Higher self-perceived attractiveness & fewer minor ailments predicted lower scores of Somatization, Obsessive–Compulsive, Interpersonal Sensitivity, Depression, Anxiety, Phobic Anxiety, Paranoid Ideation, Psychoticism

Self-Perceived Facial Attractiveness, Fluctuating Asymmetry, and Minor Ailments Predict Mental Health Outcomes. Javier I. Borráz-León, Markus J. Rantala, Severi Luoto, Indrikis A. Krams, Jorge Contreras-Garduño, Tatjana Krama & Ana Lilia Cerda-Molina. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, Aug 31 2021. https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40750-021-00172-6

Abstract

Objective  Phenotypic markers associated with developmental stability such as fluctuating asymmetry, facial attractiveness, and reports of minor ailments can also act as indicators of overall physical health. However, few studies have assessed whether these markers might also be cues of mental health. We tested whether self- and other-perceived facial attractiveness, fluctuating asymmetry, and minor ailments are associated with psychopathological symptoms in a mixed sample of 358 college students, controlling for the effects of body mass index, age, and sex.

Methods  We applied the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R) questionnaire to assess psychopathological symptoms, a battery of questionnaires about self-perceptions of facial attractiveness, and gathered information about the number of previous minor ailments as well as demographic data. Other-perceived attractiveness was assessed by an independent mixed sample of 109 subjects. Subjects’ facial fluctuating asymmetry was determined by geometric morphometrics.

Results  The results revealed that in both men and women, higher self-perceived attractiveness and fewer minor ailments predicted lower scores of Somatization, Obsessive–Compulsive, Interpersonal Sensitivity, Depression, Anxiety, Phobic Anxiety, Paranoid Ideation, Psychoticism, and a General Psychopathology Index. Higher facial fluctuating asymmetry was associated with higher Interpersonal Sensitivity, but did not contribute to its prediction when controlling for the other studied variables.

Conclusions  The observed strong associations between self-perceived attractiveness, minor ailments, and psychopathology indicate common developmental pathways between physiological and psychological symptomatology which may reflect broader life history (co)variation between genetics, developmental environment, and psychophysiological functioning.

Discussion

This research assessed whether facial FA measurements, perceptions of attractiveness, and reports of minor ailments are associated with mental health through a lower occurrence of psychopathological symptoms in a mixed sample of young adults. The results indicated that in both men and women, higher self-perceptions of facial attractiveness and fewer minor ailments predicted lower scores of Somatization, Obsessive–Compulsive, Interpersonal Sensitivity, Depression, Anxiety, Phobic Anxiety, Paranoid Ideation, Psychoticism, and the General Psychopathology Index. Higher facial fluctuating asymmetry was associated only with higher Interpersonal Sensitivity, but did not contribute to its prediction when controlling for the other studied variables.

The observed strong associations between self-perceived attractiveness, reports of minor ailments, and mental health outcomes in both sexes support and extend previous results on the relationship between phenotypic indicators of attractiveness and developmental psychopathologies (e.g., Ehlinger & Bashill, 2016). According to previous literature, perceived high attractiveness is associated with higher physical fitness (Hönekopp et al., 2004), greater reproductive success (Singh, 1993), better social competence (Eagly et al., 1991), better immune function (Luoto et al., 2021), and good self-esteem (Bale & Archer, 2013; but see Mares et al., 2010). This would explain why, in the present study, higher self-perceptions of attractiveness contributed to the expression of lower psychopathological symptoms.

Although the relationships between minor ailments and mental health have not been tested in these previous studies, our results suggest that both self-perceived attractiveness (as a result of genetics, developmental environment, and previous sociobiological interactions) and minor ailments (as indicators of general health) could be cues of mental health in men and women. Thus, the present findings build on previous literature by going beyond the use of questionnaires to evaluate mental health by integrating phenotypic traits and markers of general health. This approach allows establishing a more holistic understanding of the variables that play a role in the development of psychopathological symptoms that might also be involved in the development of mental disorders. Moreover, even though our study did not aim to test the association between LH strategies and mental health outcomes, our results suggest that LH dynamics might be associated with the expression of physically attractive traits and mental health outcomes through environmental disturbances that affect resource allocation during the development of an individual (cf. Kahl et al., 2020; Kavanagh & Kahl, 2018; Luoto et al., 2021). Further research may benefit from integrating phenotypic indicators of attractiveness and markers of general and mental health with LH theory to test how these variables are predicted by LH strategies and/or experienced harshness/unpredictability.

The impact of innate attractiveness on social interactions during development is evident very early in life, even before other traits like musculature, sports ability, or dominant behavior (Bobadilla et al., 2013). For example, Langlois et al. (1995) observed that mothers of attractive infants were more prone to be emotional and playful with them. In contrast, the opposite effect was observed with less attractive infants. Likewise, Cash (1980) reported that observers and parents gave better ratings on behavior, health, and intelligence to attractive infants than less attractive ones. Other studies have found that less attractive children had higher probabilities of being physically abused and treated less favorably by teachers than more attractive ones in preschool years (Sweeting & West, 2001). Thus, lower self-perceived attractiveness could be associated with stressful social situations in the early stages of life, a risk factor that contributes to the development of psychopathological symptoms in later years (e.g., Doom & Cicchetti, 2018; Eisenbarth et al., 2019). However, based on these studies, it is not possible to disentangle correlation from causation, and other latent variables—some of which may be endogenous rather than exogenous—may be driving the association between attractiveness and the nature of social experiences.

