Lisa M DeBruine

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Glasgow

Health perceptions are thought to play an important role in human mate preferences. Although many studies have investigated potential relationships between health ratings of faces and facial symmetry, prototypicality, and sexual dimorphism, findings have been mixed across studies. Consequently, we tested for potential relationships between health r...

Perceptions of the trustworthiness of faces predict important social outcomes, including economic exchange and criminal sentencing decisions. However, the specific facial characteristics that drive trustworthiness perceptions remain poorly understood. Here we investigated this issue by exploring possible relationships between ratings of the trustwo...

Salivary steroid immunoassays are widely used in psychoneuroendocrinological studies of menstrual cycle phase, puberty, and menopause. Though manufacturers advertise their assays as suitable, they have not been rigorously validated for these purposes. We collated data from eight menstrual cycle studies across >1,200 female participants and >9,500 t...

Mate preferences and mating-related behaviors are hypothesized to change over the menstrual cycle to increase reproductive fitness. Recent large-scale studies suggest that previously reported hormone-linked behavioral changes are not robust. The proposal that women's preference for associating with male kin is down-regulated during the ovulatory (h...

While most studies on sexuality in later life report that sexual desire declines with age, little is known about the exact nature of age effects on sexual desire. Using self-reported dyadic sexual desire relating to a partner, dyadic sexual desire relating to an attractive person, and solitary sexual desire from a large (N > 8000) and age diverse (...

Open research is increasingly required by journals and funders but involves many new skills. Creating open-source tutorials is useful to the field and personally rewarding, but these efforts must be credited accordingly. Open research is increasingly required by journals and funders but involves many new skills. Creating open-source tutorials is us...

In addition to benefiting reproducibility and transparency, one of the advantages of using R is that researchers have a much larger range of fully customizable data visualizations options than are typically available in point-and-click software because of the open-source nature of R. These visualization options not only look attractive but also can...

Over the past decade, a small literature has tested how trait-level pathogen-avoidance motives (e.g., disgust sensitivity) and exposure to pathogen cues relate to preferences for facial symmetry and sexual dimorphism. Results have largely been interpreted as suggesting that the behavioral immune system influences preferences for these features in p...

Objectives A large literature exists investigating the extent to which physical characteristics (e.g., strength, weight, and height) can be accurately assessed from face images. While most of these studies have employed two-dimensional (2D) face images as stimuli, some recent studies have used three-dimensional (3D) face images because they may con...

Research on links between peoples’ personality traits and their voices has primarily focused on other peoples’ personality judgments about a target person based on a target person’s vocal characteristics, particularly voice pitch. However, it remains unclear whether individual differences in voices are linked to actual individual differences in per...

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear w...

Objective Although it is widely assumed that men’s sexual desire and interest in casual sex (i.e., sociosexual orientation) are linked to steroid hormone levels, evidence for such associations is mixed.Methods We tested for both longitudinal and cross-sectional relationships between salivary testosterone, cortisol, reported sexual desire and socios...

Many researchers have proposed that straight men prefer women’s faces displaying feminine shape characteristics at least partly because mating with such women will produce healthier offspring. Although a prediction of this adaptation-for-mate-choice hypothesis is that straight men will show stronger preferences for feminized versus masculinized ver...

The tendency to attend to and avoid cues to pathogens varies across individuals and contexts. Researchers have proposed that this variation is partially driven by immunological vulnerability to infection, though support for this hypothesis is equivocal. One key piece of evidence (Miller & Maner, 2011) shows that participants who have recently been...

Evidence that affective factors (e.g. anxiety, depression, affect) are significantly related to individual differences in emotion recognition is mixed. Palermo et al. (Palermo et al. 2018 J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 44, 503–517) reported that individuals who scored lower in anxiety performed significantly better on two measures of facia...

Facial similarity between individuals informs kinship judgments in third-party kin recognition. Indeed, one study found that similarity and kinship judgments encapsulate the same information (Maloney & Dal Martello, 2006). Yet, another study found that this is not the case when comparing adult face pairs of different sex (DeBruine et al., 2009). We...

