If you've got a high school yearbook you can flick through, you might find that the least attractive people run a slightly higher risk of , according to a new study. Researchers in the US analyzed the fates of thousands of teenagers who graduated high school in the US in the late 1950s, to take a closer look at how looks might be linked to mortality risk. It's not implausible that features we find attractive might convey information about our state of health.
Past research has identified . Yet there is scant evidence on whether people commonly regarded as attractive are any more likely to see a ripe old age. "Little is known about the association between facial attractiveness and longevity," social scientist Connor Sheehan from Arizona State University and economist Daniel Hamermesh from the University of Texas at Austin in their published paper.
"But attractiveness may convey underlying health, and it systematically structures critical social stratification processes." The researchers asked an independent panel of six male and six female judges to rank the attractiveness of 8,386 photographs taken of high school graduates in 1957 as part of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. This beauty contest was then used to split the individuals into six different categories, rated from most attractive to .
Using the National Death Index, this was then compared with the deaths that occurred in the group up to 2022, by which time they were in their early 80s. Almost 43 percent of the peopl.