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Menstrual cycle, trait estrogen level, and masculinity preferences in the human voice
Abstract
Men with low testosterone (feminine men) invest in relationships and offspring more than men with high testosterone (masculine men). Women's attraction to testosterone dependent traits (e.g. masculine face shape) is enhanced during the late-follicular, fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Attractive, feminine women have stronger preferences for masculine men as possible long-term partners than less attractive, masculine women. We manipulated 2 testosterone related vocal traits (voice pitch and apparent vocal-tract length) in voices to test if women prefer masculinized men's voices to feminized men's voices; masculinity preferences are enhanced at the fertile (late-follicular) menstrual cycle phase; the amount that masculinity preferences shift cyclically relates to average estrone-3-glucuronide concentration (the primary urinary metabolite of estrone, E3G). We found women displayed general masculinity preferences for men's voices; masculinity preferences were greater in the fertile (late-follicular) phase of the cycle than the non-fertile (early-follicular and luteal) phase; and this effect was most pronounced for women with low average E3G concentration. As feminine women (i.e. those with high average E3G levels) are most able to obtain investment even from masculine men, these women may not need to change their mating preference or strategy during the menstrual cycle as much as masculine women.
... Furthermore, variations in secondary sex characteristics have been found to correlate with health status, physical strength, mating success and the presence of psychological disorders [2,3,4]. Several studies have shown that perceived vocal masculinity and femininity play important roles in human social preferences such as attractiveness [5,6,7,8,9,10]. These studies characterized human perception of masculinity and femininity by employing two types of research methods: (1) observing the influence of the manipulations of various acoustic properties of voice samples on perceived masculinity and femininity ratings, and (2) examining the relationships between acoustic measures and perceived masculinity and femininity ratings. ...
... Of a range of acoustic measures examined in [14], F0 and F2 were found to account for 49.60% and 19.60% of the variance in masculinity ratings for males respectively, and for 40.60% and 24.10% of the variance in femininity ratings for females respectively. Feinberg et al. [6,9] showed that F0 and apparent vocal tract lengths (VTL) both influenced the masculinity ratings for male speakers. The voice perturbation measures, including jitter, shimmer and Harmonic-to-Noice Ratio (HNR), have also been investigated in [15,16,17,18] as contributors in classifying males and females. ...
... Cartei et al. [5], consistent with other studies [1,37,38], showed that F0 and ∆F are largely independent of each other as they were affected by different constraints on the speech production system. Apart from ∆F, formant dispersion, as another estimator of VTL was shown to be independent of F0 [6,9]. Regarding the relationship between F0 and Fn, the results of Pisanski et al. [10] were consistent with other research [37,39,40] in that F0 and Fn were largely independent, both within and across utterances by the same speaker and in the average values of these measures in different speakers. ...
Previous research has found that voices can provide reliable information for gender classification with a high level of accuracy. In social psychology, perceived vocal masculinity and femininity has often been considered as an important feature on social behaviours. While previous studies have characterised acoustic features that contributed to perceivers' judgements of speakers' vocal masculinity or femininity, there is limited research on building an objective masculinity/femininity scoring model and characterizing the independent acoustic factors that contribute to the judgements of speakers' vocal masculinity or femininity. In this work, we firstly propose an objective masculinity/femininity scoring system based on the Extreme Random Forest and then characterize the independent and meaningful acoustic factors contributing to perceivers' judgements by using a correlation matrix based hierarchical clustering method. The results show the objective masculinity/femininity ratings strongly correlated with the perceived masculinity/femininity ratings when we used an optimal speech duration of 7 seconds, with a correlation coefficient of up to .63 for females and .77 for males. 9 independent clusters of acoustic measures were generated from our modelling of femininity judgements for female voices and 8 clusters were found for masculinity judgements for male voices. The results revealed that, for both sexes, the F0 mean is the most critical acoustic measure affects the judgement of vocal masculinity and femininity. The F3 mean, F4 mean and VTL estimators are found to be highly inter-correlated and appeared in the same cluster, forming the second significant factor. Next, F1 mean, F2 mean and F0 standard deviation are independent factors that share similar importance. The voice perturbation measures, including HNR, jitter and shimmer, are of lesser importance.
... The human voice is one form of sexually selected morphological trait, and is amenable to judgements of masculinity and femininity. Several studies have shown that vocal masculinity/femininity plays an important role in social behaviours [6,7,8,9]. A common research method used in examining vocal masculinity/femininity is to collect subjective gender scores, in which listeners assign degrees of masculinity/femininity to human voices. ...
... Several studies have investigated relationships between various acoustic measures and the perceived masculinity/femininity of voices, as well as the utility of the acoustic measures in objectively discriminating male and female speakers. Vocal-tract length (VTL) has been shown to influence male and female speakers' acoustic quality where longer VTL has been associated with lower F0 [10,11], lower formant dispersion [7], and higher perceived masculinity and attractiveness, as rated by female listeners [7]. It was also demonstrated that male speakers who were taller and had higher testosterone levels had lower F0 and resonance (∆F), and their voices were rated as more masculine [6,12]. ...
... Several studies have investigated relationships between various acoustic measures and the perceived masculinity/femininity of voices, as well as the utility of the acoustic measures in objectively discriminating male and female speakers. Vocal-tract length (VTL) has been shown to influence male and female speakers' acoustic quality where longer VTL has been associated with lower F0 [10,11], lower formant dispersion [7], and higher perceived masculinity and attractiveness, as rated by female listeners [7]. It was also demonstrated that male speakers who were taller and had higher testosterone levels had lower F0 and resonance (∆F), and their voices were rated as more masculine [6,12]. ...
Human voices vary in their perceived masculinity or femininity , and subjective gender scores provided by human raters have long been used in psychological studies to understand the complex psychosocial relationships between people. However, there has been limited research on developing objective gender scoring of voices and examining the correlation between objective gender scores (including the weighting of each acoustic factor) and subjective gender scores (i.e., perceived mas-culinity/ femininity). In this work we propose a gender scoring model based on Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and using weakly labelled data to objectively rate speakers' masculinity and femininity. For 434 speakers, we investigated 29 acoustic measures of voice characteristics and their relationships to both the objective scores and subjective masculinity/femininity ratings. The results revealed close correspondence between objective scores and subjective ratings of masculinity for males and femininity for females (correlations of 0.667 and 0.505 respectively). Among the 29 measures, F0 was found to be the most important vocal characteristic influencing both objective and subjective ratings for both sexes. For female voices, local absolute jitter and Harmonic-to-Noise Ratio (HNR) were moderately associated with objective scores. For male voices, F0 variance influenced objective gender scores more than the subjective ratings provided by human listeners.
