Head size related to penalty minutes (Commodore)

I found this story on line. I find it interesting. I remember reading about studies like this when I was in college but I honestly didn't think people still conducted studies like this today.

Hockey fatheads end up in the penalty box more often: study
Joanne Laucius, Canwest News Service
Published: Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Fatheaded hockey players are more aggressive than their slimmer-faced counterparts, a St. Catharines, Ont., study has found.

Results of the study published Wednesday in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society, concluded of the six Canadian-based NHL teams, the faces of the Ottawa Senators are dead giveaways when it comes to predicting how much time players spend in the penalty box.

"We're not saying that Ottawa is more aggressive than any other team. But each individual player's face predicts how much time he had in the box," said Brock University neuroscience researcher Justin Carre.

Carre, who studies fluctuations in hormone levels, wanted to test recent theories that link male facial width-to-height ratio to behaviour such as aggression. Changes in male facial shape start at puberty, when boys are exposed to the influences of testosterone, a hormone that also sparks aggressive behaviour.

The researcher devised a lab experiment comparing facial ratios of a group of student volunteers with their aggressiveness while playing a video game.

The measurements, performed with the help of a digital ruler, compare the width of the face at the cheekbones with the height between the bottom of the eyebrows and the upper lip. An unusually wide male face has a ratio of about 2.3, while a relatively narrow face has a ratio of about 1.6.

Among the male students, those with wide faces were more likely to play the video game aggressively, even downright vengefully.

Carre, who had played American college level hockey and is currently assistant coach of the Brock Badgers, decided to take the theory into the real world.

"We wanted to come up with the idea of readily-available statistics - penalty minutes," said Cheryl McCormick, co-author of the paper and the Canada research chair in behavioural neuroscience at Brock.

He shifted his gaze to the NHL and calculated the facial ratio for the players on Canada's NHL_teams using 2007-2008 roster photos and compared the results with the average number of penalty minutes per game the player racked up for aggressive behaviour such as slashing, cross-checking, high-sticking, boarding, elbowing, checking from behind and fighting. Goalies were not analyzed.

Of the 18 Senators, Carre looked at defenceman Mike Commodore, who has since left the Senators, with a facial ratio of about 1.6 and only about a minute per game in the penalty box, was at the low end of the scale.

Right-winger Chris Neil, with a facial ratio of almost 2.4 and about three minutes per game in the box, was at the opposite end. "(Chris) Neil was off the chart in the face ratio," said Carre.

Of the Canadian teams the Ottawa Senators had the strongest "correlation" between facial width and aggression - although overall, the Senators were relatively gentlemanly players with relatively few penalties.

The teams had an average correlation ranking of .30. The Senators scored the highest with .51, with the Montreal Canadiens next at .39, closely followed by the Toronto Maple Leafs at .37. The Vancouver Canucks rated .24, followed by the Edmonton Oilers at .20 and the Calgary Flames at .17.

Brian Morris, a spokesman for the Senators, was at a loss for a comment on Carre's findings. It would be hard to draw conclusions based on facial measurements working from photographs alone, he suggested.

"Seemingly, it's more of a theory than a scientific fact," he said.

Carre spent Wednesday juggling requests from the international media to perform his calculations on the faces of other sports figures, mostly British footballers.

And Carre believes there's a fascinating follow-up study to be done on how facial ratios affect hockey referees. Perhaps wide-faced players are more likely to be penalized than players whose faces are less threatening.

"It might have implications for the type of officiating they get," he said.

Ottawa Citizen