Abstract
The expression of facial asymmetries has been recurrently related with poverty and/or disadvantaged socioeconomic status. Departing from the developmental instability theory, previous approaches attempted to test the statistical relationship between the stress experienced by individuals grown in poor conditions and an increase in facial and corporal asymmetry. Here we aim to further evaluate such hypothesis on a large sample of admixed Latin Americans individuals by exploring if low socioeconomic status individuals tend to exhibit greater facial fluctuating asymmetry values. To do so, we implement Procrustes analysis of variance and Hierarchical Linear Modelling (HLM) to estimate potential associations between facial fluctuating asymmetry values and socioeconomic status. We report significant relationships between facial fluctuating asymmetry values and age, sex, and genetic ancestry, while socioeconomic status failed to exhibit any strong statistical relationship with facial asymmetry. These results are persistent after the effect of heterozygosity (a proxy for genetic ancestry) is controlled in the model. Our results indicate that, at least on the studied sample, there is no relationship between socioeconomic stress (as intended as low socioeconomic status) and facial asymmetries.
Highlights
Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) on bilateral human phenotypic attributes has been proposed as a proxy of development instability [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
Instead of developing a classic approach aimed to test if extreme poor conditions trigger some degree of FA, we focus on the “normal” observed range of socioeconomic status (SES) variations on modern, urban Latin-American populations
Given the large sample size used here and the associated metadata that we have compiled to perform this study, we have no ways of comparing our error levels with similar analyses
Summary
Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) on bilateral human phenotypic attributes has been proposed as a proxy of development instability [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10] This idea states that facial asymmetries can be seen as a biomarker of an organism stress during its development, and indirectly accounts for their phenotypic and genetic quality and/or stability [2,11,12,13,14,15,16], even though some analyses challenge this relationship [17,18,19,20,21]. Some studies suggested significantly higher FA values in lower SES groups, with males showing higher FA values than females [7] or relatively higher FA values on a sample subjected to higher stress levels [5]. Regarding body and facial measurements, there is a report showing higher values of FA in individuals having lower SES. The same results were obtained in another groups of the same city [26]
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