... In general, more masculine male voices (with lower fundamental frequencies (F0), lower formant frequency (fn) and/or smaller formant dispersion (Df)) are preferred by women (Babel, McGuire, & King, 2014;Collins, 2000;Hodges-Simeon et al., 2010). Furthermore, even when acoustic parameters of the voices are experimentally manipulated by computer software, the correlation between vocal masculinity (F0) and voice attractiveness holds (Feinberg, Jones, Little, Burt, & Perrett, 2005;Feinberg et al., 2006;Fraccaro et al., 2013;Re, O'Connor, Bennett, & Feinberg, 2012;Saxton et al., 2015). In contrast, more feminine female voices (with higher F0, higher fn and/or larger Df), are perceived as more attractive by men (Apicella and Feinberg, 2008;Collins & Missing, 2003;Feinberg, DeBruine, Jones, & Perrett, 2008;Fraccaro et al., 2010;Re et al., 2012). ...
... Voice attractiveness is also affected by listener-related factors, such as the listener sex and physiological condition. For example, some studies reported that women exhibit the strongest preference for more masculine male voices (with low F0) during the late-follicular phase of their menstrual cycle (Feinberg et al., 2006;Pisanski, Hahn et al., 2014;Pisanski, Fraccaro et al., 2014), but a recent well-powered study could not replicate this finding (Jünger et al., 2018). It seems that more studies are needed to conduct this problem. ...
... Using Praat software with publicly available scripts (Feinberg, 2018;Puts & Cardenas, 2018), we analyzed F0, formant frequency and HNR between attractive and unattractive voices, since previous studies have shown that these parameters are the major contributing factors to voice attractiveness (Collins, 2000;Collins & Missing, 2003;Feinberg et al., 2005Feinberg et al., , 2006Apicella and Feinberg, 2008;Fraccaro et al., 2010;Re et al., 2012;Fraccaro et al., 2013;Saxton et al., 2015;Hodges-Simeon et al., 2010;Babel et al., 2014). According to the programmers' recommendations (Boersma & Weenik, 2009), we set the pitch floor to 75 Hz and the pitch ceiling to 300 Hz for male voices; for female voices, the pitch range setting is 100 Hz-500 Hz. ...
Voice attractiveness plays a significant role in social interaction and mate choice. However, how listeners perceive attractive voices and whether this process is mandatory, is poorly understood. The current study explores this question using event-related brain potentials. Participants listened to syllables spoken by male and female voices with high or low attractiveness while completing an implicit (voice un-related) tone detection task or explicitly judging voice attractiveness. In both tasks, attractive male voices elicited a larger N1 than unattractive voices. However, an effect of voice attractiveness on the late positive complex (LPC) was only seen in the explicit task but it was present to both same- and opposite-sex voices. Taken together, voice attractiveness processing during early stages appears to be rapid and mandatory and related to mate selection, whereas during later elaborated processing, voice attractiveness is strategic and aesthetics-based, requiring attentional resources.
... Tactile and auditory modalities have been largely neglected, even though the latter is a sex-defining sensory cue (Puts et al., 2006(Puts et al., , 2012. The human voice transmits various and differential social cues just as for mice and rats (Figure 2) and hence age (Ptacek and Sander, 1966;Linville and Fisher, 1985), sexual orientation (Munson et al., 2006), sexual receptivity (Bryant and Haselton, 2009;Fischer et al., 2011;Klatt et al., 2020), and fertility in women (Feinberg et al., 2006;Pisanski et al., 2018), dominance in men (Puts et al., 2007(Puts et al., , 2012Cheng et al., 2016;Schild et al., 2020), physical strength in men (Sell et al., 2010;Schild et al., 2020), and body configuration in men and women (Hughes et al., 2004;Rendall et al., 2007;Pisanski and Rendall, 2011) can all be decoded from human voice. Since human mate choice can be based on all of these signals, the voice might be, just like vision, a crucial modality to choose a potential mate. ...
... The voice is most certainly a sex-defining sensory modality as a broad body of literature exists reporting that men speak at a lower vocal pitch than women (Fitch and Holbrook, 1970;Childers, 1991;Puts et al., 2012;Titze, 2017). Most men prefer women with higher pitch voices (Collins and Missing, 2003;Feinberg et al., 2008;Jones et al., 2008;Apicella and Feinberg, 2009;Puts et al., 2011;Abend et al., 2015) particularly for short-term mating while women prefer men with lower pitch voice (Collins, 2000;Feinberg et al., 2005Feinberg et al., , 2006Feinberg et al., , 2008Puts et al., 2006Puts et al., , 2007Jones et al., 2010), although this might also only occur when looking for short-term partners (Puts, 2005;Jones et al., 2010). Furthermore, certain voice features, such as volume or speech duration, are correlated with a higher number of sexual encounters and mating success for both men and women (Hughes et al., 2004;Puts, 2005;Puts et al., 2006;Apicella et al., 2007;Hodges-Simeon et al., 2011;Atkinson et al., 2012;Suire et al., 2018). ...
Mate choice is a potent generator of diversity and a fundamental pillar for sexual selection and evolution. Mate choice is a multistage affair, where complex sensory information and elaborate actions are used to identify, scrutinize, and evaluate potential mating partners. While widely accepted that communication during mate assessment relies on multimodal cues, most studies investigating the mechanisms controlling this fundamental behavior have restricted their focus to the dominant sensory modality used by the species under examination, such as vision in humans and smell in rodents. However, despite their undeniable importance for the initial recognition, attraction, and approach towards a potential mate, other modalities gain relevance as the interaction progresses, amongst which are touch and audition. In this review, we will: (1) focus on recent findings of how touch and audition can contribute to the evaluation and choice of mating partners, and (2) outline our current knowledge regarding the neuronal circuits processing touch and audition (amongst others) in the context of mate choice and ask (3) how these neural circuits are connected to areas that have been studied in the light of multisensory integration.
... Furthermore, studies have reported increase of women's attention to sexually significant stimuli (Laeng & Falkenberg, 2007) and attraction to men's masculine physical, behavioral, and personality traits in their fertile phase (e.g., Feinberg et al., 2006;Gildersleeve et al., 2014aGildersleeve et al., , 2014bLukaszewski & Roney, 2009;Pawlowski & Jasieńska, 2005;, especially when they are judged for their attractiveness for short-rather than long-term relationships (Gildersleeve et al., 2014a). Consistent with these findings, women displayed more flirting behaviors during high fertility, but only when interacting with men who displayed purported markers of genetic fitness as short-term mates by performing scripts depicting confidence and social dominance (Cantú et al., 2014). ...
