Abstrakt
The idea that the appearance of an individual represents his or her nature is very common and has accompanied mankind at least since antiquity. The fi rst written evidence can be found in Physiognomics, a book ascribed to Aristotle (trans.1963).
There, the character of a human is brought into line with the nature of the animals that the person physically resembles. Twenty centuries later, Johann Kaspar Lavater, an eighteenth-century theologist from Zürich, based his doctrine on these ancient ideas (1844/2001).
He stated that the ability to "read faces" is an intuitive capability inherent to everyone, and it can be cultivated by proper training. The bloom of physiognomy in the eighteenth century also brought along related disciplines, such as the phrenology of Franz Joseph Gall, one of the most honoured neuroanatomists of his era (Tomlinson, 2005).
Phrenology stems from comparative neuroanatomy and from the study of heads of a large number of different people. Later, Cesare Lombroso (1911) formulated his anthropology of the criminal and the genius. "Inborn criminals" possess - according to Lombroso - a number of atavistic physical and psychological traits.
His conclusions led to the establishment of a suspended sentence for people who committed a crime under someone''s infl uence but in fact were not "inborn criminals". Although Gall''s physiognomy, phrenology and related disciplines were highly popular among scientists as well as lay people, the proposals about direct connections between the shape of a particular morphological trait (e.g., ear or nose) and one''s psychological character were erroneous.
Misuse of these practices, such as by the above-mentioned forensic anthropology, actually discredited research in this fi eld for a long time. Thus, at least until the 1970s, the idea that physical appearance and psychological traits might be intercorrelated - due to shared developmental factors and/or gene expression - was taboo in the psychological sciences.