Manipulations of fundamental and formant frequencies influence the attractiveness of human male voices

By David Feinberg, B. Jones, Anthony C. Little, D. Burt, David I. Perrett. 2005

432 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Developmental Biology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Gender Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f7f664437837b5afbd3465f814d054a9dea50e7

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In Developmental Biology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Gender Studies

Citations in the corpus

Vocal and Facial Attractiveness Judgments of Children, Adolescents and Adults: the Ontogeny of Mate Choice (2006, neutral): “Certainly, the variation in female preference that coincides with the menstrual cycle (Gangestad & Thornhill 1998; Penton-Voak et al. 1999; Havlicek et al. 2005; Feinberg et al. 2006) cannot be manifest in pre-menarchal children.”
Beauty and the beast: mechanisms of sexual selection in humans (2010, background): “Finally, although some masculine traits, such as muscular builds (Frederick & Haselton, 2007) and deep, masculine voices (Feinberg et al., 2005; Puts, 2005, 2006) are sexually attractive, masculinity in these traits increases perceptions of dominance to a much greater degree than it increases…”
Context-Related Variation in the Vocal Growling Behaviour of the Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris) (2009, background): “…as 7% are picked up by listeners (Smith et al. 2005) and influence how the physical (e.g. height, weight, sex, attractiveness) and physiological (e.g. testosterone level) characteristics of a speaker are perceived by listeners (see Feinberg et al. 2005; Bruckert et al. 2006; Puts et al. 2007).”
Vocal indicators of body size in men and women: a meta-analysis (2014, methodology): “Although F0 and formants gradually decrease with age across an individual's lifetime (Bruckertet al., 2006; Evans et al., 2006; Feinberg et al., 2005; Hillenbrand et al., 1995), these voice changes are most pronounced during puberty (around age 13) and, for women, during menopause (around age 50;…”
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.”
Retraction of the mobile descended larynx during groaning enables fallow bucks (Dama dama) to lower their formant frequencies (2006, background): “In humans, lower fundamental frequencies and/or increasing apparent VTLs of males increased female ratings of masculinity, size and age of the speaker (Feinberg et al., 2005).”
Vocal masculinity is a robust dominance signal in men (2010, background): “(2007) more closely mirror the natural conditions under which men compete verbally, whereas the present methods are more similar to those used in most studies of the effects of masculinity on dominance and attractiveness (Feinberg et al. 2005; Little et al. 2007b; Roberts et al. 2009).”
Taller men are less sensitive to cues of dominance in other men (2010, methodology): “Indeed, manipulating the pitch of male voices using these methods has been shown to reliably alter perceptions of vocal masculinity, such that voices with lowered pitch are perceived to be more masculine than voices with raised pitch (Feinberg et al. 2005).”
Toward a Unified Science of Hierarchy: Dominance and Prestige are Two Fundamental Pathways to Human Social Rank (2014, background): “Consistent with this expectation, listeners consistently rate deeper voices as conveying greater physical size, strength, masculinity, and dominance (e.g., Feinberg et al. 2005; Puts et al. 2006, 2007).”
Self-rated attractiveness predicts individual differences in women's preferences for masculine men's voices (2008, methodology): “The methods used here have been used successfully in other voice attractiveness studies (e.g. Feinberg et al., 2005 ).”