ISTOCK, PEOPLEIMAGESPeople can recognize sickness in others’ faces, according to a study published yesterday (December 3) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“We can detect subtle cues related to the skin, eyes, and mouth,” study co-author John Axelsson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden tells The Washington Post. “And we judge people as sick by those cues.”
To investigate whether facial features could indicate sickness, Axelsson and his colleagues took photos of 16 healthy, young, Caucasian volunteers three times—once following a shot of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a molecule found in bacterial membranes that elicits an immune response and causes visual symptoms of illness without actually making people sick, and on two occasions after a placebo injection. Then, they recruited two groups of around 60 participants to rate those photos after viewing them for a maximum of five seconds. One group was asked whether the photographed individuals looked sick ...
