Masculine voices signal men's threat potential in forager and industrial societies

Abstract

Humans and many non-human primates exhibit large sexual dimorphisms in vocalizations and vocal anatomy. In humans, same-sex competitors and potential mates attend to acoustic features of male vocalizations, but vocal masculinity especially increases perceptions of physical prowess. Yet, the information content of male vocalizations remains obscure. We therefore examined relationships between sexually dimorphic acoustic properties and men's threat potential. We first introduce a new measure of the structure of vocal formant frequencies, 'formant position' (P f ), which we show is more sexually dimorphic and more strongly related to height than is the most widely used measure of formant structure, 'formant dispersion', in both a US sample and a sample of Hadza foragers from Tanzania. We also show large sexual dimorphisms in the mean fundamental frequency (F 0 ) and the within-utterance standard deviation in F 0 (F 0 2 s.d.) in both samples. We then explore relationships between these acoustic parameters and men's body size, strength, testosterone and physical aggressiveness. Each acoustic parameter was related to at least one measure of male threat potential. The most dimorphic parameters, F 0 and P f , were most strongly related to body size in both samples. In the US sample, F 0 predicted testosterone levels, P f predicted upper body strength and F 0 2 s.d. predicted physical aggressiveness.

Sounds like a winner: voice pitch influences perception of leadership capacity in both men and women

“…A final possibility is that from the perceptive of a female listener, any male voice with a fundamental frequency that is within the normal range is low enough to be perceived as competent and strong in the context of an election. This hypothesis [46]. In this same vein, substantial evidence shows that higher levels of endogenous androgens (e.g.…”

Three-month-old human infants use vocal cues of body size

“…That is, motion paired with emitted sounds may satisfy the input conditions of adaptations for picking up on invariant sound/object co-relations, irrespective of whether the object is a living thing vocalizing, or a non-living object producing noise [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]54]. However, because the acoustics produced by the living and non-living worlds are interestingly different from one another, both in terms of their properties and also in their affordances [9,16,22,23], the psychological mechanisms for representing and reasoning about the living versus the non-living worlds will likely become increasingly distinct from one another over the course of development. Future research will therefore be needed to fully establish when and how this happens, and theoretical analyses will be needed to more fully establish the evidentiary standards of specialized design [55] for acoustic perception adaptations designed around the living versus non-living world.…”

“…For example, lowering of F n and/or F 0 in dog barks increases attributions of the dog's aggressiveness in human listeners [20]. Playback studies with male deer vocalizations also show that male deer perceive the experimental lowering of F n and F 0 as more threatening ( [21]; see also [9,11,16,22,23] for more extensive reviews). Adult domestic dogs also correctly match the growls of larger versus smaller dogs onto visual cues of dog body size [24].…”

Sexual Selection and Life History: Earlier Recalled Puberty Predicts Men’s Phenotypic Masculinization

“…The lack of a relationship between pubertal timing and the PC onto which vocal dominance loaded was unexpected, as evidence indicates that voices have been shaped by sexual selection and contribute to men's dominance and mating success (Puts et al 2006(Puts et al , 2007(Puts et al , 2012aHodges-Simeon et al 2011;Wolff and Puts 2010). In addition, pubertal hormones influence vocal anatomy and acoustic parameters that contribute to perceptions of men's dominance (Fitch and Giedd 1999;Newman et al 2000;Harries et al 1998;Hollien et al 1994;Titze 2000;Hodges-Simeon et al 2013.…”

“…Participants were 153 men (mean age=20.1±1.8 year) from a large Midwestern U.S. university, selected from the 176 participants reported in Puts et al (2012a) on the basis of having provided data on pubertal timing. Five hundred sixty-eight male raters (mean age: 19.4±1.8 year) were recruited from a large northeastern U.S. university to rate facial photographs and voice recordings of the male participants.…”