ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Prenatal testosterone exposure is related to sexually dimorphic facial morphology in adulthood.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 189 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evolutionary Theories and Men's Preferences for Women's Waist-to-Hip Ratio: Which Hypotheses Remain? A Systematic Review.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Pooled it
- The influence of income and testosterone on the validity of facial width-to-height ratio as a biomarker for dominance.PloS one · 2018Trial
- Self-reported aggressiveness does not follow facial masculinization in diverse South Asian populations.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Measuring sexual dimorphism in human faces.Journal of anatomy · 2026Article
- Interplay of polymorphisms in sex hormone receptors and facial sexual differentiation in shaping prosocial behavior.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Placental Steroid Hypothesis of Human Brain Evolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Violence exposure is associated with preference for masculine faces: evidence from Senegal.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Three-dimensional facial features of suicide risk in females with depression.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Under the influence: exogenous testosterone influences men's cross-sex perceptions of sexual interest.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Examining infantile facial features and their influence on caretaking behaviors in free-ranging Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata).PloS one · 2024Article
- Paternity share predicts sons' fetal testosterone.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Relating Facial Trustworthiness to Antisocial Behavior in Adolescent and Adult Men.Journal of nonverbal behavior · 2023Article
- Facial Attractiveness, but not Facial Masculinity, is Used as a Cue to Paternal Involvement in Fathers.Adaptive human behavior and physiology · 2023Article
- Does the primate face cue personality?Personality neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Facial width-to-height ratio predicts fighting success: A direct replication and extension of Zilioli et al. (2014).Aggressive behavior · 2022Article
- Digit ratio (2D:4D) and maternal testosterone-to-estradiol ratio measured in early pregnancy.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Tracking sexual dimorphism of facial width-to-height ratio across the lifespan: implications for perceived aggressiveness.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Africans and Europeans differ in their facial perception of dominance and sex-typicality: a multidimensional Bayesian approach.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- An investigation of a novel broad autism phenotype: increased facial masculinity among parents of children on the autism spectrum.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prenatal testosterone may have a powerful masculinizing effect on postnatal physical characteristics. However, no study has directly tested this hypothesis. Here, we report a 20-year follow-up study that measured testosterone concentrations from the umbilical cord blood of 97 male and 86 female newborns, and procured three-dimensional facial images on these participants in adulthood (range: 21-24 years). Twenty-three Euclidean and geodesic distances were measured from the facial images and an algorithm identified a set of six distances that most effectively distinguished adult males from females. From these distances, a 'gender score' was calculated for each face, indicating the degree of masculinity or femininity. Higher cord testosterone levels were associated with masculinized facial features when males and females were analysed together (n = 183; r = -0.59), as well as when males (n = 86; r = -0.55) and females (n = 97; r = -0.48) were examined separately (p-values < 0.001). The relationships remained significant and substantial after adjusting for potentially confounding variables. Adult circulating testosterone concentrations were available for males but showed no statistically significant relationship with gendered facial morphology (n = 85, r = 0.01, p = 0.93). This study provides the first direct evidence of a link between prenatal testosterone exposure and human facial structure.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.