Researchers have suggested that more attractive women will show stronger preferences for masculine men because such women are better placed to offset the potential costs of choosing a masculine mate. However, evidence for correlations between measures of women's own attractiveness and preferences for masculine men is mixed. Moreover, the samples us...

Women’s preferences for masculine characteristics in men’s faces have been extensively studied. By contrast, little is known about how gay men respond to masculine facial characteristics. One area of disagreement in the emerging literature on this topic is the association between gay men’s partnership status and masculinity preference. One study fo...

Previous research has found that physical characteristics in faces that influence perceptions of trustworthiness and dominance have context-contingent effects on leadership perceptions. People whose faces are perceived to be trustworthy are judged to be better leaders in peacetime contexts than wartime contexts. By contrast, people whose faces are...

Findings for progesterone and anxiety in non-human animals led to the hypothesis that women's interpersonal anxiety will track changes in progesterone during the menstrual cycle. There have been few direct tests of this hypothesis, however. Consequently, we used a longitudinal design to investigate whether interpersonal anxiety (assessed using the...

Men are hypothesized to show stronger preferences for physical attractiveness in potential mates than women are, particularly when assessing the attractiveness of potential mates for short-term relationships. By contrast, women are thought to show stronger preferences for social status in potential mates than men are, particularly when assessing th...

Secondary data analyses (analyses of open data from published studies) can play a critical role in hypothesis generation and in maximizing the contribution of collected data to the accumulation of scientific knowledge. However, assessing the evidentiary value of results from secondary data analyses is often challenging because analytical decisions...

Previous research has established that humans are able to detect kinship among strangers from facial images alone. The current study investigated what facial information is used for making those kinship judgments, specifically the contribution of face shape and surface reflectance information (e.g., skin texture, tone, eye and eyebrow color). Using...

Facial attractiveness plays a critical role in social interaction, influencing many different social outcomes. However, the factors that influence facial attractiveness judgments remain relatively poorly understood. Here, we used a sample of 594 young adult female face images to compare the performance of existing theory-driven models of facial att...

Previous studies suggest that birth order affects kinship detection ability. Kaminski et al. (2010) argued that firstborns use contextual cues (e.g., maternal perinatal association) to assess kinship in their own family, leading to a disadvantage in assessing kinship from facial cues alone in strangers. In contrast, laterborns do not have the conte...

Social judgments of faces predict important social outcomes, including leadership decisions. Previous work suggests that facial cues associated with perceptions of dominance and trustworthiness have context-specific effects on leadership decisions. Facial cues linked to perceived dominance have been found to be preferred in leaders for hypothetical...

Previous research has shown strong cross-cultural agreement in facial attractiveness judgments. However, these studies all used a theory-driven approach in which responses to specific facial characteristics are compared between cultures. This approach is constrained by the predictions that can be derived from existing theories and can therefore bia...

Research on mate preference have often taken a theory-driven approach; however, such an approach can constrain the range of possible predictions. As a result, the research community may inadvertently neglect traits that are potentially important for human mate choice if current theoretical models simply do not identify them. Here, we address this l...

On average, women show stronger preferences for mates with good earning capacity than men do, while men show stronger preferences for physically attractive mates than women do. Studies reporting that sex differences in mate preferences are smaller in countries with greater gender equality have been interpreted as evidence that these sex differences...

Mate preferences and mating-related behaviors are hypothesized to change over the menstrual cycle in ways that function to increase reproductive fitness. Results of recent large-scale studies suggest that many of these hormone-linked behavioral changes are less robust than was previously thought. One specific hypothesis that has not yet been subjec...

Social judgments of faces predict important social outcomes, including leadership decisions. Previous work suggests that facial cues associated with perceptions of dominance and trustworthiness have context-specific effects on leadership decisions. Facial cues linked to perceived dominance have been found to be preferred in leaders for hypothetical...

It is well established that men report greater jealousy when imagining scenarios in which their romantic partner interacts with men displaying masculine physical characteristics. However, few studies have tested for corresponding effects of sexually dimorphic characteristics on women’s jealousy or tested for these effects in non-Western samples. Th...

The ‘dark triad’ refers to the personality traits narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Previous research found that participants could distinguish dark triad faces when judging images with average facial characteristics of people who scored either high or low on these traits. These results suggest that faces contain valid cues to dark tria...

