ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Perception of health from facial cues.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed.
- Identification of acutely sick people and facial cues of sickness.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Trial
- Creating and validating photorealistic AI-generated facial expression stimuli for emotion research.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Facial shape and self-perceived personality traits in young adults.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Face aging rate quantifies change in biological age to predict cancer outcomes.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Influence of facial shape on perceived attractiveness.Progress in orthodontics · 2026Article
- Facial Appearance and Markers of Cardiometabolic Risk in Healthy Adult Men.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Mate assessment based on physical characteristics: a review and reflection.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Simulated intra-individual skin color changes and their impact on facial attractiveness across Japanese, Chinese, and Caucasian faces.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Sexual Dimorphism: The Interrelation of Shape and Color.Archives of sexual behavior · 2024Article
- Association between the three-dimensional facial shape and its color in a boundary group of young to middle-aged Asian women.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Facial appearance associates with longitudinal multi-organ failure: an ICU cohort study.Critical care (London, England) · 2024Observational
- With or without the Mask: Age Differences in Perceived Trustworthiness and Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Effects of mild psychological stress on facial impressions.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Use of Facial Morphology to Determine Nutritional Status in Older Adults: Opportunities and Challenges.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2022Article
- Ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity differentiates sick from healthy faces: Associations with inflammatory responses and disease avoidance motivation.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2022Article
- Facial and body sexual dimorphism are not interconnected in the Maasai.Journal of physiological anthropology · 2022Article
- Disruption of cardio-pulmonary coupling in myopathies: Pathophysiological and mechanistic characterization with special emphasis on nemaline myopathy.Frontiers in cardiovascular medicine · 2022Review
- An exploratory, cross-cultural study on perception of putative cyclical changes in facial fertility cues.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Normal colour perception in developmental prosopagnosia.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Facial attractiveness and preference of sexual dimorphism: A comparison across five populations.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Impressions of health are integral to social interactions, yet poorly understood. A review of the literature reveals multiple facial characteristics that potentially act as cues to health judgements. The cues vary in their stability across time: structural shape cues including symmetry and sexual dimorphism alter slowly across the lifespan and have been found to have weak links to actual health, but show inconsistent effects on perceived health. Facial adiposity changes over a medium time course and is associated with both perceived and actual health. Skin colour alters over a short time and has strong effects on perceived health, yet links to health outcomes have barely been evaluated. Reviewing suggested an additional influence of demeanour as a perceptual cue to health. We, therefore, investigated the association of health judgements with multiple facial cues measured objectively from two-dimensional and three-dimensional facial images. We found evidence for independent contributions of face shape and skin colour cues to perceived health. Our empirical findings: (i) reinforce the role of skin yellowness; (ii) demonstrate the utility of global face shape measures of adiposity; and (iii) emphasize the role of affect in facial images with nominally neutral expression in impressions of health.
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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.