Women are more sensitive than men to facial signs of tiredness associated with health problems. There are two possible evolutionary reasons.
What a tired face… aren’t you harboring something? If it is your mother who tells you more often, it is no coincidence: women are in fact more capable of recognizing the signs of physical discomfort on faces than men. This is confirmed by a scientific study that tested this ability for the first time on really sick or really healthy faces, and not on artfully retouched photos. According to the research, published on Evolution and Human Behaviorthe reason for these superpowers may have to do with the evolution of our species.
How are these people?
Two psychologists from the University of Miami, Florida, recruited 280 university students, half women and half men, who were asked to evaluate 24 photos depicting 12 different faces, in moments of health or illness. Participants had to assign a score from 1 to 9 to six different “items” somehow related to the concept of illness, namely safety, health, accessibility, readiness, social interest and positivity. In this way the scientists were able to evaluate the subjects’ ability to detect the latent tiredness in people’s faces, to understand whether they were healthy, to decide whether or not they could approach those people if they had met them at that moment in real life.
Why are women more sensitive to signs of illness?
As initially hypothesized, women were, on average, more accurate at detecting signs of illness on faces, with a small but statistically significant difference compared to men. According to the scientists, there are two possible evolutionary explanations: the first – the “primary caregiver hypothesis” – is that, since historically women have always been assigned more tasks of caring for young children, developing a better ability to read the non-verbal signs of diseases on faces would have ensured an advantage in the survival of the offspring.
The second hypothesis, that of “avoidance of contaminants”, sees in the better ability to immediately recognize a sick face a form of self-defense for women, who more often encounter periods of immune suppression during their fertile life, both during pregnancy and, to a lesser extent, in the luteal phase of their menstrual cycle.
