THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYREADING PERSONALITY IN THE EYES,
FACE AND FINGERS
A popular method for discerning personality in Ancient Greece was to
look for clues in the face. The idea that a person can look evil or friendly
strikes an intuitive chord, and physiognomy (as it’s known) has had a long
but chequered history. Dismissed by Leonardo Da Vinci as unscientific,
and outlawed by King George II of England, it nevertheless remained an
influential idea, and in the nineteenth century was commonly used as
a way of identifying criminals and assessing types of lunacy. Although
by the twentieth century it was widely regarded as a pseudoscience, new
findings suggest that aspects of personality really do have correlates in
the face, the eyes and even the relative lengths of the fingers.
In a 2009 study, carried out by Justin Carré at Brock University,
participants were shown photographs of men whose levels of aggres-
sion had been assessed earlier and asked to judge how aggressive they
thought they were. Remarkably, the participants were largely accurate in
identifying the more aggressive types, with further analysis suggesting
that they were using the facial width-to-height ratio to make their
judgements (in other words the wider a face was relative to its length,
the more aggressive it was judged to be). The reason that this is seen as
an indicator of aggression may well be because a face with this shape
more closely resembles an angry facial expression. Separate studies have
confirmed that face-width is a valid marker – men with such faces have
higher testosterone levels, and an investigation involving ice hockey
players found that those with wide, short faces had been penalized more
often for violent acts during games.
Other related research has shown that it’s possible to discern the
sexual orientation of a person from the briefest of glimpses of their face;
that a glance at the face of a chief executive can provide a rough idea of
the profitability of a company; and that baby-faced men are more likely
to be judged innocent in court.
Focusing on the eyes, Mats Larsson at Örebro University found in
2007 that participants who had more features called Fuchs’ crypts on
the surface layers of their iris (reflecting thicker tissue) tended to form
warmer and more trustful attachments to other people, and experienced
more positive emotions. Participants with more “contraction furrows”,
another indicator of tissue density, tended to have more impulsive
personalities. Unfortunately, eye colour wasn’t linked to personality,
although a separate study published in 2010 found that white men with