The morphometrics of "masculinity" in human faces

PLoS One. 2015 Feb 11;10(2):e0118374. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0118374. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

In studies of social inference and human mate preference, a wide but inconsistent array of tools for computing facial masculinity has been devised. Several of these approaches implicitly assumed that the individual expression of sexually dimorphic shape features, which we refer to as maleness, resembles facial shape features perceived as masculine. We outline a morphometric strategy for estimating separately the face shape patterns that underlie perceived masculinity and maleness, and for computing individual scores for these shape patterns. We further show how faces with different degrees of masculinity or maleness can be constructed in a geometric morphometric framework. In an application of these methods to a set of human facial photographs, we found that shape features typically perceived as masculine are wide faces with a wide inter-orbital distance, a wide nose, thin lips, and a large and massive lower face. The individual expressions of this combination of shape features--the masculinity shape scores--were the best predictor of rated masculinity among the compared methods (r = 0.5). The shape features perceived as masculine only partly resembled the average face shape difference between males and females (sexual dimorphism). Discriminant functions and Procrustes distances to the female mean shape were poor predictors of perceived masculinity.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Face / anatomy & histology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Masculinity*
  • Sex Characteristics
  • Young Adult

Associated data

  • Dryad/10.5061/dryad.CP0P5

Grants and funding

This article was supported by the Open Access Publishing Fund of the University of Vienna, which is covering the publication costs. This research was supported by the Focus of Excellence grant “Biometrics of EvoDevo” and the Emerging Field grant “Comparative Human Life History: A Multilevel Approach” from the University of Vienna. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.