The voice and face of woman: One ornament that signals quality?

By David Feinberg, B. Jones, L. DeBruine, F. Moore, Miriam J. Law Smith, R. Cornwell, Bernard Paul Tiddeman, L. Boothroyd, David I. Perrett. 2005

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The attractiveness of women's faces, voices, bodies, and odors appear to be interrelated, suggesting that they reflect a common trait such as femininity. We invoked novel approaches to test the interrelationships between female vocal and facial attractiveness and femininity. In Study 1, we examined the relationship between facial-metric femininity and voice pitch in two female populations. In both populations, facial-metric femininity correlated positively with pitch of voice. In Study 2, we constructed facial averages from two populations of women with low- and high-pitched voices and determined men's preferences for resulting prototypes. Men preferred averaged faces of women from both populations with higher pitched voices to those with lower pitched voices. In Study 3, we tested whether the findings from Study 2 also extended to the natural faces that made up the prototypes. Indeed, men and women preferred real faces of women with high-pitched voices to those with low-pitched voices. Because multiple cues to femininity are related, and feminine women may have greater reproductive fitness than do relatively masculine women, male preferences for multiple cues to femininity are potentially adaptive.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0595bcfe957b39d165bdcc31af19bae31667c330

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. B. Jones
2. Anthony C. Little
3. L. DeBruine
4. J. Vukovic
5. Casey A. Klofstad
6. David Feinberg

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. David Feinberg
2. B. Jones
3. L. DeBruine
4. Anthony C. Little
5. J. Vukovic
6. Casey A. Klofstad
7. L. Sugiyama
8. J. O'Connor

In Marketing

1. David Feinberg
2. B. Jones
3. L. DeBruine
4. Anthony C. Little
5. J. Vukovic
6. Casey A. Klofstad
7. L. Sugiyama
8. J. O'Connor

Citations in the corpus

• A domain-specific opposite-sex bias in human preferences for manipulated voice pitch. (2010, background): “…these findings, studies in which pitch alone was manipulated in voice recordings have found that raising the pitch of women’s voices (Feinberg et al. 2008a; Jones et al. 2008) and lowering the pitch of men’s voices (Feinberg et al. 2005a, 2008b; Vukovic et al. 2008) increases vocal attractiveness.”
• Candidate Voice Pitch Influences Election Outcomes (2016, background): “For example, a growing literature in psychology shows that voice pitch—perceived “highness” or “lowness” as determined by the physiology of the throat—influences perceptions of the speaker’s strength (Feinberg, Jones, Little, Burt, & Perrett, 2005a; Puts, Apicella, & C ardenas, 2012; Sell at al., 20”