To find out if this really were true, Dr Ben Jones in the Face Research Laboratory at the University of Aberdeen and a team of researchers carried out a study that involved volunteers looking at four different sets of digital images -- women looking happy, women looking disgusted, men looking happy and men looking disgusted.

In each case, the boffins paired together images that were identical except that in one the person was looking directly at the camera and in the other their gaze was averted.