New Delhi, April 9: The face of a young person holds cues that signal whether he or she likes — or dislikes — one-night stands, and men and women use them to pick partners, a study said today.

The study by psychologists in the UK is the first to show that men and women can correctly judge other people’s attitudes to sexual relationships from facial cues alone.

Published this week in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour, the study also found that men on average prefer women who they perceive as open to short-term relationships. However, women are interested in men who they interpret as more likely to engage in long-term relationships.

“People can judge the sexual strategy of others simply by looking at faces,” said Lynda Boothroyd, a psychologist at Durham University and lead author of the paper.

But, she said, these facial cues remain unknown. “We think for male faces, people are using facial masculinity — for instance, the shape of the jaw or the forehead. For female faces, we can’t work out what the precise features are,” Boothroyd told The Telegraph. Scientists also don’t know whether the cues vary from person to person.

In their study, the researchers showed participants pairs of photographs or facial images of men and women in their early 20s with opposing attitudes to relationships. The participants had to choose the face they believed would be more open to short-term sexual relationships, one-night stands and sex without love.

In a sample of 153 participants, three out of four correctly identified the sexual attitudes from facial photographs alone.

But the researchers caution that facial cues don’t necessarily mean a relationship is imminent. Women’s choice is what matters, said David Perrett, a team member at St Andrew’s University, Scotland.

“Indeed, most women found promiscuous-looking guys unattractive for both short and long-term relationships,” said Perrett, who has been exploring facial attractiveness for nearly 15 years.

A previous study by Boothroyd and her colleagues had shown that men with masculine features are seen as less faithful. “Here, for the first time we see that men with more interest in short-term relationships are more facially masculine,” said Boothroyd.

The new study found that women open to short-term relationships were seen by others as more attractive. And the men who were open to casual relationships were perceived as more masculine-looking with square jaws, large noses and thin eyes.