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The morphometrics of "masculinity" in human faces
Philipp Mitteroecker1, Sonja Windhager2, Gerd B Müller1
1Department of Theoretical Biology, University of Vienna, Althanstrasse 14, 1090 Vienna, Austria.
Plos One
|February 12, 2015
Summary
Researchers developed a new morphometric strategy to measure facial masculinity and maleness separately. This approach accurately predicts perceived masculinity using specific facial shape features, outperforming previous methods.
Area of Science:
- Anthropology
- Psychology
- Biometrics
Background:
- Studies on social inference and mate preference utilize various methods to compute facial masculinity.
- Previous approaches often conflated perceived masculinity with sexually dimorphic facial shape features (maleness).
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a morphometric strategy for separately estimating perceived masculinity and maleness.
- To compute individual scores for these distinct facial shape patterns.
- To construct faces with varying degrees of masculinity and maleness.
Main Methods:
- Utilized geometric morphometrics to analyze facial shape.
- Developed a strategy to quantify masculinity and maleness shape patterns independently.
- Applied methods to a dataset of human facial photographs.
Main Results:
- Identified key facial features associated with perceived masculinity: wide faces, wide inter-orbital distance, wide nose, thin lips, and a large lower face.
- The derived masculinity shape scores were the strongest predictor of rated masculinity (r = 0.5).
- Perceived masculine features only partially aligned with average male-female facial shape differences (sexual dimorphism).
Conclusions:
- The developed morphometric strategy effectively distinguishes and quantifies perceived masculinity and maleness.
- Masculinity shape scores provide a more accurate measure of perceived masculinity than methods based on sexual dimorphism.
- Facial masculinity perception is influenced by specific shape configurations beyond general sexual dimorphism.
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