... The caution is needed in interpreting this effect because the study is likely underpowered for testing complex higher-order interactions. Furthermore, it is worth noting that, although shifts in masculinity preference are relatively well-documented (e.g., Feinberg et al., 2006;Gildersleeve et al., 2014aGildersleeve et al., , 2014bLukaszewski & Roney, 2009;Pawlowski & Jasieńska, 2005;, some more recent studies using more reliable hormone assessment and larger sample sizes have not replicated this preference shift in high fertility period (e.g., Jünger et al., 2018a;Marcinkowska et al., 2016Marcinkowska et al., , 2018. Regardless, to draw a conclusion regarding the increased pitch in fertile phase in response to a femininized man compared to a woman in the present study, it is important to note that pitch did not significantly differ from the pitch in the menstrual and luteal phases in the same situation, that the increase in pitch was only found for the women in a relationship, and that the effect size was found to be very small (Funder & Ozer, 2019), which seriously calls into question hormone-dependent pitch changes across the cycle. ...
Objective
Research has demonstrated that men prefer women’s voices with higher pitch and that women’s voices recorded at high compared to low fertility phases of the menstrual cycle are rated as more attractive. These findings suggest that voice conveys information relevant to reproductive success. Because voice attractiveness is higher during the high fertility phase and voice pitch positively predicts attractiveness ratings, it has been hypothesized that cyclical changes in vocal attractiveness are driven by changes in voice pitch. However, attempts to detect acoustic changes have produced mixed results. With the higher degree of ecological validity achieved by including social context (simulated interactions with men and women) and by recording voice in the three phases of menstrual cycles, the present study addresses limitations of previous research.
Methods
Forty-eight naturally cycling women were recorded during the menstrual, late follicular (high fertility), and luteal phases while leaving voice messages to masculinized and femininized men and women.
Results
No cycle-related changes in pitch and pitch variability for the recordings directed to masculinized and femininized men and women were detected. By including relationship status as predictor in additional models, higher-order interaction effects showed that single and partnered women displayed opposite cycle-related pitch changes directed only to women, but not men.
Conclusion
The cycle-related voice changes found in the present study do not support the hypothesis that cyclic pitch variations represent an adaptive mechanism for attracting partners. We discuss cyclic changes in voice pitch in relation to intrasexual competition by taking into an account that the present study is likely underpowered for adequate testing of the complex higher-order interactions.
... In addition to reporting higher preferences for putative cues to immunocompetence in a mate when seeking shortterm relationships (e.g., Schmitt, 2005), some evidence suggests that women increase their preferences for these men in late-follicular (i.e., fertile) phase of the menstrual cycle (e.g., Gangestad et al., 2007;Jones et al., 2005;Penton-Voak et al., 1999;Welling et al., 2007;reviewed in Welling & Burriss, 2019; but see Jones et al., 2018), with women reporting stronger preferences for men with masculine (Feinberg et al., 2006;Gangestad et al., 2007;Johnston et al., 2001;Jones et al., 2005;Little et al., 2007;Penton-Voak & Perrett, 2000;Penton-Voak et al., 1999;Puts, 2006;Welling et al., 2007) and symmetrical ; see also Gangestad & Thornhill, 1998;Rikowski & Grammer, 1999;Thornhill et al., 2003) traits, and stronger attraction to displays of dominance (Gangestad et al., 2004Lukaszewski & Roney, 2009) near ovulation compared to other times. This shift in preferences may reflect a "mixed mating" strategy (see Gangestad & Thornhill, 2008;Penton-Voak et al., 1999), whereby women with lower quality primary partners may selectively engage in extra-pair copulations with men of higher genetic quality near peak fertility to secure superior genes for their children (Buss, 2003;Gangestad et al., 2000Gangestad et al., , 2007Smith, 1984;Symons, 1979). ...
... An average of these two cycle lengths was taken: the length of their current cycle based on the number of days between their last recalled date of menstrual onset and the predicted date of their next menstrual onset, and their estimated average cycle length. Using this averaged menstrual cycle length, the point in each participant's menstrual cycle at last copulation relative to their predicted date of ovulation was calculated using the backward-counting method (e.g., Feinberg et al., 2006;Gangestad et al., 2004Gangestad et al., , 2016Welling & Burriss, 2019). It was predicted that ovulation would occur 15 days prior to participants' next predicted menstrual onset (Dixon et al., 1980;Wilcox et al., 2000). ...
A great deal of research has focused on women’s attention to the physical and behavioral cues of potential romantic partners. Comparatively little work has investigated how these cues influence women’s sexual risk-taking. The current study investigated the relationship between women’s perceptions of various factors associated with their partner’s genetic or investment quality, and women’s risky sexual behaviors (i.e., behaviors that could lead to unintended pregnancy). This work also investigated the influence of estimated menstrual cycle phase using a between-subject design. Analyses failed to reveal menstrual cycle effects, but women reported a greater tendency to engage in risky sexual behaviors when they had more physically attractive partners and when they use sexual inducements as a mate retention strategy. Also, conception-risking behaviors occurred most often when the woman reported being more socially dominant and she reported being less upset by a potential pregnancy. Moreover, the self-reported likelihood that women would carry an unintended pregnancy to term with their partner was predicted by feeling less upset by a potential pregnancy, taking fewer social risks, religiosity, and by more favorable ratings of their partners’ masculinity. These results are discussed in line with evolutionary theory surrounding mate choice.
... The parameters relating to the first category, sexual dimorphism, include acoustic and aerodynamic measurements that indicate characteristics of the speaker such as body size, 1 facial or body symmetry, 2−3 masculinity, dominance, 4−5 and threat potential. 6 These studies tend to focus on acoustic measures associated with body size, such as fundamental frequency, 5,7−12 vocal tract length 13 (though some studies have shown mixed results on this 14 ), or formant dispersion. 15 The parameters associated with the second category, health and youthfulness, include such characteristics as vocal changes occurring as a function of the speaker's fertility (or, conversely, the effects of a female listener's fertility on their judgments of the attractiveness of a man's voice), 14,16 breathiness in female voices, 17−20 and a high harmonics to noise ratio, 21 all of which are associated with a generally young, healthy, person. ...
