Hong Kong Women Project a Larger Body When Speaking to Attractive Men

Abstract

In this pilot study we investigated the vocal strategies of Cantonese women when addressing an attractive vs. unattractive male. We recruited 19 young female native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese who completed an attractiveness rating task, followed by a speech production task where they were presented a subset of the same faces. By comparing the rating results and corresponding acoustic data of the facial stimuli, we found that when young Cantonese women spoke to an attractive male, they were less breathy, lower in fundamental frequency, and with denser formants, all of which are considered to project a larger body. Participants who were more satisfied with their own height used these vocal strategies more actively. These results are discussed in terms of the body size projection principle.

Full text

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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT
published: 05 January 2022
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.786507
Edited by:
Oliver Niebuhr,
University of Southern Denmark,
Denmark
Reviewed by:
Kara Hawthorne,
Gallaudet University, United States
Katia Nemr,
University of São Paulo, Brazil
*Correspondence:
Albert Lee
albertlee@eduhk.hk
Specialty section:
This article was submitted to
Language Sciences,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Received: 30 September 2021
Accepted: 13 December 2021
Published: 05 January 2022
Citation:
Lee A and Ng E (2022)
Hong Kong Women Project a Larger
Body When Speaking to Attractive
Men. Front. Psychol. 12:786507.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.786507
Hong Kong Women Project a Larger
Body When Speaking to Attractive
Men
Albert Lee1*and Eva Ng2
1Department of Linguistics and Modern Language Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong
SAR, China, 2Department of Linguistics, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR, China
In this pilot study we investigated the vocal strategies of Cantonese women when
addressing an attractive vs. unattractive male. We recruited 19 young female native
speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese who completed an attractiveness rating task,
followed by a speech production task where they were presented a subset of the same
faces. By comparing the rating results and corresponding acoustic data of the facial
stimuli, we found that when young Cantonese women spoke to an attractive male,
they were less breathy, lower in fundamental frequency, and with denser formants, all of
which are considered to project a larger body. Participants who were more satisfied with
their own height used these vocal strategies more actively. These results are discussed
in terms of the body size projection principle.
Keywords: body size projection, Cantonese, sexual selection, sociophonetics, vocal attractiveness
INTRODUCTION
Having an attractive voice is useful because listeners tend to associate it with an attractive face
(Hughes and Miller, 2016), a likeable personality (Zuckerman and Driver, 1989), and assign it
higher health ratings (Albert et al., 2021). It has been reported that physical attractiveness leads
to advantages in situations such as dating (Berscheid et al., 1971), job applications (Watkins
and Johnston, 2000), promotion (Chung and Leung, 1988), elections (Jäckle et al., 2020), and is
associated with more social support (Sarason et al., 1985). While one’s physical appearance cannot
be easily altered at least in the short run, adjusting their own voice is an immediately possible
alternative. Therefore, a good understanding of vocal attractiveness is of practical, social, and
theoretical importance. So far, researchers have identified the characteristics of an attractive voice in
perception experiments (e.g., by rating voice stimulus), but whether speakers choose to speak in the
same preferred voice is an open question. This study approached this lesser-studied aspect of vocal
attractiveness by studying how Cantonese women from Hong Kong choose their vocal strategies
when addressing attractive vs. unattractive men.
Averageness vs. Body Size Projection
Two seemingly competing hypotheses seek to account for the phonetics of an attractive voice,
namely the averageness hypothesis and body size projection. The former stems from the
‘averaging attractiveness phenomenon’ and argues that voices similar to the population average
are considered more attractive (see review in Belin, 2021). From an evolutionary point of view,
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the average voice may signal good genes as it has withstood
evolution and adaptive changes to become the norm of the
population, much like the average face appearing to signal high
fitness (Langlois and Roggman, 1990;Thornhill and Gangestad,
1999). From a perceptual perspective, the average voice may be
easier to process as it resembles a central voice prototype based
on which voice identities are encoded, as is the case for face
(Winkielman et al., 2006).
