Faking it: deliberately altered voice pitch and vocal attractiveness

Fraccaro, Paul J.; O'Connor, Jillian J.M.; Ré, Daniel; Jones, Benedict C.; DeBruine, Lisa M.; Feinberg, David R.

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.10.016

Cited by 70 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 111 publications

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“…Further, it may also be possible to identify more transient dominant states through vocal information. For example, Fraccaro et al (2013) reported that manipulation of voice pitch influences judgments related to dominance. They argued that we may employ strategies to maximize social gain, in that attending to these variable cues when assessing dominance may reduce the likelihood of encountering conflict.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The negative correlation may be tentatively explained in terms of mate selection and competition: men with less dominant facial features may need to compensate with more dominant voices, and vice versa. Research by Fraccaro et al (2013) shows that deliberate lowering of pitch in men's voices leads viewers to perceive them as more dominant but not more attractive. This would suggest that this strategy is largely employed for intra-sex competition with less emphasis on mate selection.…”

Section: Intermodal Correlationsmentioning

confidence: 96%

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Dominant Voices and Attractive Faces: The Contribution of Visual and Auditory Information to Integrated Person Impressions

et al. 2015

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Faces and voices, in isolation, prompt consistent social evaluations. However, most human interactions involve both seeing and talking with another person. Our main goal was to investigate how facial and vocal information are combined to reach an integrated person impression. In Study 1, we asked participants to rate faces and voices separately for perceived trustworthiness, attractiveness, and dominance. Most previous studies relied on stimuli in which extra-vocal information (e.g., verbal content, prosody) may have confounded voice-based effects; to prevent these unwanted influences, we used brief, neutral vowel sounds. Voices, like faces, led to the formation of highly reliable impressions. Voice trustworthiness correlated with voice attractiveness, mirroring the relation between face trustworthiness and attractiveness, but did not correlate with voice dominance. Inconsistent with the possibility that face and voice evaluations are indicative of real character traits, we found no positive correlations between judgments of trustworthiness or dominance based on faces and the same judgments based on voices (there was also no correlation between face attractiveness and voice attractiveness). In Study 2, we asked participants to evaluate male targets after seeing their faces and hearing their voices. Faces and voices contributed equally to judgments of trustworthiness and combined to produce a significant interaction effect. For attractiveness, faces were given more weight than voices, possibly due to the predominantly visual character of the attractiveness concept (there was no interaction effect). For dominance, the reverse pattern was true, with voices having a larger effect than faces on final judgments. In this case the auditory cues may be perceived to be more reliable because of the strong links between voice pitch, masculinity, and dominance.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Intermodal Correlationsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Dominant Voices and Attractive Faces: The Contribution of Visual and Auditory Information to Integrated Person Impressions

et al. 2015

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“…Similar subtle modulation in voices might be expected in courtship contexts. In fact, there is evidence of vocal differences between speech directed towards romantic partners and same-sex friends which can be detected by listeners (Farley, Hughes, & LaFayette, 2013), and intentional voice manipulations make female voices, but not male voices, sound more attractive (Hughes, Mogilski, & Harrison, 2013; see also Fraccaro et al, 2013). Indeed, such modulations occur in other species including frogs (Ryan, 1980), koalas, Phascolarctos cinereus (Charlton, Ellis, Brumm, Nilsson, & Fitch, 2012), fallow deer, Dama dama (Charlton & Reby, 2011), red deer, Cervus elaphus (Reby et al, 2005;Reby, Charlton, Locatelli, & McComb, 2010), and birds.…”