... 6 These studies tend to focus on acoustic measures associated with body size, such as fundamental frequency, 5,7−12 vocal tract length 13 (though some studies have shown mixed results on this 14 ), or formant dispersion. 15 The parameters associated with the second category, health and youthfulness, include such characteristics as vocal changes occurring as a function of the speaker's fertility (or, conversely, the effects of a female listener's fertility on their judgments of the attractiveness of a man's voice), 14,16 breathiness in female voices, 17−20 and a high harmonics to noise ratio, 21 all of which are associated with a generally young, healthy, person. Another acoustic vocal quality measurement, voice onset time, has been shown to affect judgments of vocal attractiveness by identifying female speakers who are at the point of their menstrual cycle at which they are most fertile. ...
Objective
The objective of this study was to investigate the difference between vocal beauty and vocal attractiveness by determining whether perceptual ratings of vocal beauty and vocal attractiveness could be dissociated in a cohort of normal raters without a diagnosed sexual desire disorder.
Methods
Twenty five gay male participants were presented with randomly-chosen samples from the Geneva Voices and Faces Database, and were asked to rate each sample in terms of beauty, attractiveness for a relationship of short duration, and attractiveness for a relationship of long duration. Responses were recorded on a visual analog scale (0–100) using a touch-screen interface. The number of stimulus repetitions and the participant response times were also recorded. Statistical analyses were done using two-way Analysis of Variance tests and independent student's t tests. P values were considered statistically significant at the P < 0.05 level.
Results
Participants rated male voices significantly higher in terms of beauty, attractiveness for a relationship of long duration, and attractiveness for a relationship of short duration (P < 0.001). Participants rated female voices significantly higher for beauty than for attractiveness for relationship of long or short duration (P < 0.001). There was no significant difference in response time between male and female voices when rating vocal beauty (P = 0.5608). Response time was significantly longer for male voices than for female voices when assessing attractiveness for a relationship of short duration (P < 0.002) but not for long duration (P < 0.3496). Attractive voices (male and female) were repeated more often, and male voices were repeated more often than female voices for both long-term and short-term attractiveness. There was no difference in stimulus replay behavior as a function of the beauty ratings.
Conclusion
In a cohort of gay male raters without a diagnosed sexual desire disorder, vocal beauty and vocal attractiveness ratings of male and female voices are two related but distinct perceptual constructs that can, under certain circumstances, be dissociated. In general, gay men rated male voices equivalently for beauty, short-term, and long-term attractiveness, while the same ratings for female voices showed a significant difference between ratings of beauty and ratings of short-term and long-term attractiveness.
... Indeed, there was more variations between females judges than between vocal stimuli (s judges ¼ 0.07, s stimuli ¼ 0.01), suggesting, for example, that the timing of the ovulatory cycle may play a role. In fact, it has been long suggested that menstrual phase and mating contexts may influence women's preferences for masculine vocal attributes (Feinberg et al., 2006;Pisanski et al., 2014c;Puts, 2005). Under the "good genes ovulatory shift hypothesis," women in their fertile phase are predicted to shift their preferences toward mates indicating high genetic quality (i.e., more masculine men, to which women may be particularly attracted to for a short-term relationship, such as a one-night stand), as opposed to mates indicating high parental investment in their nonfertile phase (i.e., less masculine men, to which women may be particularly attracted to for a long-term, committed, and romantic relationship; Jünger, Kordsmeyer, Gerlach, & Penke, 2018). ...
... For instance, Puts (2005) found that females judged lowered pitch voices more attractive than the same voices raised in pitch in their fertile phase of their ovulatory cycle with respect to a short-term context. Similarly, Feinberg et al. (2006) found that women's masculinity preferences for low-pitched voices were stronger during the fertile phase. Although the effect was not Figure 2. Barplots of the predicted probabilities that a voice would be considered more attractive when it is 1 standard deviation lower and 1 standard deviation higher than the other voice, as a function of its (a) mean F0, (b) F0-SD, and (c) intensity. ...
In both correlational and experimental settings, studies on women’s vocal preferences have reported negative relationships between perceived attractiveness and men’s vocal pitch, emphasizing the idea of an adaptive preference. However, such consensus on vocal attractiveness has been mostly conducted with native English speakers, but a few evidence suggest that it may be culture-dependent. Moreover, other overlooked acoustic components of vocal quality, such as intonation, perceived breathiness and roughness, may influence vocal attractiveness. In this context, the present study aims to contribute to the literature by investigating vocal attractiveness in an underrepresented language (i.e., French) as well as shedding light on its relationship with understudied acoustic components of vocal quality. More specifically, we investigated the relationships between attractiveness ratings as assessed by female raters and male voice pitch, its variation, the formants’ dispersion and position, and the harmonics-to-noise and jitter ratios. Results show that women were significantly more attracted to lower vocal pitch and higher intonation patterns. However, they did not show any directional preferences for all the other acoustic features. We discuss our results in light of the adaptive functions of vocal preferences in a mate choice context.
... Relevant studies have shown that females in the ovulatory phase display a stronger desire for sex and more frequent sexual behavior than during the luteal phase (Gangestad, Thornhill, & Garver, 2002) or non-ovulation days of the menstrual cycle (Adams, Gold, & Burt, 1978). The ovulation also boosts the female motivation to select romantic partners who display indicators of good genes (Thornhill & Gangestad, 2008), such as deep male voices (Feinberg et al., 2006). To attract romantic partners, women prefer sexy clothing (Durante, Griskevicius, Hill, Perilloux, & Li, 2011) and red color for dresses (Beall & Tracy, 2013), and display more flirtatious behaviors (Cantú et al., 2014) during the late follicular phase (days 6-14) or ovulatory phase compared with the luteal phase. ...
... Prior research on menstrual phases focused mainly on the sexual selection function and showed stronger sexual desire, provocative dressing, and preference for male partners with good genes during the ovulatory phase (Durante et al., 2011;Feinberg et al., 2006;Gangestad et al., 2002). Our findings suggest that the "food-orientation" function in the luteal phase is an important direction for future research and it would be useful to identify another risk aversion regarding food. ...
