LONDON: Don't bother with months of email courtship, pay only polite attention to the advice of your friends - and as for those Jane Austen-style books on how to select Mr. Right, leave them to gather dust on the store shelves.

A more reliable way for a woman to judge whether a man will be a suitable mate is to look at him in the face and to trust her instincts, scientists say.

In a study published on Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a journal of Britain's Royal Society, U.S. psychologists test a key hypothesis about male attractiveness.

In a nutshell, this theory says that women are, frankly, ambivalent. They might fancy men who are hunky and macho but they also like the kind, caring types too.

These preferences may seem contradictory, but there is a solid genetic cause for it. A strong, beefy, square-jawed man represents the best potential for producing a healthy baby, whereas a caring, friendly, sensitive man represents the best potential for protecting and nurturing the offspring.

Indeed, studies into female hormones and sex drive say a woman will find a "masculine" face more attractive when she ovulates but switch to a more "feminine" preference during the other phases of her menstrual cycle.

A team led by James Roney, a professor of the University of California at Santa Barbara, have now put the theory to the test in an experiment combining psychology and hormones.

They recruited 39 male students aged 18 to 33. The volunteers were photographed, with their faces framed in an oval to obscure information about hairstyles, and with a neutral facial expression.

The men also gave saliva samples, which were assessed for levels of the key male hormone testosterone, and were asked to look at pictures of babies and to rate how much they liked children.

The photos were then individually assessed by 29 undergraduate women students aged 18-20.
They were asked to rate each man one a one-to-seven scale for "likes children," "masculine", "physically attractive" and "kind."

And they were then asked to rate the men's attractiveness as "a short-term romantic partner (e.g. for a brief affair)" and as "long-term romantic partner (e.g. for a committed relationship such as marriage)."

The researchers found the women were uncannily accurate in guessing which men liked children and which men were less interested or indifferent to kids.

The men whom the women considered to be more masculine and a choice for a brief fling also had higher testosterone levels than their counterparts.

But the men whom the women preferred for a long-term relationship had a strong affinity for children.

Roney says these findings provide the first direct evidence that women track men's hormone concentrations and liking for children when they formulate a judgement about attractiveness.
Indeed, "men's interest in children may be a relatively underappreciated influence on men's long-term mate attractiveness," he says.

Men may despair about this pigeon-holing, just as women have long despaired about men who stereotype females by placing them into such categories as Mother or Sex Bomb.
But they may also find a crumb of comfort.

For the team saw no correlation between testosterone and liking for children.

In other words, Mr. Macho may like children and Mr. Sensitive may not. But the risk is that a woman may write them off respectively, as a long-term or a short-term mating prospect.

"There (may) exist somewhat independent indices of men's genetic and paternal quality rather than a single dimension in which the two aspects of mate quality trade off against one another," says the study.