Section: Accepted M Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 97%

Vocal modulation during courtship increases proceptivity even in naive listeners

Leongoméz

Binter

Kubicová

et al. 2014

Evolution and Human Behavior

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Speakers modulate their voice when talking to infants, but we know little about subtle variation in acoustic parameters during speech in adult social interactions. Because tests of perception of such variation are hampered by listeners' understanding of semantic content, studies often confine speech to enunciation of standard sentences, restricting ecological validity. Furthermore, apparent paralinguistic modulation in one language may be underpinned by specific parameters of that language. Here we circumvent these problems by recording speech directed to attractive or unattractive potential partners or competitors, and testing responses to these recordings by naive listeners, across both a Germanic (English) and a Slavic (Czech) language. Analysis of acoustic parameters indicates that men's voices varied F 0 most in speech towards potential attractive versus unattractive mates, while modulation of women's F 0 variability was more sensitive to competitors, with higher variability when those competitors were relatively attractive. There was striking similarity in patterns of social context-dependent F 0 variation across the two model languages, with both men's and women's voices varying most when responding to attractive individuals. Men's minimum pitch was lower when responding to attractive than unattractive women. For vocal modulation to be effective, however, it must be sufficiently detectable to promote proceptivity towards the speaker. We showed that speech directed towards attractive individuals was preferred by naive listeners of either language over speech by the same speaker to unattractive individuals, even when voices were stripped of several acoustic properties by low-pass filtering, which renders speech unintelligible. Our results suggest that modulating F 0 may be a critical parameter in human courtship, independently of semantic content.

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“…We note here that while the correlational nature of our findings demonstrate that lowdominance men in the main study demonstrated a stronger preference for feminized voice-pitch (i.e. low dominance men; see Fraccaro et al 2013), these findings are still consistent with the proposed importance of "homophily" in the evolution of cooperation (Riolo et al, 2001) and recent work which suggests that this is a factor in group organization among the Hadza (Apicella et al, 2012). We also note that exploring the role played by different styles of humor within social partnerships, such as aggressive humor controlled for in our analyses, could provide a fruitful line of further enquiry.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 68%

“…"thinness", reviewed in Vaillancourt, 2013), at least in Western cultures. Given that raised voice pitch in women is positively correlated with perceived attractiveness but is negatively correlated with perceived dominance (reviewed in Fraccaro et al, 2013), we have no clear basis with which to predict that differences between women in their phenotypic condition will be correlated with their appreciation of humor delivered by attractive and/or dominant female speakers. Indeed, given that attractiveness is both an important feature of denigration among females and a trait that may afford females a strategic advantage over same-sex rivals for access to mates (see, e.g., Fisher and Cox, 2009;Maner et al, 2009; see also Vaillancourt, 2013 for related discussion),…”

Section: Accepted M Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

It’s the way he tells them (and who is listening): men’s dominance is positively correlated with their preference for jokes told by dominant-sounding men

Cowan

Watkins

Fraccaro

et al. 2016

Evolution and Human Behavior

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It's the way he tells them (and who is listening): Men's dominance is positively correlated with their preference for jokes told by dominant-sounding men AbstractWhile much research has explored humorous exchange in relation to mate choice, recent perspectives have emphasized the importance of humor for monitoring interest within social partnerships more generally. Indeed, given that similarity is thought to be important in the maintenance of social partnerships, we may expect humor appreciation to vary according to the degree of similarity between humor producers and recipients. In the current study we report evidence for such variation that is specific to men"s judgments of other men"s humor. Here we manipulated voice pitch in a set of "one-liner" jokes to create low-pitched and high-pitched versions of men and women telling jokes. A composite measure of men"s own dominance was positively correlated with their preference for jokes told by other men with lowered voice pitch (a vocal cue to dominance). A follow-up study demonstrated that selfreported dominance was positively related to men"s choice of low-pitch men as friends when judging humorous audio clips but not when judging neutral control audio clips, suggesting that humour may be important in mediating the effect of dominance on friendship choice. These studies indicate systematic variation in humor appreciation related to friendship choices which may function to promote cohesion within male partnerships based on status.

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Faking it: deliberately altered voice pitch and vocal attractiveness

Cited by 70 publications

References 111 publications

Dominant Voices and Attractive Faces: The Contribution of Visual and Auditory Information to Integrated Person Impressions

Dominant Voices and Attractive Faces: The Contribution of Visual and Auditory Information to Integrated Person Impressions

Vocal modulation during courtship increases proceptivity even in naive listeners

It’s the way he tells them (and who is listening): men’s dominance is positively correlated with their preference for jokes told by dominant-sounding men

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