HONG KONG (Reuters) - Women can tell with some accuracy whether
an unfamiliar male is faithful simply by looking at his face, but men seem to
lack the same ability when checking out women, according to an Australian study
published on Wednesday.

In a paper that appeared in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers
found that women tended to make that judgement based on how masculine-looking
the man was.

"Women's ratings of unfaithfulness showed small-moderate, significant
correlations with measures of actual infidelity," wrote the team, led by Gillian Rhodes at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition
and its Disorders at the University of
Western Australia in Perth.

"More masculine-looking men (were) rated as more probable to be unfaithful
and having a sexual history of being more unfaithful."

Attractiveness was not a factor in the women making the link.

In the study, 34 men and 34 women were shown colour photographs of 189
Caucasian adult faces and asked to rate them for faithfulness.

The researchers compared their answers to the self-reported sexual histories
of the 189 individuals and found that the women participants were better able to
tell who was faithful and who was not.

"We provide the first evidence that faithfulness judgements, based solely on
facial appearance, have a kernel of truth," they wrote in the paper.

Men, on the other hand, seemed to have no clue. They tended to perceive
attractive, feminine women to
be unfaithful, when there was no evidence that they were, the scientists
noted.

Faithfulness is seen as important in the context of sexual relationships and
mate choice, the scientists wrote in the paper. Men with unfaithful partners
risk raising another man's child, while women with unfaithful partners risk
losing some, or even all, parental and other resources to competitors.

(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn, editing by Elaine Lies)