HEALTH ASYMMETRY IN THE FACE 229
Comparison between health and previous
attractiveness judgements
As our hypothesis was that there is a relationship between the appearance of
health on the face and facial attractiveness, we next determined the frequency of
selecting the left-left or right-right for each stimulus face across all participants.
We then compared the health judgement data to the attractiveness judgement
data from the previously published study (Zaidel et al., 1995) with an ANOVA
applied to the faces of women and an ANOVA applied to the faces of men. With
each ANOVA, the between-subjects factor was Decision (healthy, attractive)
and the within subject factor was Side (left-left, right-right). We found with
each ANOVA that the Decision × Side interaction was not significant (p>.85),
while there was a significant main effect for Decision [men's faces:
F(l, 16) = 9.12, p = .008; women’s faces: (F( 1,20) = 7.27, p = .01], reflecting a
generally higher rating for health than for attractiveness, regardless of side. With
the women’s faces ANOVA there was a significant main effect for Side,
F( 1,20) = 6.84, p = 0.01, which reflected significantly higher ratings for right-
right than for left-left, regardless of Decision.
DISCUSSION
Against the background of biological and evolutionary perspectives, and our
previous findings on facial attractiveness (Chen et al., 1997; Zaidel et al., 1995),
we hypothesised that right-right composites of women’s’ faces would be judged
significantly healthier than left-left. Along the same lines, we predicted no
preference for either side of men’s faces. Not only did the results confirm our
hypotheses, they also reflected our previous findings regarding attractiveness. It
is important to note that the identical set of faces used to obtain ratings of health
was also used previously for the judgement of attractiveness. The subjects in this
experiment were allowed to report “no difference’’ between left-left and right-
right faces. They nevertheless perceived differences, particularly in women’s
faces, and responded accordingly. Thus, the present results are consistent with
sex-related, left-right asymmetry in the appearance of health in the face, and
suggest a linkage between facial appearance of attractiveness and health.
Facial asymmetry refers to the fact that the human face (women and men) is
not morphologically symmetrical. This trait is not deemed to be pathological;
rather, it is considered to be normal. Support for this comes from methods in
which actual morphological measurements of human faces revealed relative
asymmetry (Ferrario, Sforza, Pogio, & Tartaglia, 1994; Ferrario et al., 1993;
Sackeim, 1985; Samuels et al., 1994).
How the mind in the brain of the observer processes health cues in someone’s
face is little understood. Such assessment is often labelled subjective. However,
there is no logical reason to believe that “health assessment’’ lacks a