Despite widespread adoption of genetically modified (GM) agriculture and the sale of GM foods, consumers are still apprehensive about it. This paper identifies menstrual cycle as a novel factor influencing consumer attitudes towards GM foods. We propose that female consumers lower their evaluations of GM foods in the luteal phase compared with the early follicular phase and ovulatory phase, as the salience of food risk concerns rises in the luteal phase. We conducted four studies and one single-paper meta-analysis to test this basic effect and the underlying mechanism of perceived risk of GM foods through a tracking survey, real food tasting, and scenario evaluation. The findings contribute to the literature of consumer attitudes to GM foods by identifying a unique influencing factor, and also reveal that during the luteal phase female consumers do not just seek more food but also avoid certain types of food.
... For humans, much has been done on static differences in the acoustic properties of speech on vocal preferences (Feinberg et al., 2005(Feinberg et al., , 2006 and social dominance (Anikin, 2020;Anikin et al., 2021;Borkowska & Pawlowski, 2011;Puts, Gaulin & Verdolin, 2006;Wolff & Puts, 2010). Also, much is done on its implication for intonational structures than for emotional expressions (Bänziger & Scherer, 2005;Gussenhoven, 2002). ...
The phonetics of emotion is about the acoustic-phonetic properties of the emotional facets of human vocalization. Conventionally, these properties are studied as correlates of a person’s internal states arising from reactions to the environment, where the internal states are defined by influential psychological theories of emotion. A more recent perspective, however, views emotion as an evolved mechanism for motivating actions to proactively interact with other individuals, including, in particular, the production of emotional expressions. From this perspective, the acoustic properties of emotional vocalization are devised to actively influence the listeners in ways that may benefit the vocalizer. Interestingly, the meanings of these acoustic properties could be interpreted with knowledge of speech acoustics accumulated over the years. A key encoding mechanism is body-size projection, whereby vocal properties associated with emotions like anger make the vocalizer sound large to dominate the listener, while properties associated with emotions like joy make the vocalizer sound small to appease the listener. Body-size projection is encoded through three acoustic dimensions—pitch, voice quality and formant dispersion. Furthermore, body-size projection is likely accompanied by additional iconic encoding mechanisms also aimed at influencing the listener in specific ways. The acoustic properties associated with these mechanisms are not yet fully clear. Further exploration of the body-size projection principle and identification of additional mechanisms may drive much of the research activity in the coming decades.
... A further limitation is not to have taken into consideration the hormone status of our female participants. Women have been shown to exhibit stronger preference for more masculine male voices in their late-follicular (most fertile phase) than at other times (Feinberg et al., 2006;Pisanski et al., 2014). Therefore, it would be of interest to assess the impact of the menstrual cycle on female attractiveness processing. ...
The attractiveness of a person, a complex, and socially relevant type of information, is transmitted in many ways, not least through face and voice. However, it is unclear how the stimulus domains carrying attractiveness information interact. The present study explored the audiovisual perception of attractiveness in a Stroop-like paradigm using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants were presented with face-voice pairs carrying congruent or incongruent attractiveness information and, in turn, judged the attractiveness level of each domain while ignoring the other. Voice attractiveness judgments were influenced by unattended face attractiveness, in terms of both, early perceptual encoding (N170, P200) as well as later evaluative stages (N400, LPC). In contrast, effects of unattended voice attractiveness on face attractiveness judgments were confined to early perceptual encoding (N170). These results demonstrate not only the interaction of multiple domains in human attractiveness perception at different processing stages but also a relative dominance of face over voice attractiveness.
... However, we were not able to assay our samples due to laboratory and labor disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Although menstrual cycle effects are heavily debated (Gildersleeve, Haselton, & Fales, 2014;Harris, 2011Harris, , 2013Harris, Chabot, & Mickes, 2013;Harris, Pashler, & Mickes, 2014;Wood & Carden, 2014;Wood, Kressel, Joshi, & Louie, 2014), some studies demonstrate that menstrual cycle phase and hormonal contraceptive use affect women's perceptions of men's body odor (Grammer, 1993;Havliček, Roberts, & Flegr, 2005;Hummel, Gollisch, Wildt, & Kobal, 1991;Sorokowska, Sorokowski, & Szmajke, 2012;Thornhill, Chapman, & Gangestad, 2013), faces (e.g., Ditzen, Palm-Fischbacher, Gossweiler, Stucky, & Ehlert, 2017;Johnston, Hagel, Franklin, Fink, & Grammer, 2001;Little, Burriss, Petrie, Jones, & Roberts, 2013;Little & Jones, 2012;Penton-Voak et al., 1999;Penton-Voak & Perrett, 2000), and voices (Feinberg et al., 2006;Pisanski et al., 2014;Puts, 2005Puts, , 2006. Conversely, other studies cast doubt on the existence of cycle shifts in preferences for faces (e.g., Jones et al., 2018;Marcinkowska, Hahn, Little, DeBruine, & Jones, 2019) and voices (e.g., Jünger et al., 2018). ...
Studies of mate choice from an evolutionary perspective often begin by investigating whether individuals of one sex share similar preferences for mates. Evidence for shared preferences is often interpreted as support for the hypothesis that preferences are adaptations that have evolved to select high-quality mates. To date, the importance of body odor in human mate choice is uncertain because fundamental questions, such as whether preferences for body odor are shared, have not yet been systematically explored. Here, we asked groups of heterosexual men and women from the University of Pennsylvania to rate the attractiveness of body odors, faces, and voices of opposite-sex individuals. We used our data to produce quantitative estimates of the amount of rater agreement for each of the three modalities of attractiveness, applying a uniform methodology that facilitates cross-modality comparisons. Overall, we found evidence of agreement within all three modalities. Yet, our data also suggest a larger component of attractiveness judgments that can be attributed to personal preferences and idiosyncratic noise. Importantly, our results provide no evidence that agreement regarding odor attractiveness is substantially quantitatively different from the amount of agreement found in other modalities that have been the focus of most previous work. To the extent that evidence exists of shared preferences for faces and voices, our results reveal evidence of shared preferences for body odors.
... La jalousie est ainsi conçue en PE comme un mécanisme de défense contre la forme d'infidélité affectant le plus le succès reproductif d'un individu. L'application de la même logique à d'autres problèmes mettant en jeu le succès reproductif permettrait d'expliquer les préférences naturelles dans le choix des partenaires (Buss, 1989 ;Collins, 2000 ;Feinberg et al., 2005 ;Grammer & Thornhill, 1994 ;Rikowski & Grammer, 1999 ;Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999), ainsi que la manière dont ils sont modérés par l'âge ou les phases du cycle menstruel (Feinberg et al., 2006 ;Gangestad, Simpson, L'année psychologique/Topics in Cognitive Psychology, 2023, 123, 173-214 Pixellence -13-12-22 11:48:39 -(c) Humensis RE0333 U000 -Oasys 19.00x -Page 186 -E1 Revue Annee psychologique 2023-1 -Dynamic layout 0 × 0 Qu'est-ce que la psychologie évolutive ? ...