Meanwhile, the body size projection principle (Morton, 1977)
contends that animals use their voice to project different body
sizes to serve different communicative functions (e.g., small
projected body to show appeasement, large to express hostility).
Extending this principle, subsequently Xu et al. (2013) found
that an attractive male voice to female English listeners was
one that sounded large, vice versa for a female voice to male
listeners. However, this does not mean that, for example,
perceived attractiveness would monotonously increase with a
smaller projected female body – extremely high fundamental
frequency (fohenceforth, i.e., the acoustic correlate of pitch) was
not judged as the most attractive in Xu et al. (2013), possibly
because the very small projected body started to sound more
child-like than attractive. All in all, it appears that an attractive
voice is one that resembles the population average, with specific
projected body sizes (larger for male speakers, smaller for female
speakers) adding enhancing effects, provided they do not deviate
too much from the average.
Acoustic Correlates of Body Size
In general, there is an inverse relationship between body size and
fo(Morton, 1977) as well as formant dispersion (Fitch, 1997).
fois the frequency at which membranes (the vocal folds in the
case of humans) vibrate (see Lee and Mok, 2021 for a recent
review), and is determined by body size – “(t)he larger the animal,
the lower the sound frequency it can produce” (Morton, 1977,
p. 864). Formant dispersion, or the averaged difference between
successive formant frequencies, reflects one’s vocal tract length
(Fitch, 1997), and in turn body size. The shorter the vocal tract,
the further apart the speaker’s formants. As for forange, the use
of a larger forange is associated with both cooperativeness (cf.
“the effort code,” Gussenhoven, 2016) and happiness (Xu et al.,
2013), in turn likely a smaller body which signals less threat. In
terms of voice quality, breathy voice (acoustically manifested in
spectral parameters such as “H1–A1” and “H1–A3”) is argued to
be acoustically more similar to pure tone compared with voice
qualities such as modal voice (Xu et al., 2013), and signals a
small body according to Morton (1977). Conversely, creaky voice
(main acoustic correlates: “jitter” and “shimmer”) is typically
argued to be associated with masculinity and authority (see
Yuasa, 2010 for a review).
Cross-Linguistic Variation in Preferences
in Voices
The acoustic correlates of an attractive voice have been
extensively studied in recent years. To male English listeners,
an attractive female voice is high in fo, breathy, and with wide
formant dispersion, all of which signal a small body; to female
English listeners, an attractive male voice (i) is low in foand (ii)
has narrow formant dispersion, both signaling a large body, but
(iii) is also breathy, signaling a smaller body (Xu et al., 2013),
presumably to neutralize some of the hostility accompanying the
large projected body.
It has been reported that the creaky voice is increasingly
used by American female speakers in recent years (Yuasa, 2010).
Although this seems to deviate from the body-size projection
principle, as creakiness is considered to be associated with a
large body, there is also evidence that the use of creaky voice
by American women is considered less attractive than a normal
speaking voice (Anderson et al., 2014). Therefore, it seems to
suggest instead that speakers’ vocal strategies do not necessarily
have to align with what the opposite sex considers attractive.
Apart from Xu et al. (2013), comparable perception studies
on non-Western populations include Japanese (Xu et al., 2017)
and Mandarin (Xu and Lee, 2018), which demonstrated cross-
linguistic variations in the acoustic cues to an attractive voice.
These studies found that while the general principles of body
size projection in accounting for patterns in voice preferences
appeared to hold, there were also language-specific deviations.
For example, in Mandarin and Japanese, a narrow forange
(which signals a larger body) was found to be unattractive to both
male and female listeners alike.
