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How your face betrays your personality and health
[img]http:// ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfeatures/624_351/images/live/p0/2l/ts/p02ltsg8.jpg[/img] We are more than just a pretty face. It turns out the shape, size and even colour of our looks can relay some very important information about our personalities, health and sexuality. David Robson investigates. You might expect a great philosopher to look past our surface into the depths of the soul – but Ancient Greek thinkers were surprisingly concerned with appearance. Aristotle and his followers even compiled a volume of the ways that your looks could reflect your spirit. "Soft hair indicates cowardice and coarse hair courage," they wrote. Impudence, the treatise says, was evident in "bright, wise-open eyes with heavy blood-shot lids"; a broad nose, meanwhile, was a sign of laziness, like in cattle. Sensuous, fleshy lips fared little better. The philosophers saw it as a sign of folly, "like an ass", while those with especially thin mouths were thought to be proud, like lions. Today, we are taught not to judge a book by its cover. But while it is wise not to set too much by appearances, psychologists are finding that your face offers a window on our deepest secrets. Even if you keep a stony poker face, your features can reveal details about your personality, your health, and your intelligence. Assertive structure “The idea is that our biology, like genes and hormone levels, influences our growth, and the same mechanisms will also shape our character,” explains Carmen Lefevre at Northumbria University. Consider the face’s bone structure – whether it is relatively short and wide or long and thin. Lefevre has found that people with higher levels of testosterone tend to be wider-faced with bigger cheekbones, and they are also more likely to have more assertive, and sometimes aggressive, personalities. The link between face shape and dominance is surprisingly widespread, from capuchin monkeys – the wider the face, the more likely they are to hold a higher rank in the group’s hierarchy – to professional football players. Examining the 2010 World Cup, Keith Welker at the University of Boulder, Colorado, recently showed that the ratio of the width and height of the footballers’ faces predicted both the number of fouls among midfielders, and the number of goals scored by the forwards.
It may even clue you in to a politician’s motives. Using volunteers to rate former US presidents on different psychological attributes, Lefevre found that face shape seemed to reflect their perceived ambition and drive. John F Kennedy had a thicker-set face than 19th Century Chester Arthur, for instance. Such analyses of historical figures are perhaps best taken with a pinch of salt, however, and it has to be said that other traits, such as cooperation and intelligence, should be equally important for success.