The face own-age bias effect refers to the better ability to recognize the face from one’s own age compared with other age groups. Here we examined whether an own-age advantage occurs for faces sex categorization. We examined 7- and 9-year-olds’ and adults’ ability to correctly categorize the sex of 7- and 9-year-olds and adult faces without exter...

Al-Shawaf et al. (2015, Evolution & Human Behavior, 36, 199–205) found that people who were more interested in pursuing a short-term mating strategy (indexed by higher total scores on the Revised Sociosexual Orientation Inventory) reported less sexual disgust (indexed by lower scores on the sexual disgust subscale of the Three Domain Disgust Scale)...

Research into the characteristics of attractive women’s voices has focused almost exclusively on associations with fundamental or formant frequencies. A recent study of a small sample of voices used a bottom-up approach to identify acoustic characteristics associated with women’s vocal attractiveness, finding that many acoustic characteristics othe...

Previous research has suggested that women using oral contraceptives show weaker preferences for masculine men than do women not using oral contraceptives. Such research would be consistent with the hypothesis that steroid hormones influence women’s preferences for masculine men. Recent large-scale longitudinal studies, however, have found limited...

All supporting information has been included in the “S1 Supplementary Materials”. (PDF)

Social judgments of faces made by Western participants are thought to be underpinned by two dimensions: valence and dominance. Because some research suggests that Western and Eastern participants process faces differently, the two-dimensional model of face evaluation may not necessarily apply to judgments of faces by Eastern participants. Here we u...

Additional analyses for face ratings from male and female participants. (HTML)

Many studies have attempted to identify biological factors that reliably predict individual differences in women's preferences for masculine male faces. Marcinkowska et al. (2018, Hormones & Behavior) recently reported that women's (N = 102) preferences for facial masculinity were predicted by the interaction between their relationship status (part...

Kinship informs the allocation of pro-social and sexual behaviour. In addition to the ability to detect kin who are directly related to the observer, humans are also able to detect relatedness among others who are not related to themselves based on facial cues of relatedness. However, it is unclear what exact facial cues inform these kinship judgme...

Findings for progesterone and anxiety in non-human animals led to the hypothesis that women's interpersonal anxiety will track changes in progesterone during the menstrual cycle. There have been few direct tests of this hypothesis, however. Consequently, we used a longitudinal design to investigate whether interpersonal anxiety (assessed using the...

The dual mating strategy hypothesis proposes that women's preferences for uncommitted sexual relationships with men displaying putative fitness cues increase during the high-fertility phase of the menstrual cycle. Results consistent with this hypothesis are widely cited as evidence that sexual selection has shaped human mating psychology. However,...

Objectives Ancestrally, strength is likely to have played a critical role in determining the ability to obtain and retain resources and the allocation of social status among humans. Responses to facial cues of strength are therefore thought to play an important role in human social interaction. Although many researchers have proposed that sexually...

Concerns about the veracity of psychological research have been growing. Many findings in psychological science are based on studies with insufficient statistical power and nonrepresentative samples, or may otherwise be limited to specific, ungeneralizable settings or populations. Crowdsourced research, a type of large-scale collaboration in which...

Previous reports that women with attractive faces are healthier have been widely cited as evidence that sexual selection has shaped human mate preferences. However, evidence for correlations between women's physical health and facial attractiveness is equivocal. Moreover, positive results on this issue have generally come from studies of self-repor...

Objectives Ancestrally, strength is likely to have played a critical role in determining the ability to obtain and retain resources and the allocation of social status among humans. Responses to facial cues of strength are therefore thought to play an important role in human social interaction. Although many researchers have proposed that sexually...

Objectives Many previous studies have investigated relationships between men’s competitiveness and testosterone. For example, the extent of changes in men’s testosterone levels following a competitive task predicts the likelihood of them choosing to compete again. Recent work investigating whether individual differences in men’s testosterone levels...

Objectives Recent research on the signal value of masculine physical characteristics in men has focused on the possibility that such characteristics are valid cues of physical strength. However, evidence that sexually dimorphic vocal characteristics are correlated with physical strength is equivocal. Consequently, we undertook a further test for po...