Although the perception of vocal attractiveness in western
societies is relatively well understood, there is much less
production data available, let alone from non-Western
populations. To the best of our knowledge, to date there is
no production study on vocal attractiveness in Cantonese. This
study serves to fill this gap. While perception studies are useful
for identifying the effect of individual acoustic cues, production
data are essential as they show how these cues interact in everyday
speech. In addition, production data can shed light on individual
variability, which is increasingly important with the emergence
of statistical tools capturing speakers as a random factor.
Hypotheses
Based on the studies reviewed above, we expected that female
Cantonese speakers would use vocal strategies to signal a small
body (Hypotheses 3 and 4) when addressing an attractive male,
but they might also be creaky (related to Hypotheses 1, 2, 5,
and 6) like their American counterparts. The seemingly arbitrary
prediction of creakiness is based on two reasons: (i) we tested
well-educated young women in Hong Kong where the influence
of western (including American) culture is prevalent (Louie,
2010), and (ii) the effect of voice quality in neutralizing one’s
projected body size was also observed in female English listeners’
preferences in a male voice (Xu et al., 2013). Therefore, in this
study we tested the following hypotheses (see Table 1):
Hypothesis 1 and 2 are related to the use of breathy voice.
As the decrease in energy at higher frequencies from the first
harmonic (or H1) is the greatest for breathy voice and the
least for creaky voice (see review in Gordon and Ladefoged,
2001), we expected to see decreased H1–A1 (where A1 stands
for amplitude of the first formant) and H1–A3 in the attractive
face condition (i.e., less breathy as we are also hypothesizing
increased creakiness in Hypotheses 5 and 6). Here we included
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TABLE 1 | Working hypotheses (prediction for the attractive facial stimulus condition).
Perceptual
property
Acoustic
correlate
Hypothesis Projected
body
Hypothesis 1 Breathiness H1-A1 Decrease Large
Hypothesis 2 H1-A3 Decrease Large
Hypothesis 3 Apparent vocal tract length Formant disp. Increase Small
Hypothesis 4 Pitch Median foIncrease Small
Hypothesis 5 Creakiness Jitter Increase Large
Hypothesis 6 Shimmer Increase Large
multiple spectral parameters (i.e., both H1–A1 and H1–A3)
to ensure reliability of our results (cf.Kreiman et al., 2007).
Formant dispersion (Hypothesis 3) is inversely related to vocal
tract length, thus in the attractive face condition we expect
to see more dispersed formants that project a shorter vocal
tract, in turn a smaller body. Hypothesis 4 is based on the
assumption that Cantonese women would project a smaller
body with higher median fowhen addressing an attractive man.
Finally, while there are different types of creaky voice (Redi and
Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2001), each with its own acoustic properties,
as working hypotheses (Hypothesis 5 and 6) we hypothesized that
Cantonese women would exhibit more cycle-to-cycle variability
in the attractive face condition, thus increased jitter and shimmer
(i.e., more creakiness).
METHODS
Participants
Nineteen women participated in this study. They were all
recruited in Hong Kong, speaking Cantonese as their first
language, and university-educated (either then-current students
or recently graduated). They aged between 19 and 25, and self-
declared as heterosexual. All of them also spoke English and
Mandarin as second languages. Their mean height was 159.4 cm
(SD ±4.4). Participation was voluntary and no one received any
monetary remuneration. No one reported any (history of) speech
and hearing impairment.
Warm-Up Task
This study comprised three tasks: warm-up, facial attractiveness
rating, and speech production task. All tasks were completed
in the same session in a quiet room on university campus.
Participants were recorded using a Logitech H340 microphone
at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz.
During the warm-up session, participants were asked to say
the semantically neutral utterance
你好啊
,
你讀咩科嫁？
“Hello.
What is your major?” three times without being presented
any visual stimuli. The purpose of this task was to familiarize
the participants with main production task, which will be
described below.
Facial Attractiveness Rating
Fifty different male facial stimuli were used. We only included
faces of East Asian ethnicities as their features are more familiar
to our participants (cf.Coetzee et al., 2014). Forty of the faces were
relatively attractive Asian male faces (celebrities and otherwise).
