Most of us have, at some point, looked at a friend or family member and thought, “You look unwell,” even before they said they were sick.
We often pick up on small changes in someone’s face, like droopy eyelids or pale lips, that tell us they might not be feeling well.
A new study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior now shows that women may be better at noticing these small signs of sickness than men.
In earlier research, people were asked to judge how sick someone looked in a photo. However, many of those photos were either digitally changed or showed people who had fake symptoms.
This new study wanted to take a more natural approach. Researchers gathered real photos of people when they were healthy and when they were actually sick. Then, they asked others to rate how ill these people looked based on those real photos.
The study included 280 undergraduate students—140 men and 140 women—who were shown 24 photos. These photos featured 12 different faces, each photographed once when the person was sick and once when they were healthy.
The students were asked to rate each face on six traits: how safe, healthy, approachable, alert, socially interested, and positive the person seemed. Each rating used a 9-point scale.
These six areas helped the researchers get a better sense of how “sick” the person looked. They grouped the six ratings into one bigger measurement called “lassitude perception,” which basically reflects how tired or unwell someone appears.
The researchers believed that women would be more accurate in telling who was sick based on this lassitude perception.
After looking at the results, the researchers found they were right. On average, women were better than men at noticing when someone looked sick. The difference wasn’t huge, but it was consistent and statistically meaningful.
The researchers believe there could be two main reasons for this. The first is known as the “primary caretaker hypothesis.”
This idea suggests that over time, women evolved to be better at spotting illness because they were usually the ones caring for children. If a woman could quickly recognize when a child was sick, she could act faster to help them, which would improve the child’s chances of survival.
The second explanation is called the “contaminant avoidance hypothesis.” This theory says women might naturally feel more disgust toward things that could make them sick.
Because women experience changes in their immune systems during pregnancy and certain times in their monthly cycle, they may have developed stronger instincts to avoid sickness. This could explain why they’re more alert to the early signs of illness in others.
However, the researchers also pointed out some limits in their study. The participants were all college students, so it’s not clear if the same results would apply to older adults or people from different backgrounds.
Also, the photos only showed faces. Other signs of sickness—like changes in someone’s voice, posture, or movements—weren’t included, and these might also affect how sick someone seems.
In conclusion, this study gives us a better understanding of how people recognize illness in others, and it shows that women may have a small but meaningful edge when it comes to reading the signs.
This ability may have deep evolutionary roots related to caregiving and protecting health. Even though the results are still limited to one group of people and certain types of signals, they offer an interesting look at how we detect and react to signs of sickness in daily life.
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