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.