The remaining stimuli were relatively less attractive male faces
(again including celebrities). The images of male celebrities were
those from Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, and Mainland China. All
stimuli were publicly available images obtained from the Internet.
Participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of these 50
faces on a 1 ∼10 scale (10 = most attractive) and write down their
response on an answer sheet. They were told to base their ratings
purely on how much they were attracted to each face, and to
ignore any past knowledge of the respective males or experience
they might have with people of similar appearances. Stimuli were
presented in a randomized order in Microsoft Powerpoint slides.
Production Task
Based on the ratings from above, for each participant the five
most attractive and five least attractive faces were used as
target stimuli in a subsequent production task. In the event
of faces with the same rating, those that were presented later
were chosen. Each face was presented three times on separate
occasions in random order. Participants were instructed to
imagine themselves in a classroom setting, and that the male face
was of a classmate sitting next to them. Participants were then
to ask the male classmate
你好啊
,
你讀咩科嫁？
“Hello. What is
your major?” From each participant, 30 utterances were recorded.
Recordings were subsequently analyzed using ProsodyPro (Xu,
2013 ver. 5.7.2), which allows manual checking of vocal pulses
and automatically extracts numerous acoustic measurements, as
will be presented below.
Post hoc Questionnaire
Preliminary data analysis revealed a bimodal distribution which
was seemingly related to participants’ height. Specifically, we
seemed to observe that taller participants seemed to behave in
the opposite direction from the rest. To verify this, we sent out a
questionnaire to gather information on participants’ height and
how satisfied they were about it. There were four questions in
the questionnaire: (1) “How tall are you?,” (2) “On a scale of 1
to 10, how satisfied are you about your own height?,” (3) “If you
are not satisfied, how much taller/shorter would you like to be
(in centimeters)?,” and (4) “What are you doing to address your
unsatisfactory height (e.g., wearing high heels)?” All participants
bar one responded (i.e., N= 18). Based on their response,
participants were then classified in terms of how satisfied they
were about their height, namely (H)ighly satisfied, (M)oderately
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satisfied, and (L)east satisfied. There were six participants in each
category. The correlation between participants’ height and their
satisfaction with their own height was nearly but not significant,
rs= 0.446, N= 18, p= 0.063.
RESULTS
We set out to test six hypotheses (see Table 1) to examine whether
Cantonese women project a small body when addressing an
attractive male. Results are shown in Figure 1, where attractive
(A) and unattractive (U) facial stimuli are compared (coral
and turquoise, respectively) for each acoustic correlate of vocal
attractiveness. The X-axis of Figure 1 represents how much
speakers were satisfied with their own body height (converted
into the three categories H, M, L, with H being the most satisfied).
See also Supplementary Figure 1 for corresponding boxplots
with height satisfaction contrasts collapsed.
For voice quality, H1–A1 was higher for unattractive stimuli,
indicating more use of breathiness when participants spoke to
an unattractive face; the same was true for H1–A3. Cantonese
women also appeared to lengthen their vocal tract with denser
formants in the Attractive condition, thus projecting a larger
body. Similarly, participants’ median fowas lower in the
FIGURE 1 | Boxplots comparing acoustic correlates of projected voices in attractive (A) vs. unattractive (U) facial stimulus conditions. H, M, L stand for highly,
moderately, least satisfied with speakers’ own height.
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TABLE 2 | Model summaries for different acoustic correlates.
