Human vocal attractiveness as signaled by body size projection.

Yi Xu,Xuan Liu,Wing-Li Wu,Peter Birkholz,Albert Lee

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062397

Yi Xu, Xuan Liu + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0062397

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Abstract

Voice, as a secondary sexual characteristic, is known to affect the perceived attractiveness of human individuals. But the underlying mechanism of vocal attractiveness has remained unclear. Here, we presented human listeners with acoustically altered natural sentences and fully synthetic sentences with systematically manipulated pitch, formants and voice quality based on a principle of body size projection reported for animal calls and emotional human vocal expressions. The results show that male listeners preferred a female voice that signals a small body size, with relatively high pitch, wide formant dispersion and breathy voice, while female listeners preferred a male voice that signals a large body size with low pitch and narrow formant dispersion. Interestingly, however, male vocal attractiveness was also enhanced by breathiness, which presumably softened the aggressiveness associated with a large body size. These results, together with the additional finding that the same vocal dimensions also affect emotion judgment, indicate that humans still employ a vocal interaction strategy used in animal calls despite the development of complex language.

Highlights

Attractive men and women enjoy enhanced success in dating, job applications and elections [1,2,3], and they receive more support during social interactions [4]
The sentences were digitally modified in terms of median pitch, formant dispersion and sentence-final pitch slope, see Table 1, along the directions of signaling a small body size and happiness, or large body size and anger [27,28]
The results presented here show that female voices rated as more attractive were breathy, high pitched, with widely dispersed formants, and all these qualities are consistent with the projection of a relatively small body size

Summary

Introduction

Attractive men and women enjoy enhanced success in dating, job applications and elections [1,2,3], and they receive more support during social interactions [4]. Attractiveness is closely related to physical properties like facial features, body shape and other secondary sexual characteristics [1,2,3,5]. As one of the secondary sexual characteristics, can affect perceived attractiveness of an individual [6,7]. Male voices with lower fundamental frequency are in general preferred by female listeners [5,8,9]. Female voices with higher fundamental frequency and higher formant frequencies are heard as more attractive by male listeners [10]. Women raise their voice pitch when speaking to men they find attractive [11]

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