Male Facial Masculinity as a Cue to Health Outcomes

Boothroyd, Lynda G.; Scott, Isabel M.; Gray, Alan; Coombes, Claire; Pound, Nicholas

doi:10.1177/147470491301100508

Cited by 60 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…As a matter of fact, they are often used as synonymous concepts. This puzzling result has been observed before [15], [50]. Several reasons may explain why these measures are at odds, but it is quite plausible that subjective judgments of masculinity are influenced by other factors apart from just the morphology of the face.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Facial Masculinity: How the Choice of Measurement Method Enables to Detect Its Influence on Behaviour

2014

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Recent research has explored the relationship between facial masculinity, human male behaviour and males' perceived features (i.e. attractiveness). The methods of measurement of facial masculinity employed in the literature are quite diverse. In the present paper, we use several methods of measuring facial masculinity to study the effect of this feature on risk attitudes and trustworthiness. We employ two strategic interactions to measure these two traits, a first-price auction and a trust game. We find that facial width-to-height ratio is the best predictor of trustworthiness, and that measures of masculinity which use Geometric Morphometrics are the best suited to link masculinity and bidding behaviour. However, we observe that the link between masculinity and bidding in the first-price auction might be driven by competitiveness and not by risk aversion only. Finally, we test the relationship between facial measures of masculinity and perceived masculinity. As a conclusion, we suggest that researchers in the field should measure masculinity using one of these methods in order to obtain comparable results. We also encourage researchers to revise the existing literature on this topic following these measurement methods.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Facial Masculinity: How the Choice of Measurement Method Enables to Detect Its Influence on Behaviour

2014

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“…Facial BMI scores correlated with actual BMI (r 118 ¼ 0.59, p , 0.001), but not height (r 117 ¼ 0.05, p ¼ 0.565) [57]. 1 Eyelid openness. The degree of eyelid openness was examined by taking the vertical distance from the centre of the pupil to the top eyelid and dividing it by the width of the eye inner canthus to outer canthus.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Understanding how these judgements are informed is important because they feed into other social judgements such as attractiveness [1][2][3] or leadership ability [4], which is potentially consequential in terms of real-life outcomes, such as dating and or employment outcomes. Other social consequences may stem directly from judgements of health because maintaining a physical distance from those who are perceived to be unhealthy has clear evolutionary benefits through avoidance of contagious disease.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of health from facial cues

Henderson

Holzleitner

Talamas

et al. 2016

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Impressions of health are integral to social interactions, yet poorly understood. A review of the literature reveals multiple facial characteristics that potentially act as cues to health judgements. The cues vary in their stability across time: structural shape cues including symmetry and sexual dimorphism alter slowly across the lifespan and have been found to have weak links to actual health, but show inconsistent effects on perceived health. Facial adiposity changes over a medium time course and is associated with both perceived and actual health. Skin colour alters over a short time and has strong effects on perceived health, yet links to health outcomes have barely been evaluated. Reviewing suggested an additional influence of demeanour as a perceptual cue to health. We, therefore, investigated the association of health judgements with multiple facial cues measured objectively from two-dimensional and three-dimensional facial images. We found evidence for independent contributions of face shape and skin colour cues to perceived health. Our empirical findings: (i) reinforce the role of skin yellowness; (ii) demonstrate the utility of global face shape measures of adiposity; and (iii) emphasize the role of affect in facial images with nominally neutral expression in impressions of health.

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“…In this study, we investigated the ICHH in humans by testing for an association between immunocompetence, as measured by heterozygosity at the major histocompatibility (MHC) locus, and an objective measure of facial masculinity, a secondary sexual trait that is thought to have evolved to signal health and immune-function in humans (11,(46)(47)(48)(49)(50) . Based on what we know about the condition-dependence of sexual ornaments (18)(19)(20)(21)(22) , we tested three hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: Facial masculinity is a condition-dependent male ornament in humans.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facial masculinity does not appear to be a condition-dependent male ornament in humans and does not reflect MHC heterozygosity

White

Mattern

et al. 2018

Preprint

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Facial masculinity is thought to be a condition-dependent male ornament, reflecting immunocompetence in humans. To test this hypothesis, we calculated an objective measure of facial masculinity/femininity using three-dimensional images in a large sample (N = 1,233) of people of European ancestry. We show that facial masculinity is positively correlated with adult height in both males and females. This suggests that variation in growth contributes, at least in part, to variation in facial masculinity, which is characteristic of condition-dependent traits. However, facial masculinity scales with growth similarly in males and females, suggesting that facial masculinity is not specifically a male ornament. Additionally, we measured immunocompetence via heterozygosity at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a well known genetic marker of immunity. We show that while height is positively correlated with MHC heterozygosity, facial masculinity is not. Thus, facial masculinity does not reflect immunocompetence measured by MHC heterozygosity in humans as thought previously. Overall, we find no support for the idea that facial masculinity is a condition-dependent male ornament that has evolved to indicate immunocompetence.

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Male Facial Masculinity as a Cue to Health Outcomes

Cited by 60 publications

References 43 publications

Facial Masculinity: How the Choice of Measurement Method Enables to Detect Its Influence on Behaviour

Facial Masculinity: How the Choice of Measurement Method Enables to Detect Its Influence on Behaviour

Perception of health from facial cues

Facial masculinity does not appear to be a condition-dependent male ornament in humans and does not reflect MHC heterozygosity

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