Philandering men have unfaithfulness written all over their faces, according to research that suggests men and women are able to spot cheating chaps just by looking at them.

一项调查显示，玩弄女性的男性会把不忠“写在脸上”。根据这项调查，人们可以通过外表判断出男性是否会出轨。

Experts found men with more "masculine" faces were more likely to be thought to be unfaithful, and such men also self-reported more cheating or "poaching" of other men's partners.

However, they stressed the results were modest, and said people should be wary of deciding whether someone is a love rat based on impressions of facial features alone.

The team said being suspicious of men with masculine features - such as a strong browridge, strong jaw and thinner lips – might have offered an evolutionary advantage, allowing heterosexual women to spot a flaky partner and men to recognize a potential rival who might seduce their partner or leave them raising someone else's child.

Previous research has suggested women are able to spot unfaithful men from their mugshot, with the masculinity of the man's face a key factor in the judgment, while weaker effects have been found for men weighing up images of women. However, it was unclear whether people could also spot a philanderer of the same sex.

Writing in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers described how they asked heterosexual white participants to judge the facial features of 189 white adults who had been photographed and taken part in previous research. Overall, 293 men and 472 women rated pictures of women, while 299 men and 452 women judged images of men, rating on a scale of one to 10 how likely they thought each person was to be unfaithful.

Those in the pictures had previously reported the extent of any cheating and whether they had "poached" a partner from someone else. Their photos had already been rated for attractiveness, untrustworthiness and how masculine or feminine they appeared.

The results showed men and women as a whole gave higher scores of unfaithfulness to the images of men who had self-reported more cheating or poaching.

"Therefore, perceived unfaithfulness may indeed contain some kernel of trust in male faces," the authors said. However, there was no such effect for the images of women.