Recent studies that either used luteinizing hormone tests to confirm the timing of ovulation or measured steroid hormones from saliva have found little evidence that women's preferences for facial or body masculinity track within-subject changes in women's fertility or hormonal status. Fewer studies using these methods have examined women's prefere...

Objectives Recent research on the signal value of masculine physical characteristics in men has focused on the possibility that such characteristics are valid cues of physical strength. However, evidence that sexually dimorphic vocal characteristics are correlated with physical strength is equivocal. Consequently, we undertook a further test for po...

Many studies have attempted to identify biological factors that reliably predict individual differences in women's preferences for masculine male faces. Marcinkowska et al. (2018 Hormones & Behavior) recently reported that women's (N=102) preferences for facial masculinity were predicted by the interaction between their relationship status (partner...

Putative associations between sex hormones and attractive physical characteristics in women are central to many theories of human physical attractiveness and mate choice. Although such theories have become very influential, evidence that physically attractive and unattractive women have different hormonal profiles is equivocal. Consequently, we inv...

Facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) has been linked to many different behavioral tendencies. However, not all of these correlations have replicated well across samples. Arnocky et al. (in press, Archives of Sexual Behavior) recently reported that sexual desire was correlated with fWHR. The current study aimed to test this relationship in a large sa...

Putative associations between sex hormones and attractive physical characteristics in women are central to many theories of human physical attractiveness and mate choice. Although such theories have become very influential, evidence that physically attractive and unattractive women have different hormonal profiles is equivocal. Consequently, we inv...

How organisms discount the value of future rewards is associated with many important outcomes, and may be a central component of theories of life-history. According to life-history theories, prioritizing immediacy is indicative of an accelerated strategy (i.e. reaching reproductive maturity quickly and producing many offspring at the cost of long-t...

JonesSupplementalMaterial – Supplemental material for No Compelling Evidence That Preferences for Facial Masculinity Track Changes in Women’s Hormonal Status

JonesOpenPracticesDisclosure – Supplemental material for No Compelling Evidence That Preferences for Facial Masculinity Track Changes in Women’s Hormonal Status

Raised progesterone during the menstrual cycle is associated with suppressed physiological immune responses, reducing the probability that the immune system will compromise the blastocyst's development. The Compensatory Prophylaxis Hypothesis proposes that this progesterone-linked immunosuppression triggers increased disgust responses to pathogen c...

Although widely cited as strong evidence that sexual selection has shaped human facial-attractiveness judgments, findings suggesting that women’s preferences for masculine characteristics in men’s faces are related to women’s hormonal status are equivocal and controversial. Consequently, we conducted the largest-ever longitudinal study of the hormo...

When the adult sex ratio of the local population is biased toward women, men face greater costs due to increased direct intrasexual competition. In order to mitigate these costs, men may be more attuned to cues of other men’s physical dominance under these conditions. Consequently, we investigated the relationships between the extent to which peopl...

Many previous studies have investigated relationships between men’s competitiveness and testosterone. For example, the extent of changes in men’s testosterone levels following a competitive task predicts the likelihood of them choosing to compete again. Recent work investigating whether individual differences in men’s testosterone levels predict in...

Although widely cited as strong evidence that sexual selection has shaped human facial attractiveness judgments, evidence that preferences for masculine characteristics in men’s faces are related to women’s hormonal status is equivocal and controversial. Consequently, we conducted the largest ever longitudinal study of the hormonal correlates of wo...

Several recent longitudinal studies have investigated the hormonal correlates of both young adult women’s general sexual desire and, more specifically, their desire for uncommitted sexual relationships. Findings across these studies have been mixed, potentially because each study tested only small samples of women (Ns = 43, 33, and 14). Here we rep...

Although some researchers have suggested that the interaction between cortisol and testosterone predicts ratings of men’s facial attractiveness, evidence for this pattern of results is equivocal. Consequently, the current study tested for a correlation between men’s facial attractiveness and the interaction between their cortisol and testosterone l...

Sexual dimorphism (i.e., masculinity in males and femininity in females) is known to affect social perceptions that are important for both mate choice and intrasexual competition, such as attractiveness and dominance. Little is known, however, about the neurophysiological underpinnings mediating sexual dimorphism’s effects on face processing. Here...

