Abstract
Facial cues contribute to attractiveness, including shape cues such as symmetry, averageness, and sexual dimorphism. These cues may represent cues to objective aspects of physiological health, thereby conferring an evolutionary advantage to individuals who find them attractive. The link between facial cues and aspects of physiological health is therefore central to evolutionary explanations of attractiveness. Previously, studies linking facial cues to aspects of physiological health have been infrequent, have had mixed results, and have tended to focus on individual facial cues in isolation. Geometric morphometric methodology (GMM) allows a bottom–up approach to identifying shape correlates of aspects of physiological health. Here, we apply GMM to facial shape data, producing models that successfully predict aspects of physiological health in 272 Asian, African, and Caucasian faces – percentage body fat (21.0% of variance explained), body mass index (BMI; 31.9%) and blood pressure (BP; 21.3%). Models successfully predict percentage body fat and blood pressure even when controlling for BMI, suggesting that they are not simply measuring body size. Predicted values of BMI and BP, but not percentage body fat, correlate with health ratings. When asked to manipulate the shape of faces along the physiological health variable axes (as determined by the models), participants reduced predicted BMI, body fat and (marginally) BP, suggesting that facial shape provides a valid cue to aspects of physiological health.
Highlights
Evolutionary accounts of human facial attractiveness posit that facial cues associated with attractiveness and healthy appearance represent valid cues to aspects of underlying physiological health
leave one out cross-validation (LOOCV) values were highly correlated with predicted values [r(270) = 0.986; p < 0.001] and Mean squared error (MSE) was low (
All variance inflation factor (VIF) values were within the acceptable range
Summary
Evolutionary accounts of human facial attractiveness posit that facial cues associated with attractiveness and healthy appearance represent valid cues to aspects of underlying physiological health. 2004): symmetry (Grammer and Thornhill, 1994), averageness (Rhodes et al, 2001b), sexual dimorphism (Perrett et al, 1998), skin color (Fink et al, 2006; Matts et al, 2007; Stephen et al, 2009b, 2012), facial adiposity (Coetzee et al, 2009), and skin homogeneity (Matts et al, 2007) all being identified as contributing to attractiveness or healthy appearance. In order to identify a valid cue to health, it is necessary to demonstrate a link between the cue in question and some aspect of real, physiological health. This part of the equation has received much less attention (Coetzee et al, 2009). A similar study using a large longitudinal database failed to find a relationship between facial symmetry and health during development (Pound et al, 2014)
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