Recent studies reveal that violence significantly contributes to explaining individual’s facial preferences. Women who feel at higher risk of violence prefer less-masculine male faces. Given the importance of violence, we explore its influence on people’s preferences for a different physical trait. Masculinity correlates positively with male strength and weight or body mass index (BMI). In fact, masculinity and BMI tend to load on the same component of trait perception. Therefore we predicted that individuals’ perceptions of danger from violence will relate to preferences for facial cues to low-BMI. In two studies in Colombia, men and women from Bogota, Medellin, and surrounding communities were shown pairs of faces transformed to epitomize the shape correlates of men with high or low-BMI. The images were of European, Salvadoran, or Colombian men. Participants were asked to choose the face they considered most attractive. Subsequently, participants answered a survey about their health (e.g., frequency of illnesses the past year), media access (e.g., frequency of Internet use), education level (e.g., graduating from high school), and experiences/perceptions of violence in study 1 and about specific types of violence (public and domestic) in study 2. Results from both studies showed that women who experienced/perceived higher levels of violence preferred faces of low-BMI Salvadoran men. Preferences for low-BMI facial cues were significantly explained by violence (public or domestic), even after controlling for all other variables (including age, education, health, and media access). These results may reflect women’s strategy to avoid male partners capable of inflicting harm.

中文翻译：

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哥伦比亚女性对暴力的恐惧与高BMI男性的偏好减少有关。

最近的研究表明，暴力显着有助于解释个人的面部偏好。容易遭受暴力侵害的女性更喜欢男性化程度较低的男性面孔。鉴于暴力的重要性，我们探讨了暴力对人们偏好其他生理特征的影响。男性气质与男性的力量，体重或体重指数（BMI）呈正相关。实际上，男性气质和BMI倾向于加重特质感知的同一部分。因此，我们预测个人对暴力危险的感知将与偏向低BMI的面部提示偏好有关。在哥伦比亚进行的两项研究中，来自波哥大，麦德林和周边社区的男性和女性被显示成对的面孔被转化以概括高BMI或低BMI男性的形状。这些图像是欧洲人，萨尔瓦多人或哥伦比亚人的图像。要求参与者选择他们认为最有吸引力的面孔。随后，参与者回答了有关其健康状况（例如，过去一年的疾病发生频率），媒体访问（例如，使用互联网的频率），教育水平（例如，高中毕业）以及对学习中的暴力经历/看法的调查1和关于研究2中特定类型的暴力（公共和家庭暴力）的比较。两项研究的结果均表明，经历/感知到较高暴力程度的女性更喜欢低BMI萨尔瓦多男性的面孔。即使在控制了所有其他变量（包括年龄，教育程度，健康状况和媒体访问权限）之后，暴力（公共或家庭暴力）也可以很好地说明低BMI面部提示的偏爱。这些结果可能反映了妇女避免有能力造成伤害的男性伴侣的策略。