Fixed effects Random effect
SD
Est. SE df t p Speaker
H1–A1 (Intercept) 8.218 0.930 18.056 8.840 <0.001 3.944
Attract. −0.417 0.119 17.124 −3.499 0.003 0.317
Attract.:DesChg 0.055 0.021 17.542 2.578 0.019
H1–A3 (Intercept) 29.119 1.218 17.946 23.904 <0.001 5.218
Attract. –0.444 0.135 19.920 −3.277 0.004 0.403
Attract.: DesChg 0.055 0.022 17.519 2.453 0.025
F1–F3 (Intercept) 968.015 21.398 17.765 45.238 <0.001 89.719
Attract. −8.909 2.179 15.555 −4.088 0.001 8.377
Median fo(Intercept) 0.029 0.001 18.489 22.055 <0.001 0.005
Attract. –0.001 <0.001 15.992 −4.265 0.001 0.001
Jitter (Intercept) 1527.525 36.888 17.853 41.410 <0.001 156.64
Attract. 44.184 5.347 17.882 8.263 <0.001 15.78
Attract.:DesChg −1.970 0.903 16.526 −2.180 0.044
Shimm. (Intercept) 0.823 0.036 22.020 23.012 <0.001 0.144
Attract. –0.015 0.003 542.600 −4.692 <0.001
Attract.: DesChg 0.001 0.001 480.400 2.011 0.045
“Attract.” stands for facial attractiveness rating (1–10, 10 = the most attractive). “DesChg” stands for desired change in height (in cm). Significant fixed effects are in bold.
Attractive condition. In terms of creakiness, participants showed
higher jitter but lower shimmer in the Attractive condition.
Initial exploratory data analysis (based on visual inspection
of Supplementary Figure 2) revealed substantial individual
variability in vocal strategies. Therefore, for each acoustical
parameter in Figure 1, we fitted a linear mixed effects model
using the lmerTest package in R (Kuznetsova et al., 2017, ver. 3.1-
3) to model by-speaker variations. Model summaries are shown
in Table 2. All models contained the continuous predictor of
Attractiveness (rating of male facial stimuli). In some models,
we also included the interaction between Attractiveness and
desired change in height (see Question 3 in §2.5), which appeared
to be a good heuristic of the individual variation. No other
manipulation of the data was performed. All models included
by-speaker random intercepts; most also included by-speaker
random slope for Attractiveness (except for shimmer, in which
model including the random slope for Attractiveness would lead
to non-convergence).
Table 2 shows that there was a significant main effect of
Attractiveness (p<0.005 for all cases) on all acoustical correlates
of vocal attractiveness analyzed. This indicates that, after taking
into account by-speaker variation, in general an attractive male
face elicited significantly less breathiness (lower H1–A1 and
H1–A3), longer vocal tract (denser formant dispersion), lower
median fo, less regular cycle-to-cycle variation in fo(higher jitter)
but more regular cycle-to-cycle variation in amplitude (lower
shimmer). In addition, there was a significant interaction between
Attractiveness and desired change in height in all voice quality-
related measurements. It can be seen in Figure 1 and Table 3
that the contrast between attractive and unattractive faces in
terms of acoustic correlates were bigger for speakers who were
satisfied with their own height (in bold in Table 3). The opposite
parameter estimates of the main effect of Attractiveness and the
interaction term in Table 2 may be understood from the fact that
those desiring the largest change in height are the least satisfied,
and are using vocal strategies less differently to address attractive
vs. unattractive males (cf.Table 3).
DISCUSSION
Summary of Findings
This study explored how Cantonese women projected their
voice when speaking to an attractive vs. unattractive face.
Results showed that, in the attractive face condition, most
acoustic cues pointed to a larger body (except Hypothesis 6).
Participants were significantly less breathy (lower H1–A1 and
H1–A3) in the attractive condition, supporting Hypothesis 1
and 2. In terms of vocal tract length, participants showed
narrower formant dispersion in the attractive condition, signaling
a larger body, rejecting Hypothesis 3. Their median fowas
also significantly lower when addressing an attractive face, thus
TABLE 3 | Summary of differences (attractive less unattractive facial stimuli) in
each acoustic correlate by speakers’ satisfaction in their own height (H being the
most satisfied).
