14 DAY TRIAL // What's in the mind of a possible mate? Just look well at his/her face. It tells a lot about his/her attitude towards sexual relationships, as found by a new research carried out at the Durham, St. Andrews and Aberdeen Universities and published in "Evolution and Human Behavior."
The study made on 700 heterosexual subjects revealed that men generally look for women perceived as being open to affairs, whilst women are more interested in potentially stable partners.
The participants were asked to judge the attractiveness and attitude towards sex of various persons of opposite gender from their facial photographs. They were presented pairs of facial images of men and women in their early 20s, considered of average attractiveness and having two opposite attitudes towards relationships. The volunteers had to rate the faces of the individuals that would be more open to short-term relationships, one-night stands and to the idea of sex as distinct from love.
They also scored the faces depending on how attractive they were for a long- or short-term relationship, masculinity or femininity, and general attractiveness.
The subjects' perceptual judgments were subsequently compared with the real behavior of the characters seen in the photographs, previously evaluated through detailed questionnaires.
It appeared that both male and female subjects could assess quite precisely from photographs which characters were more prone to short-term sexual relationships: 72% of the participants correctly detected sexual attitudes in over 50% of the cases. Even so, subjects were not always confident in their first impression based on visual analysis of the faces.
The women who were more open to short-term sexual relationships were perceived as being more attractive, but the researchers could not explain why. The men that were more open to affairs were regarded as having a more masculine look, with squarer jaws, larger nose and smaller eyes. A previous research made by the same team had showed that women perceive masculine men as being less trustful and bad fathers.
"Although some people can judge the sexual strategy of others simply from looking at their face, people are not always sure about their judgments possibly because the cues are very subtle. This shows that these initial impressions may be part of how we assess potential mates - or potential rivals - when we first meet them. These will then give way over time to more in depth knowledge of that person, as you get to know them better, and may change with age," said lead author Dr. Lynda Boothroyd from Durham University's Psychology Department.
"Lots of previous studies have shown that people can judge a lot about a person from their face, including things like health and even some personality traits like introversion, but this really is the first study to show that people are also sensitive to subtle facial signals about the type of romantic relationships that others might enjoy," said co-author Dr. Ben Jones, from the University of Aberdeen's Face Research Lab.
But don't you think that reading faces is enough for a cling; at least in the case of men. "While faces do hold cues to sexual attitudes, men should not presume any kind of relationship is wanted from appearance alone since women's choice is what matters. Indeed most women found promiscuous-looking guys unattractive for both short and long-term relationships," warned co-author Professor David Perrett from the University of St. Andrews.