Toronto, Aug 20 (IANS) You would only have to look at the shape of a man’s face to figure out just how aggressive he is, pointed out a study on male ice-hockey players.No matter how hard men try, their faces reflects levels of aggression that have been hard wired into them.

Cheryl McCormick and Justin Carre of Brock University Ontario found that larger the width-to-height ratio of a male’s face, the more aggressive they were.

This physical characteristic has been linked to higher levels of testosterone, which in turn is linked to aggressive behaviour.

McCormick and Carre measured aggression by the number of penalty points each player accrued for potentially harmful behaviour, such as elbowing and fighting.

Although the team first stumbled on the fact while studying students in a computer games, McCormick said they were “astounded to see that the measure could predict aggressive behaviour in a ‘real world’ setting”.

Previous studies on facial metrics have suggested that women can tell whether a man wants children just by looking at their photograph.

Now McCormick’s study raises the question of whether people can spot these subtle facial differences and use it to guide everyday behaviour.

“If someone was given the choice of one of two opponents to compete against who differed on the basis of the facial metric, would the facial metric predict the less aggressive opponent?” asks McCormick.

These findings were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.