Impressions of health are integral to social interactions, yet poorly understood. A review of the literature reveals multiple facial characteristics that potentially act as cues to health judgements. The cues vary in their stability across time: structural shape cues including symmetry and sexual dimorphism alter slowly across the lifespan and have been found to have weak links to actual health, but show inconsistent effects on perceived health. Facial adiposity changes over a medium time course and is associated with both perceived and actual health. Skin colour alters over a short time and has strong effects on perceived health, yet links to health outcomes have barely been evaluated. Reviewing suggested an additional influence of demeanour as a perceptual cue to health. We, therefore, investigated the association of health judgements with multiple facial cues measured objectively from two-dimensional and three-dimensional facial images. We found evidence for independent contributions of face shape and skin colour cues to perceived health. Our empirical findings: (i) reinforce the role of skin yellowness; (ii) demonstrate the utility of global face shape measures of adiposity; and (iii) emphasize the role of affect in facial images with nominally neutral expression in impressions of health.

50Converging evidence suggests men's beards, like many androgen-dependent 51 masculine secondary sexual traits, communicate masculinity and dominance 52 intra-sexually while effects of men's beardedness on attractiveness ratings are 53 more equivocal. Beards may enhance perceived masculinity and dominance via 54 amplifying aspects of underlying craniofacial masculinity, particularly the size of 55 the lower face and jaw. Here we tested these predictions across two studies. In 56 Study 1, we tested how three facial metrics -objectively measured craniofacial 57 masculinity, facial-width-to-height ratio (fWHR), and jaw size -calculated while 58clean-shaven impacted on ratings of attractiveness, masculinity and dominance 59 of 37 men photographed when clean-shaven and with full beards. Results 60showed that beards exerted significant and positive effects on masculinity, 61 dominance and to a lesser extent attractiveness. However, fWHR did not 62 significantly interact with beardedness to influence the directions of any of the 63 ratings, and while some linear and nonlinear interactions were significant 64 between objective craniofacial masculinity and beardedness as well as between 65 jaw size and beardedness, they tended to be subtle and dwarfed by the large 66 main effect of beardedness on perceptual ratings. In Study 2, we measured 67 ratings of attractiveness, masculinity and dominance for composite clean-shaven 68 and bearded stimuli experimentally manipulated in facial shape to represent 69 ±50% the shape of a beard, essentially manipulating the size of the lower face 70 and jaw of the stimuli. We found a strong main effect whereby bearded stimuli 71 enhanced dominance and masculinity ratings over clean-shaven stimuli. 72Increasing the size of the lower face and jaw augmented ratings of masculinity 73 and dominance in clean-shaven stimuli but did not exert strong effects within 74 bearded stimuli. Attractiveness ratings were highest for bearded faces with 75 smaller jaws followed by bearded and clean-shaven faces with larger jaws and 76 lowest for clean-shaven faces with small jaws. Taken together, our findings 77 suggest that beards exert main effects on masculinity and dominance possibly by 78 amplifying male typical facial shape. Attractiveness ratings of facial hair may 79 reflect a compromise between overly dominant looking faces with larger jaws 80 and the additive effects beardedness has on these ratings. 81 82

Impression formation is profoundly influenced by facial attractiveness, but the existence of facial cues which affect judgments beyond such an “attractiveness halo” may be underestimated. Because depression and tiredness adversely affect cognitive capacity, we reasoned that facial cues to mood (mouth curvature) and alertness (eyelid-openness) affect impressions of intellectual capacity. Over 4 studies we investigated the influence of these malleable facial cues on first impressions of intelligence. In Studies 1 and 2 we scrutinize the perceived intelligence and attractiveness ratings of images of 100 adults (aged 18–33) and 90 school-age children (aged 5–17), respectively. Intelligence impression was partially mediated by attractiveness, but independent effects of eyelid-openness and subtle smiling were found that enhanced intelligence ratings independent of attractiveness. In Study 3 we digitally manipulated stimuli to have altered eyelid-openness or mouth curvature and found that each independent manipulation had an influence on perceptions of intelligence. In a final set of stimuli (Study 4) we explored changes in these cues before and after sleep restriction, to examine whether natural variations in these cues according to sleep condition can influence perceptions. In Studies 3 and 4 variations with increased eyelid-openness and mouth curvature were found to relate positively to intelligence ratings. These findings suggest potential overgeneralizations based on subtle facial cues that indicate mood and tiredness, both of which alter cognitive ability. These findings also have important implications for students who are directly influenced by expectations of ability and teachers who may form expectations based on initial perceptions of intelligence.

Despite the old adage not to ‘judge a book by its cover’, facial cues often guide first impressions and these first impressions guide our decisions. Literature suggests there are valid facial cues that assist us in assessing someone’s health or intelligence, but such cues are overshadowed by an ‘attractiveness halo’ whereby desirable attributions are preferentially ascribed to attractive people. The impact of the attractiveness halo effect on perceptions of academic performance in the classroom is concerning as this has shown to influence students’ future performance. We investigated the limiting effects of the attractiveness halo on perceptions of actual academic performance in faces of 100 university students. Given the ambiguity and various perspectives on the definition of intelligence and the growing consensus on the importance of conscientiousness over intelligence in predicting actual academic performance, we also investigated whether perceived conscientiousness was a more accurate predictor of academic performance than perceived intelligence. Perceived conscientiousness was found to be a better predictor of actual academic performance when compared to perceived intelligence and perceived academic performance, and accuracy was improved when controlling for the influence of attractiveness on judgments. These findings emphasize the misleading effect of attractiveness on the accuracy of first impressions of competence, which can have serious consequences in areas such as education and hiring. The findings also have implications for future research investigating impression accuracy based on facial stimuli.

What is the social, emotional, and academic impact of attending school remotely rather than in person? We address this issue using survey data collected from N = 6,576 high school students in a large, diverse school district that allowed families to choose either format in fall 2020. Controlling for baseline measures of well-being collected 1 month before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as demographics, high school students who attended school remotely reported lower levels of social, emotional, and academic well-being (effect size [ES] = 0.10, 0.08, and 0.07 standard deviations, respectively) than classmates who attended school in person—differences that were consistent across gender, race and ethnicity, and socioeconomic status subgroups but significantly wider among 10th–12th graders than ninth graders.