Face Perception in Mate Choice

Our initial research in this area has investigated whether women use facial cues to track different possible components of men's mate attractiveness. A published study (Roney et al., 2006) reported that women's ratings of men's faces for how much the men like children were correlated with men's scores on an interest in infants test, and women's ratings of men's faces for masculinity correlated with men's actual testosterone concentrations. Women's perceptions of masculinity and liking children, in turn, predicted their short- and long-term mate attractiveness judgments, respectively. We are currently planning follow-up studies designed to better elucidate the types of cues women may be using to form such judgments. Toward this end, morphometric measurements are being made on a large sample of faces. In addition, we are exploring ways to test whether subtle emotional expressions in still photographs may drive the sorts of effects reported in the above paper.