Stressful life events and limited resource availability contribute to impaired health and immune function in children and adolescents (Dunkel et al., 2020; Kim et al., 2020; Schmeer et al., 2019; Wickrama et al., 2005; Yiğit et al., 2018). For example, children born in socioeconomically disadvantaged families had higher probabilities to have developmental impairments due to the inability to provide proper nutrition, vaccination, and adequate access to health care (Krams et al., 2019; Lauringson et al., 2020; Rubika et al., 2020). Likewise, children from unstable family environments are more likely to develop fast LH strategies which can contribute to the development of higher psychopathological symptoms (Hurst & Kavanagh, 2017; Kahl et al., 2020). Chronically stressful life experiences and/or lack of resources may exert deleterious effects on biological functioning (Luoto et al., 2021) that could be translated into a higher number of minor ailments and fast LH strategies that, based on our results, would contribute to the prediction of psychopathological symptoms (Hurst & Kavanagh, 2017; Schmeer et al., 2019; Wickrama et al., 2005). Thus, this previous literature supports the view of self-perceived attractiveness and minor ailments as outcomes of mental health, rather than the other way around. However, it is also possible that perceptions of attractiveness, minor ailments, and mental health can be mutually influenced and/or be connected by a latent variable, such as genetic heritability and covariation between those traits. As another possibility, previous studies have reported that some mental disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder are associated with low-grade neuroinflammation (Rantala et al., 2018, 2021). This low-grade neuroinflammation and the increase of proinflammatory cytokines may reduce the bioavailability of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine (Miller, 2009), leading to low mood and sickness behavior that may promote a warped self-image and, probably, lower self-perceptions of attractiveness (Rantala et al., 2019).

On the other hand, even though we found that facial FA—a physical trait related to apparent health and developmental stability (Stephen & Luoto, 2021)—was positively correlated with Interpersonal Sensitivity scores, the effect size was low (r = 0.105) as most of the previous studies have reported (e.g., Borráz-León & Cerda-Molina, 2015; Pound et al., 2007). Facial FA was not correlated with any of the other psychopathological dimensions. Thus, it is possible that facial FA is more related to indicating an optimal developmental environment rather than mental health both in humans and non-human animals (Borráz-León et al., 2017b; De Anna et al., 2013; Luoto et al., 2021). However, it is noteworthy that the present research partially replicates and extends previous results (e.g., Shackelford & Larsen, 1997; Thornhill & Møller, 1997) on the relationship between facial FA and psychophysiological stress, with the advantage of using statistical analyses beyond a bivariate correlational approach, a more reliable technique for calculating facial FA (Fink et al., 2005), and a higher sample size (i.e., three times higher) than in previous research (e.g., Shackelford & Larsen, 1997).

It is also possible that insults from poor developmental environments may contribute to a dysregulation of physiological systems (e.g., the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis) affecting the development of symmetrical traits and contributing to altered cortisol responses and higher stress perceptions (Borráz-León et al., 2017b), which, in turn, would affect mate value, attractiveness, and health indicators (Borráz-León et al., 2017a; Rantala et al., 2019). In contrast, self-perceived attractiveness could be more directly related to mental health. This hypothesis is in line with the multiple fitness model (Cunningham et al., 1995) which proposes that perceived physical attractiveness results from the evaluation of multiple features rather than a single one, signaling different aspects of mate value (Little et al., 2006; Luoto, 2019; Miller & Todd, 1998; Stephen & Luoto, 2021). Thus, our results suggest that self-perceived attractiveness and number of previous ailments may not only signal general health, thereby affecting sexual selection processes, but that they may also covary with mental health outcomes.

Limitations

It is possible that our findings arose from response bias covariance since SCL-90-R is a self-rating instrument and its accuracy relies on correct interpretation of questions, which is susceptible to denial, minimization, and bias mechanisms (Eisen et al. 1999). Nevertheless, a moderate-to-high reliability and internal consistency of the SCL-90-R have been reported in the literature (e.g., Otte et al., 2017), including in this study. The αs of the psychopathological symptoms range from 0.76 to 0.81, which reduced the probability of bias in the responses.

Another possible limitation of this study is that we did not measure self-esteem in our sample. Since self-esteem tends to be associated with positive social outcomes (e.g., Borráz-León et al., 2018, 2019b; Harris & Orth, 2020), and since higher self-perceived attractiveness predicted lower psychopathological symptoms in our sample, it is possible that mechanisms such as low self-esteem, warped self-image, and adverse childhood experiences, which could be driven by psychopathology, could lead to lower self-perceived attractiveness and impaired mental health (cf. Rantala et al., 2019).

As this study was conducted only on university students, further studies with more heterogeneous samples are needed to increase the generalizability of the results, as well as to investigate the role of self-esteem as a mediator in the associations between self-perceived attractiveness and psychopathological symptoms. Based on these data, we are unable to verify the direction of causality between self-perceived attractiveness, minor ailments, and psychopathological symptoms, or whether latent variables underlie these associations.