Objective
The aim of the present study was to explore whether people consider their own voice to be more attractive than others and whether the self‐enhancement bias of one's own voice could be generalised to other variants of self‐voice.
Method
Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, female and male participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of three types of audio recordings (numbers, vowels, words) from same‐sex participants. In Experiment 2, the participants were instructed to rate the attractiveness of six types of audio signals: their own original voice, their recorded voice, a “pitch+20 Hz” audio recording, a “pitch−20 Hz” audio recording, a “loudness+10 dB” audio recording, and a “loudness−10 dB” audio recording. The participants also rated the similarity between the given audio signals and their own voices.
Results
Experiment 1 showed that the participants rated their own audio recordings as more attractive than others rated their audio recordings, and they rated their own audio recordings as more attractive than those of others. Experiment 2 revealed that the participants rated the recorded voices and the “loudness+/−10 dB” audio recordings as more attractive and similar than the “pitch+/−20 Hz” audio recordings.
Conclusions
The present study demonstrates that people evaluate their own voices as more attractive than the voices of others and that the self‐enhancement bias of voice attractiveness can be generalised to similar and familiar versions of self‐voice.
The aim of the present study was to determine whether the self‐enhancement effect of voice attractiveness evaluation is due to general self‐positivity bias and/or the familiarity effect. The participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of their own voice, a friend's voice and strangers' voices. In addition, a self‐reference valence (SR‐valence) task was adopted in the experiment. Significant self‐enhancement effects in voice attractiveness ratings were demonstrated, regardless of whether the participants recognized their self‐voice or not. However, the friend‐enhancement effect was found in only those participants who successfully recognized their friend's voice. Moreover, a significant correlation was found between self‐positivity bias in the SR‐valence task and the self‐enhancement effect (but not the friend‐enhancement effect). Our findings suggest that both the familiarity effect and self‐positivity bias account for the vocal self‐enhancement effect, and the influence of self‐positivity bias could be implicit. The present study thus provides empirical evidence to clarify the potential explanations for the self‐enhancement of voice attractiveness assessment.
People evaluated their own voices as sounding more attractive than others rated their voices (i.e., self-enhancement effect from the perspective of the rater, termed "SE_rater"), and people also rated their own voices as more attractive than the voices of others (i.e., self-enhancement effect from the perspective of the voice, termed "SE_voice"). The aim of the present study is to explore whether the gender context (i.e., same-sex and opposite-sex rating context) could influence the SE effect of voice attractiveness evaluation. Male and female participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of their own voices and other participants' voices, either in a same-sex session or an opposite-sex session. The results demonstrated both the SE_rater and SE_voice effect in the same-sex and oppositesex contexts, for both male and female. More importantly, we found that the SE_rater for the male voices was significantly greater than that for the female voices in the same-sex context whereas no such difference was found in the opposite-sex context. In addition, the SE_voice effect in men was larger in the same-sex context than that in the oppositesex context whereas the SE_voice in women was smaller in the same-sex context than that in the opposite-sex context. These findings indicated that the self-enhancement effect of vocal attractiveness was modulated by the gender context.
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