What is evolutionary psychology? Cognition and behavior in the light of evolution
Evolutionary psychology aims to understand human cognitive organisation and functioning in the light of evolutionary theory. Despite its growing acceptance among scientists as a metatheory of the mind, evolutionary psychology has yet to find its place in the French scientific literature. This article aims to provide a general introductory framework to evolutionary psychology. We describe how natural selection shaped cognition and behavior, and what it entails for conceptualizing the human mind. We also explore how sexual selection acted as a key driver for the evolution of psychological differences between men and women. Finally, we address the most recurrent critics directed at evolutionary psychology.
... There is a large number of studies reporting supportive evidence for the GGOSH. When fertile, women report to prefer short-term sexual relationships with men who have more masculine or symmetrical faces (Penton-Voak et al., 1999;Penton-Voak & Perrett, 2000), masculine or muscular bodies (Little et al., 2007), masculine (deeper) voices (Feinberg et al., 2006;Puts, 2005Puts, , 2006, masculine scent (Gangestad & Thornhill, 1998;Havlíček et al., 2005), and men who show more dominant behaviors (Gangestad et al., 2004(Gangestad et al., , 2007. Further, changes in the target of women's sexual desire have been reported. ...
The Oxford Handbook of Human Mating covers the contributions and up-to-date theories and empirical evidence from scientists regarding human mating strategies. The scientific studies of human mating have only recently risen, revealing fresh discoveries about mate attraction, mate choice, marital satisfaction, and other topics. Darwin’s sexual selection theory primarily guides most of the research in the scientific study of mating strategies. Indeed, research on the complexities of human mate competition and mate choice has centred around Darwin’s classic book. This book discusses theories of human mating; mate selection and mate attraction; mate competition; sexual conflict in mating; human pair bonding; the endocrinology of mating; and mating in the modern world.
... A recent meta-analysis (Gildersleeve et al., 2014a) of 50 studies found "robust" shifts in women's preferences for men as short-term partners across the ovulatory cycle. Although this shift in favor of masculinity during the fertile phase is most often documented using faces of men (Johnston et al., 2001;Penton-Voak & Perrett, 2000), studies have also found the predicted shift using men's body shape (e.g., Little et al., 2007), height (Pawlowski & Jasienska, 2005), voices (Feinberg et al., 2006;Puts, 2005), and traits such as creativity (Haselton & Miller, 2006) and competitiveness (Gangestad et al., 2007). ...
We tested the good genes ovulatory shift hypothesis through speed-dating, an ecologically valid paradigm with real life consequences. Fifteen speed-dating sessions of 262 single Asian Americans were held. We analyzed 850 speed-dates involving 132 men and 100 normally ovulating women, finding ovulatory shifts in the desirability of men with more masculine facial measurements (smaller eye–mouth–eye angle, larger lower face to full face height ratio, and smaller facial width to lower face height ratio) in the predicted direction. However, there was no support for ovulatory shifts in preferences for men’s self-reported height. In addition, the expected shifts were not found for women’s second date offers to men. Therefore, with natural stimuli and in a competitive dating scenario, we partially replicated previously documented ovulatory shifts in women’s preferences for men.
... These include things like social dominance and assertiveness (Gangestad et al., 2004;see, Graziano et al., 1997 for review) A second line of suggestive research addresses changes in female mate preferences during fertile phases of the menstrual cycle: i.e., when they are more sexually receptive (Gangestad & Haselton, 2015). Several studies have indicated that women tend to prefer more "masculine" traits when fertile: such as deeper voices (Feinberg et al., 2006;Puts, 2005), competitive intrasexual behavior (Graziano et al., 1997) more masculine facial brow and jaw structure (Johnston et al., 2001;Penton-Voak & Perrett, 2000) and greater height (Pawlowski & Jasienska, 2005). ...
Misperception of others’ sexual willingness or consent is widely considered to contribute to sexual coercion. Sexual arousal is commonly present among those in situations with potential to result in sexual assault. The current research tests the effects of sexual arousal on related attitudes: including those toward token resistance, assertive sexual strategies, and affirmative consent. Sexual arousal was primed through a narrative writing paradigm. Results indicate sexual arousal led all participants to be more likely to endorse belief in female token resistance, and led women to more strongly endorse men’s assertive sexual strategies. Implications for research on sexual consent are discussed.
... One prominent theory along these lines asserts that, when women are conceptive, they have increased preference for male features that may have ancestrally been indicators of genetic quality-indirect benefits that sires pass to offspring. Researchers have examined preferences for candidate features of genetic quality, some of which are directly involved in regulating male-male competition: the body scents of symmetrical men (Gangestad and Thornhill, 1998;Rikowski and Grammer, 1999;Thornhill and Gangestad, 1999;Thornhill et al., 2003); facial masculinity (e.g., Penton-Voak et al., 1999); vocal masculinity (Puts, 2005;Feinberg et al., 2006;Pisanski et al., 2014); facial symmetry (though findings were largely negative; e.g., Koehler et al., 2002); body masculinity (e.g., Little et al., 2007); facial features associated with testosterone (Roney et al., 2011); behavioral indicators associated with dominance, confidence, and "social presence" (Gangestad et al., 2004(Gangestad et al., , 2007Flowe et al., 2012;Giebel et al., 2013;Cantú et al., 2014). ...
How do women's sexual interests change across their ovulatory cycles? This question is one of the most enduring within the human evolutionary behavioral sciences. Yet definitive, agreed-upon answers remain elusive. One empirical pattern appears to be robust: Women experience greater levels of sexual desire and interest when conceptive during their cycles. But this pattern is not straightforward or self-explanatory. We lay out multiple possible, broad explanations for it. Based on selectionist reasoning, we argue that the conditions that give rise to sexual interests during conceptive and non-conceptive phases are likely to differ. Because conceptive and non-conceptive sex have distinct functions, the sexual interests during conceptive and non-conceptive phases are likely to have different strategic ends. We discuss provisional evidence consistent with this perspective. But the exact nature of women's dual sexuality, if it exists, remains unclear. Additional empirical research is needed. But perhaps more crucially, this topic demands additional theory that fruitfully guides and interprets future empirical research.
