Attractiveness is a proposed universal cue to overall biological quality. Nonetheless, local raters and raters of the same ethnicity may be more accurate in assessing the cues for attractiveness than distant and unfamiliar raters. Shared ethnicity and shared environment may both affect rating accuracy: our aim was to compare their relative influence. Therefore, we photographed young Vietnamese participants (N = 93, 33 women) from Hanoi, Vietnam. The photographs were rated by Czechs, Asian Vietnamese, and Czech Vietnamese (raters of Vietnamese origin who lived in Czechia for all or most of their life). Using geometric morphometrics, we measured facial shape cues to biological quality: averageness, asymmetry, and sexual dimorphism. We expected that Vietnamese raters residing in Czechia and Vietnam would agree on perceived attractiveness and use shape-related facial cues to biological quality better than Czech European raters, who are less familiar with East Asians. Surprisingly, mixed-effect models and post hoc comparisons identified no major cross-group differences in attributed attractiveness and path analyses revealed that the three groups based their rating on shape-related characteristics in a similar way. However, despite the considerable cross-cultural agreement regarding perceived attractiveness, Czech European raters associated attractiveness with facial shape averageness significantly more than Vietnamese raters.

• MeSH
• Beauty * MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Southeast Asian People * MeSH
• Perception MeSH
• Sex Characteristics * MeSH
• Eastern European People MeSH
• Check Tag
• Humans MeSH
• Female MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH
• Geographicals
• Vietnam MeSH

When looking at others, primates primarily focus on the face - detecting the face first and looking at it longer than other parts of the body. This is because primate faces, even without expression, convey trait information crucial for navigating social relationships. Recent studies on primates, including humans, have linked facial features, specifically facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR), to rank and Dominance-related personality traits, suggesting these links' potential role in social decisions. However, studies on the association between dominance and fWHR report contradictory results in humans and variable patterns in nonhuman primates. It is also not clear whether and how nonhuman primates perceive different facial cues to personality traits and whether these may have evolved as social signals. This review summarises the variable facial-personality links, their underlying proximate and evolutionary mechanisms and their perception across primates. We emphasise the importance of employing comparative research, including various primate species and human populations, to disentangle phylogeny from socio-ecological drivers and to understand the selection pressures driving the facial-personality links in humans. Finally, we encourage researchers to move away from single facial measures and towards holistic measures and to complement perception studies using neuroscientific methods.

• Keywords
• dominance, evolution, fWHR, perception, rank, sexual selection, social signal,
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH

Biosocial impact of facial dominance and sex-typicality is well-evidenced in various human groups. It remains unclear, though, whether perceived sex-typicality and dominance can be consistently predicted from sexually dimorphic facial features across populations. Using a combination of multidimensional Bayesian approach and geometric morphometrics, we explored associations between perceived dominance, perceived sex-typicality, measured sexual shape dimorphism, and skin colour in a European and an African population. Unlike previous studies, we investigated the effect of facial variation due to shape separately from variation due to visual cues not related to shape in natural nonmanipulated stimuli. In men, perceived masculinity was associated with perceived dominance in both populations. In European women higher perceived femininity was, surprisingly, likewise positively associated with perceived dominance. Both shape and non-shape components participate in the constitution of facial sex-typicality and dominance. Skin colour predicted perceived sex-typicality in Africans but not in Europeans. Members of each population probably use different cues to assess sex-typicality and dominance. Using our methods, we found no universal sexually dimorphic scale predicting human perception of sex-typicality and dominance. Unidimensional understanding of sex-typicality thus seems problematic and should be applied with cautions when studying perceived sex-typicality and its correlates.

• MeSH
• Bayes Theorem MeSH
• Black People * MeSH
• Humans MeSH
• Face * MeSH
• Perception MeSH
• Sexual Behavior MeSH
• Check Tag
• Humans MeSH
• Male MeSH
• Female MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH