I like to think that my photograph at the top of this column speaks of knowledge and authority, power and success and it encourages you to read every word I write. For you can deduce much from a person's face, especially if it belongs to the boss of a company. Psychologists have found that CEOs whose faces rate as “powerful” to the average onlooker run the most successful companies. In contrast, those with “warmer” faces are to be found in the companies languishing near the bottom of the Fortune 1000 list. Rather tantalisingly, this suggests there may be facial characteristics associated with exceptional leaders.

Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady, psychologists at Tufts University, Massachusetts, showed college students photographs of unnamed CEOs from the top and bottom 25 performers on the Fortune 1000 list. The students were asked to rate the invariably middle-aged, Caucasian male faces for competence, dominance, likeability, facial maturity and trustworthiness. Competence, dominance and facial maturity were taken to represent “power”, and likeability and trustworthiness meant “warmth”.

“CEOs who are ranked higher in terms of looking more powerful do better or have more profitable companies than those who are ranked warm,” Ambady said. The research will be published in Psychological Science next month. The duo are now rounding up the evidence on female CEOs and the evidence is pointing the same way.

So, does your face make you a boss, or does your face change to suit the role? It could be either way, Rule tells me. “There is ample evidence from the psychological literature to suggest that your ‘face is your fate'. There is also research that make it tenable to think that decades of climbing up the corporate ladder would show in the face in particular ways.”

Being a round-faced, brown-skinned female, I realise that my authoritativeness is now sorely compromised by my photograph. Although, I'm sure you'll agree, my locks curl most assertively.

When writing about polar bears for times2 - about the morality of rescuing a cub neglected by its mother at Nuremberg Zoo - I was surprised to find that they are not listed as a threatened species. That should have changed, at least in America, this month, with the US Fish and Wildlife Service's plan to bring polar bears under the protection of the United States Endangered Species Act. That decision has now been delayed, and is unlikely to take place before February 6.

And why is that date important? Because that is when another arm of the American Government plans to flog off drilling rights in the Chukchi Sea, off Alaska. About a tenth of the world's 20,000 wild polar bears live there, and are predicted to disappear by 2050. Without legal protection, there is no obligation for the American Government to consider polar bear habitats when selling the leases. An unhappy coincidence, surely.

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