... From an evolutionary perspective, the rise in estrogen levels is for reproductive goals in the late FP (i.e., high fertility phase). Women's preferences and behaviors could change by reproductive goals in the late FP, including face preference [55][56][57][58] and reward perception [59,60]. The mechanism of mating and face preference in the FP may be attributed to the activation of the reward-network system [59][60][61][62]. ...
Numerous studies have shown that perception of emotion and emotional memory vary across the menstrual cycle. However, most of these studies used stimuli that contained not only emotional but also social elements. Importantly, the social cognitive abilities of individuals are as crucial as emotional abilities for danger avoidance and recruitment of allies. Therefore, the issue that natural hormonal fluctuations may affect emotion processing should be revisited. To investigate whether the effects of the menstrual cycle are emotion-specific or can also be attributed to social information processing, the present study examined social attention across the menstrual cycle in three tasks—visual search, memory, and memory-guided orienting—with a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking measures. We used images of people standing upright with neutral emotion as social distractors and everyday objects with physical properties matched as non-social distractors. Thirty-six healthy women without hormone use and with stable menstrual cycles of 26 to 30 days participated in the three tasks in the late follicular phase (FP) and mid-luteal phase (LP), respectively. During visual search, participants were asked to search for targets accompanied by social or non-social distractors in complex scenes. Social attentional bias, as evidenced by longer search times and shorter gaze behaviors for targets with social distractors, was found in the FP but not in the LP. In the following memory task, memory accuracy for targets was higher in the FP than in the LP, and the memory for targets with social distractors was more precise in both phases. Finally, in the orienting task, targets in social scenes were detected more slowly than in non-social scenes in LP. Taken together, these findings point to the interplay between social attention, memory, and memory-oriented attention and reveal the distinct processing pathways for social information in the FP and LP. The underlying mechanisms from an evolutionary perspective and from behavioral and neural basis were discussed.
... For example, there is evidence that men with low-pitched voices have more testosterone than other men, and are thought by female listeners to be more dominant and attractive (Collins, 2000;Feinberg et al., 2005;Puts et al., 2006), especially when their voice is heard in a courtship or mating context (Apicella and Feinberg, 2009;Little et al., 2011). This preference is stronger when women are in the fertile phase of their ovulatory cycle when estrogen levels are unusually high (Puts, 2005;Feinberg et al., 2006). ...
Many studies of primate vocalization have been undertaken to improve our understanding of the evolution of language. Perhaps, for this reason, investigators have focused on calls that were thought to carry symbolic information about the environment. Here I suggest that even if these calls were in fact symbolic, there were independent reasons to question this approach in the first place. I begin by asking what kind of communication system would satisfy a species’ biological needs. For example, where animals benefit from living in large groups, I ask how members would need to communicate to keep their groups from fragmenting. In this context, I discuss the role of social grooming and “close calls,” including lip-smacking and grunting. Parallels exist in human societies, where information is exchanged about all kinds of things, often less about the nominal topic than the communicants themselves. This sort of indexical (or personal) information is vital to group living, which presupposes the ability to tolerate, relate to, and interact constructively with other individuals. Making indexical communication the focus of comparative research encourages consideration of somatic and behavioral cues that facilitate relationships and social benefits, including cooperation and collaboration. There is ample room here for a different and potentially more fruitful approach to communication in humans and other primates, one that focuses on personal appraisals, based on cues originating with individuals, rather than signals excited by environmental events.
... Ženy přitahovali muži, kteří vykazovali znaky vysokého hierarchického postavení, jako je vysoký sociální status (Mealey 1985;Mazur et al. 1994;Fieder et al. 2005), tvář s rysy typickými pro dominantní osoby (Mueller -Mazur 1997;Booth -Mazur 1998), fyzická dominance (Wolff -Puts 2010), maskulinní hlas (Feinberg et al. 2006), a přitahovala je vůně dominantních mužů (Havlicek et al. 2005). Část osob má však opačné preference -některé ženy volí submisivní muže a submisivní muži je sexuálně vzrušují Jozifkova -Kolackova 2017;Jozifkova 2018). ...
Dominanční hierarchie se vyvinula jako adaptace sociálně žijících živočichů na podmínky prostředí. Postavení v dominanční hierarchii výrazně ovlivňuje život a chování člověka i v dnešních moderních evropských a amerických společnostech. Zde 1) stručně vysvětlíme principy a evoluční pozadí dominanční hierarchie z úhlu pohledu behaviorálních věd, 2) popíšeme rysy dominanční hierarchie u člověka, a 3) uvedeme příklady toho, co určuje hierarchické postavení jedince u člověka, jak toto postavení ovlivňuje život jedince a jak se projevuje v chování.Struktura dominanční hierarchie, ustavení hierarchického postavení (rank) a omezení daná tímto postavením jsou předvídatelná. Postavení ovlivňuje život jedince v mnoha směrech (reprodukce, komunikace, zdraví, tok informací, vzorce chování). Pokud chceme plně porozumět chování člověka, jeho rozhodnutím a pocitům, musíme brát v úvahu existence dominanční hierarchie mezi jedinci a mezi skupinami jedinců.
... Consistent with this hypothesis, some studies have observed marked cycle shifts in female preferences and sexual desire (Gildersleeve et al., 2014;Roney & Simmons, 2013). For instance, researchers have documented significant associations between fertile phases of the menstrual cycle and heightened preferences for deeper male vocal traits (Feinberg et al., 2006;Puts, 2006), facial cues of good health (Jones et al., 2008;Penton-Voak et al., 1999), and more socially assertive behaviors (Gangestad, Simpson, Cousins, Garver-Apgar, & Christensen, 2004). ...
Energetic investment in human reproduction has long been recognized as costly, influencing developmental, physiological, and behavioral patterns in males and females. These effects are largely coordinated through the actions of reproductive hormones (eg, testosterone, estradiol, and progesterone). Here, the utility and limitations of minimally invasive sampling techniques are explored, providing a novel perspective on how reproductive hormone measurements can enhance reproductive endocrinology research. Salivary steroid measures are most commonly used, although several dried blood spot and urine assays are also available, and researchers continue to explore the efficacy of other sample types. These relatively simple measures have facilitated the collection of multiple samples from a single participant, allowing researchers to more accurately track the diurnal and cyclical variation exhibited by many reproductive hormones. Ultimately, the ability to collect fine‐grained participant data allows biological anthropologists to better test questions central to human reproductive ecology, life history theory, and public health. For example, fieldwork using these techniques suggests that testosterone profile variation across populations is influenced by energetic constraints and reproductive status. Moreover, hormone concentrations shape the development of sex characteristics, with implications for evolutionary questions related to sexual selection. Hormone levels also can be used to identify a range of medical concerns (eg, suppressed hormone production levels linked with psychosocial stress). These findings highlight how minimally invasive collection techniques can be applied to test diverse evolutionary hypotheses and identify important health concerns. Still, more work is needed to standardize collection and laboratory analysis procedures, thereby enabling more direct data comparisons between researchers.