Cues available in facial skin are used to assess mate quality in humans and non-human primates. In men, perception of skin healthiness and facial attractiveness are associated with heterozygosity at genes in the major histocompatibility complex, with potential implications for securing direct benefits through mate choice. There is, however, some de...

Effects of facial coloration on facial attractiveness judgments are hypothesized to be “universal” (i.e., similar across cultures). Cross-cultural similarity in facial color preferences is a critical piece of evidence for this hypothesis. However, only two studies have directly compared facial color preferences in two cultures. Both of those studie...

Raised progesterone during the menstrual cycle is associated with suppressed physiological immune responses, reducing the probability that the immune system will compromise the blastocyst's development. The Compensatory Prophylaxis Hypothesis proposes that this progesterone-linked immunosuppression triggers increased disgust responses to pathogen c...

Several recent longitudinal studies have investigated the hormonal correlates of both young adult women's general sexual desire and, more specifically, their desire for uncommitted sexual relationships. Findings across these studies have been mixed, potentially because each study tested only small samples of women (Ns = 43, 33, and 14). Here we rep...

Social judgments of faces are thought to be underpinned by two perceptual components: valence and dominance. Recent work using a standard key-press task to assess reward value found that these valence and dominance components were both positively related to the reward value of faces. Although bodies play an important role in human social interactio...

Variable names legend. (DOCX)

Full results of model testing for effects of female body general component on key-press scores for female bodies. (DOCX)

Full results of model testing for effects of male body general component on key-press scores for male bodies. (DOCX)

Full results of model testing for effects of female valence and dominance components on key-press scores for female faces. (DOCX)

Full results of model testing for effects of male valence and dominance components on key-press scores for male faces. (DOCX)

Human romantic partners tend to have similar physical traits ¹ , but the mechanisms causing this homogamy are controversial. One potential explanation is direct matching to own characteristics 2,3 . Alternatively, studies showing similarity between parent and partner 4,5 support positive sexual imprinting 6,7 , where individuals are more likely to...

The benefits of minimizing the costs of engaging in violent conflict are thought to have shaped adaptations for the rapid assessment of others’ capacity to inflict physical harm. Although studies have suggested that men’s faces and voices both contain information about their threat potential, one recent study suggested that men’s faces are a more v...

Behaviors that minimize exposure to sources of pathogens can carry opportunity costs. Consequently, how individuals resolve the trade off between the benefits and costs of behavioral immune responses should be sensitive to the extent to which they are vulnerable to infectious diseases. However, although it is a strong prediction of this functional...

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Feminine physical characteristics in women are positively correlated with markers of their mate quality. Previous research on men’s judgments of women’s facial attractiveness suggests that men show stronger preferences for feminine characteristics in women’s faces when their own testosterone levels are relatively high. Such results could reflect st...

Although many researchers have suggested that more physically attractive women report less restricted sociosexual orientations (i.e., report being more willing to engage in short-term, uncommitted sexual relationships), evidence for this association is equivocal. Consequently, we tested for possible relationships between women's scores on the revis...

Both behavioral and neural measures of the motivational salience of faces are positively correlated with their physical attractiveness. Whether physical characteristics other than attractiveness contribute to the motivational salience of faces is not known, however. Research with male macaques recently showed that more dominant macaques’ faces hold...

Data used in analyses. (XLS)

Romantic relationships can have positive effects on health and reproductive fitness. Given that attractive potential alternative mates can pose a threat to romantic relationships, some researchers have proposed that partnered individuals discriminate opposite-sex individuals less along the physical attractiveness dimension than do unpartnered indiv...

The benefits of minimizing the costs of engaging in violent conflict are thought to have shaped adaptations for the rapid assessment of others' capacity to inflict physical harm. Although studies have suggested that men's faces and voices both contain information about their threat potential, one recent study suggested that men's faces are a more v...

Research on within-subject changes in women's intrasexual competitiveness has generally focused on possible relationships between women's intrasexual competitiveness and estimates of their fertility. While this approach is useful for testing hypotheses about the adaptive function of changes in women's intrasexual competitiveness, it offers little i...