Attractive less unattractive facial stimuli
H1–A1 H1–A3 Jitter Shimmer
H−2.308 −2.627 27.447 −0.025
M−0.781 −1.773 18.349 −0.020
L−0.787 −0.253 24.565 −0.016
Significant fixed effects are in bold.
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rejecting Hypothesis 4. For creaky phonation, in the attractive
face condition there was greater jitter but smaller shimmer, thus
supporting Hypothesis 5 but not Hypothesis 6. For all voice
quality-related measurements (i.e., analyses of breathiness and
creakiness), there was a significant interaction between facial
attractiveness rating and desired change in height.
Body Size Projection
As reported in Xu et al. (2013), male English listeners judged
small-sounding acoustic cues to be more attractive, so even
with cross-linguistic variation one would have expected
Cantonese women to at least use some small-sounding
cues in their production. Rather unexpectedly, in our data
participants seemed to be always trying to project a large-
sounding voice instead when speaking to an attractive
face, unlike what the body size projection account would
have predicted. This is reminiscent of the prevalent use
of creaky voice by female American speakers, despite that
creakiness is considered unattractive (Anderson et al.,
2014). The case of creaky voice in American female speech
shows that speakers do not necessarily use vocal strategies
that listeners typically consider attractive – knowingly or
otherwise. Another conceivable speculation is that speakers
were taking into account social factors (classroom setting with
friends nearby, interlocutor being a classmate), such that they
deliberately avoided sounding too eager in front of an attractive
potential mate. This speculation, needless to say, needs to be
carefully verified.
In our initial analysis, we had the impression that speakers’
height might affect their vocal strategies – this was confirmed in
Table 3. For all voice quality-related acoustic cues, participants
who were satisfied with their own height manifested a larger
contrast between the attractive and the unattractive stimulus
conditions. Our data thus seem to suggest that although female
Cantonese speakers have the same set of vocal strategies for
attractive vs. unattractive mates, it is those who are confident in
their own height that are using them more actively.
Caveats
Participants in this study were well-educated young women who
had been exposed to western culture since a very young age. They
also spoke fluent English and Mandarin as second languages.
This group of speakers thus represents only a subset of the local
population. It is also noteworthy that when they took part in the
production task, they had already been primed to think about
attractiveness during the rating task – this could possibly have
affected how they spoke. Finally, as is clear from Supplementary
Figure 2, there is substantial individual variability in terms of
vocal strategies. Therefore, this study may benefit from a larger
sample than 19 speakers.
Suggestions for Future Research
Future studies should look at other groups of speakers in
the community, such as older monolingual speakers. Another
potentially interesting factor to investigate would be the effect
of menstrual cycle on speech production. To the best of
our knowledge, to date there is only preliminary data on
how the menstrual cycle affects voice quality in Cantonese
women (Li, 2016). Understanding how physiological factors
interact with vocal attractiveness would shed new light on this
issue. Finally, it would also be useful to verify the present
findings with articulatory data, such as electroglottography
(i.e., laryngograph).
CONCLUSION
This pilot study has found that young Cantonese women
projected a large-sounding voice when speaking to an
attractive male face. This seems to disagree with the widely
held body size projection principle which states that an
attractive female voice is small-sounding. We also found that
women who were confident in their own height adjust their
voice more actively depending on the attractiveness of their
mates. Further investigation is needed to understand the
relationship between the present findings and those observed in
other languages.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be
made available by the authors, without undue reservation.
ETHICS STATEMENT
The studies involving human participants were reviewed and
approved by School of Humanities, the University of Hong Kong.
The patients/participants provided their written informed
consent to participate in this study.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
EN conceived of the study supervised by AL. EN collected the
data. AL analyzed the data and wrote the final manuscript.
Both authors contributed to the article and approved the
submitted version.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An earlier version of this study appeared in Lee and Ng (2019).
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online
at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.
786507/full#supplementary-material
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Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 7January 2022 | Volume 12 | Article 786507