Facial cues for mate selection

Reuters: The image shows a pair of computerised "averaged" facial photographs taken from real people's pictures. According to the research, the face on the right is of someone who is more likely to be interested in a short-term sexual relationship whilst the one on the left is more likely to be interested in a long-term relationship.

LONDON (Reuters) - Members of the opposite sex can spot whether someone is after a one-night stand or something more permanent just by looking at their face, scientists said on Wednesday.

On men, a square jaw, large nose and small eyes are more likely to betray the look of lust than of love.

Women found men with softer features more likely to opt for commitment.

But the Durham University-led research found that while men can judge whether a woman is footloose-and-fancy-free or not, there is no common facial detail to explain it.

About 700 heterosexual people took part in the survey carried out by Durham, St. Andrews and Aberdeen universities.
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For couples:
Social influence in human face preference: men and women are influenced more for long-term than short-term attractiveness decisions

Abstract
In nonhuman animals, mate-choice copying has received much attention, with studies demonstrating that females tend to copy the choices of other females for specific males. Here we show, for both men and women, that pairing with an attractive partner increases the attractiveness of opposite-sex faces for long-term relationship decisions but not short-term decisions. Our study therefore shows social transmission of face preference in humans, which may have important consequences for the evolution of human traits. Our study also highlights the flexibility of human mate choice and suggests that, for humans, learning about nonphysical traits that are important to pair-bonding drives copying-like behavior.

Discussion
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Mate-choice copying has been proposed to be adaptive when there is a cost, such as energy, to evaluating the quality of potential mates or when discriminating between the quality of potential mates is difficult (Wade & Pruett-Jones 1990). In this way, social transmission may allow individuals to assess a potential mate quickly and efficiently, and perhaps teaches individuals what to look for in a mate. In humans, there are many aspects to a partner other than their physical traits, and potentially, the choices of others can be used to infer positive or negative traits, such as behavior, resources, or intelligence, which are difficult to infer just from physical appearance.

Specificity to long-term preferences implies that social influence is being used to determine nonphysical traits that make a target a good long-term partner. Studies have shown that individuals value physical attractiveness in short-term contexts over other attractive traits such as pleasant personalities (Buss & Schmitt 1993). Judges may then be able to acquire the physical information from a photograph to judge physical attractiveness for short-term contexts, and hence, the extra information from the paired partner is of little relevance. Humans bring two factors to a parenting relationship: a level of parental investment and potential heritable benefits (e.g., genes for high-quality immune systems). Social information may be more useful for judging the former given such information is less readily discernable. Of course, in species without parental care, mate-choice copying likely occurs because individuals are able to acquire information about the genetic quality of a prospective mate (Witte & Ryan 2002), and potentially, this is also true in humans despite our finding of specificity to long-term judgments.

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