Pettijohn put out a study, published online last April in Current Psychology, that tested his hypothesis in the realm of country music. His research team measured the faces of the most popular country artists every year from 1946 to 2010, as calculated by Billboard, and compared them to an economic index that accounts for the unemployment rate, the consumer price index, the suicide rate, and several other indicators of “hard times.” The results of this analysis suggest that the worse off the economy is, the more likely it is that the most popular country singer has facial features associated with maturity, such as small eyes and a large chin. When things are rosier, breakout singers’s features tend to be closer in resemblance to those of infants.
For example, Johnny Cash—who has larger eyes and a smaller chin than most country singers—had a number-one hit, “Folsom Prison Blues,” in 1968, when the economy was doing fairly well. Meanwhile, the 2008 chart-topper “Just Got Started Lovin’ You” was sung by James Otto, whose wide chin and beady eyes were judged to be more mature-looking.
The theoretical framework Pettijohn uses to explain this phenomenon is called the Environmental Security Hypothesis, which he first put forth in 1999 with the University of Georgia’s Abraham Tesser. Pettijohn and Tesser proposed that when people lose confidence in the economy, they tend to prefer more-mature characteristics, which seem to provide some psychological security.
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