Short answer: No.

In recent times (i.e. 2007 to now) there has been a surge in popular interest in relating facial and/or bodily features to psychological type. The people who indulge in these sorts of correlations rarely bother to address the question of why there should even be such correlations besides the fact that it would be neat and intuitively pleasing if there was.

But alas – just because something would be nice if it was so,  it doesn’t mean that it actually is so. In the entire history of psychology and psychiatry, very little actual evidence has been produced that links somatic and facial features to a person’s personality. As mentioned, the people who claim that there is a noticeable link between a person’s physiology and a person’s type rarely provide any discussion of why this is so – they simply present their posited correlations as a matter of course; a matter of natural extension of the field of typology. These people do not seem to take stock of the fact that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (and that, given the failure of professional scientists to find links between physiology and personality, these claims are extraordinary). Nor do they seem to be aware that they are actually contradicting Jung, who had the following to say about his typology:

The question of psychological and physiological types is a complicated one. Kretschmer’s types are based primarily on somatic criteria. My typology is based exclusively on psychological premises which can hardly coincide with physiological or somatic qualities. (boldface added)

Reference: Jung. Letter to Ernst Hanhart. 18 Feb. 1957. Published in C.G. Jung Letters, vol.2 Routledge & Kegan Poul 1976 pp. 346-7

And furthermore:

[My typology is] is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system. – Jung

Reference: Jung. Psychological Types p. xv PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 1971 ed.

And again:

My intentions and interests are also in no way directed to characterology, but in complete contrast, to typology. … [It is] a schema with which I can order psychological material. – Jung, October 20th, 1932

Thus, as a minimum, the people who engage in such practices (linking physiology to psychological type) owe their audience a reasoned explanation of why they engage in this sort of distortion and of what proof lies at the heart of their adherence to such a method. (“I seem to have noticed this tentative correlation,” is a fair statement. “Obviously Fe users have wider smiles than Fi users because I have noticed it myself,” is not.)

Obviously, we do not know why people engage in “face reading” practices when they should be concerned with psychological types other than the fact that face reading makes intuitive sense in the same way that graphology, and other such practices seems to make sense to some people. But if we were to venture a guess we would say that some of the people who engage in these practices are often the same people who are bad at cognitive meta-representation, that is, who are bad at picking up on the inner workings of the people that they are observing. As a consequence, the psychologically oriented method of typing seems uncertain to these people and they will therefore naturally want something more “certain,” more tangible, and so they resort to  facial features when attempting to type.

But of course, that’s just a guess.

Update January 2013: The writer Marcel Proust has commented on such practices in his book, Remembrance of Things Past:

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.

Which is, if you will, a poetic description of the error that one makes oneself so prone to when attempting any kind of face reading: That of experimenter bias.

Update March 2013: It seems this idea is becoming more and more popular online (with some proponents even purporting the purely mental approach of classical Jungians to be ‘pseudoscience’ even while their own physiological systems feature *no* ways of guarding against experimenter bias.

In the meantime it strikes us, however, that the approach where one aims to arrive at Jungian types by way of body language or facial features is far more Freudian than Jungian. We have already quoted Jung above to say that his system was exclusively mental, and here is Freud’s preferred approach to the matter:

Observation teaches us that individual human beings realize the general picture of humanity in an almost infinite variety of ways. If we yield to the legitimate need to distinguish particular types in this multiplicity, we shall, at the start, have the choice as to what characteristics and what points of view we shall take as the basis of our differentiation. For that purpose physical qualities will doubtless serve no less well than mental ones; the most valuable distinctions will be those which promise to present a regular combination of physical and mental characteristics.

Reference: Freud: Libidinal Types in The Penguin Freud Library vol. 7 p. 361

Indeed, even as they were enemies, Freud and Jung were in agreement that Freud attempted to create a mind-body synthesis, like modern online face readers and body language readers, whereas Jung preferred to separate the two entirely.

Jung: “Unlike Freud who [had] the assumption of the sovereignty of the physical constitution, trying to turn everything back in theory into instinctual processes conditioned by the body, I start with the assumption of the sovereignty of the psyche.” (Psychological Types §968)