nephew and cousins more often than unrelated pairs .…”