ArticlePsychological science2014
Genetic factors that increase male facial masculinity decrease facial attractiveness of female relatives.
Article in Psychological science, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Measuring sexual dimorphism in human faces.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- Testosterone mediates life-history trade-offs in female mammals.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Time perception of attractive male faces and voices: The role of women's menstrual cycle.PloS one · 2025Article
- Vienna Talking Faces (ViTaFa): A multimodal person database with synchronized videos, images, and voices.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Article
- Facial Attractiveness, but not Facial Masculinity, is Used as a Cue to Paternal Involvement in Fathers.Adaptive human behavior and physiology · 2023Article
- An investigation of a novel broad autism phenotype: increased facial masculinity among parents of children on the autism spectrum.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Genomic evidence consistent with antagonistic pleiotropy may help explain the evolutionary maintenance of same-sex sexual behaviour in humans.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- A broad autism phenotype expressed in facial morphology.Translational psychiatry · 2020Article
- Facial masculinity does not appear to be a condition-dependent male ornament and does not reflect MHC heterozygosity in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- No Compelling Evidence that Preferences for Facial Masculinity Track Changes in Women's Hormonal Status.Psychological science · 2018Article
- No evidence that facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) is associated with women's sexual desire.PloS one · 2018Article
- Facial averageness and genetic quality: Testing heritability, genetic correlation with attractiveness, and the paternal age effect.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2016Article
- Testing the mate-choice hypothesis of the female orgasm: disentangling traits and behaviours.Socioaffective neuroscience & psychology · 2016Article
- Evolutionary behavioral genetics.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2015Article
- Estimating the sex-specific effects of genes on facial attractiveness and sexual dimorphism.Behavior genetics · 2014Article
- Women's Preferences for Masculinity in Male Faces Are Predicted by Material Scarcity, But Not Time or Psychological Scarcity.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
- Refined Carbohydrate Consumption and Facial Attractiveness.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
- Male Homosexual Preference: Femininity and the Older Brother Effect in Indonesia.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
For women, choosing a facially masculine man as a mate is thought to confer genetic benefits to offspring. Crucial assumptions of this hypothesis have not been adequately tested. It has been assumed that variation in facial masculinity is due to genetic variation and that genetic factors that increase male facial masculinity do not increase facial masculinity in female relatives. We objectively quantified the facial masculinity in photos of identical (n = 411) and nonidentical (n = 782) twins and their siblings (n = 106). Using biometrical modeling, we found that much of the variation in male and female facial masculinity is genetic. However, we also found that masculinity of male faces is unrelated to their attractiveness and that facially masculine men tend to have facially masculine, less-attractive sisters. These findings challenge the idea that facially masculine men provide net genetic benefits to offspring and call into question this popular theoretical framework.
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Registered trials
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