... To optimize communication in changing contexts senders can modify the frequency, amplitude, timing or type of vocalizations to adjust to environmental changes or address specific receivers (Schwartz, 1987;Hotchkin and Parks, 2013;Gill et al., 2015;Pomberger et al., 2018), and receivers can undergo changes in their auditory system (Sisneros et al., 2004;Feinberg et al., 2006;Arch and Narins, 2009;Brenowitz and Remage-Healey, 2016). For example, female plainfin midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus), that use phonotaxis to find their mates, go through seasonal and hormonemediated changes in the peripheral auditory system that enhance their ability to detect males (Sisneros et al., 2004). ...
Social animals flexibly use a variety of vocalizations to communicate in complex and dynamic environments. However, it remains unknown whether the auditory perception of different vocalizations changes according to the ecological context. By using miniature wireless devices to synchronously record vocal interactions and local neural activity in freely-behaving zebra finches in combination with playback experiments, we investigate whether the auditory processing of vocalizations changes across life-history stages. We show that during breeding, females (but not males) increase their estrogen levels and reply faster to their mates when interacting vocally. These changes are associated with an increase in the amplitude of the female's neural auditory responses. Furthermore, the changes in auditory response are not general, but specific to a subset of functionally distinct vocalizations and dependent on the emitter's identity. These results provide novel insights into auditory plasticity of communication systems, showing that the perception of specific signals can shift according to ecologically-determined physiological states.
... Praat software (Boersma and Weenink, 2018) was used to analyse the voice samples for the following phonetic parameters: Mean F0 (corresponds to perceived voice pitch), variation in F0 (intonation, F0 SD), minimum F0, maximum F0 (pitch range), and variation in perceived loudness (Intensity SD). Phonetic analyses were performed automated based on Praat scripts, the frequency range was set to 100-600 Hz following Feinberg et al. (2006). Apart from this, default set tings were used. ...
Women's voices reportedly sound more attractive during the fertile days compared to the non-fertile days of their menstrual cycle. Here we investigated whether the speech content modulates the cyclic changes in women's voices. We asked 72 men and women to rate how interested they were in getting to know the speaker based on her voice. Forty-two naturally cycling women were recorded once during the late follicular phase (high fertility) and once during the luteal phase (low fertility) while speaking sentences of neutral and social content. Listeners were more interested in getting to know the speakers when hearing sentences with social content. Furthermore, raters were more interested in getting to know the speakers when these were recorded in the late follicular than in the luteal phase, but only in sentences with social content. Notably, levels of reproductive hormones (EP ratio) across the cycle phases did not significantly predict the preference for late follicular voices, but echoing the perceptual ratings, there was a significant EP ratio x speech content interaction. Phonetic analyses of mean fundamental frequency (F0) revealed a main effect of menstrual cycle phase and speech content but no interaction. Employing an action-oriented task, the present study extends findings of cycle-dependent voice changes by emphasising that speech content critically modulates fertility effects.
... For example, nu-merous findings suggest that female preferences for different male features vary during the menstrual cycle. In the late follicular phase (high estrogen and low progesterone), when the odds for conception are increased, women show the highest preferences for presumed good genes indicators: facial masculinity (Johnston, Hagel, Franklin, Fink, & Grammer, 2001;Little, Jones, & DeBruine, 2008;Penton-Voak et al., 1999;Penton-Voak & Perrett, 2000), vocal masculinity (Feinberg et al., 2006;Puts, 2005), symmetry and body scents associated with it (Rikowski & Grammer, 1999;Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999) so that they might gain heritable benefits for their offspring, whereas these preferences are less pronounced in lower fertility phases. On the other hand, during the midluteal phase, which is hormonally similar to pregnancy (increased levels of both estrogen and progesterone), women prefer less masculinized (Penton-Voak et al., 2000) or self-resembling faces (DeBruine, , that is, those indicating prosociality and willingness for investment, and healthier-looking faces , associated with lower risks of infection. ...
... Across species, genders, and cultures, f0 depends in part on learned factors, including the phonetic and phonologic structure of the language being spoken 20 and on the extralinguistic uses of voice quality shared by a given group of speakers. 21 F0 also depends on the speaker's anatomy 22−26 and physiology, 27,28 and thus can reliably signal physical size 18,29 along with a speaker's emotional state, 30,31 personality, 7 sex, 32 age, 21 attractiveness, 33,34 and threat potential, 19 in addition to leadership status. 17,35,36 Pitch, the perceptual correlate of f0, has been shown to influence listeners' choice of a leader, 37−40 and is exploited by listeners according to a "frequency code." ...
Objectives/hypotheses:
Charismatic leaders use vocal behavior to persuade their audience, achieve goals, arouse emotional states, and convey personality traits and leadership status. This study investigates voice fundamental frequency (f0) and sound pressure level (SPL) in female and male French, Italian, Brazilian, and American politicians to determine which acoustic parameters are related to cross-gender and cross-cultural common vocal abilities, and which derive from culture-, gender-, and language-specific vocal strategies used to adapt vocal behavior to listeners' culture-related expectations.
Study design:
Speech corpora were collected for two formal communicative contexts (leaders address followers or other leaders) and one informal communicative context (dyadic interaction), based on the persuasive goals inherent in each context and on the relative status of the listeners and speakers. Leaders' acoustic voice profiles were created to show differences in f0 and SPL manipulation with respect to speakers' gender and language in each communicative context.
Results:
Cross-gender and cross-language similarities in manipulation of average f0 and in f0 and SPL ranges occurred in all communicative contexts. Patterns of f0 manipulation were shared across genders and cultures, suggesting this dimension might be biologically based and is exploited by leaders to convey dominance. Ranges for f0 and SPL seemed to be affected by the communicative context, being wider or narrower depending on the persuasive goal. Results also showed language- and speaker-specific differences in the acoustic manipulation of f0 and SPL over time.
Conclusions:
These findings are consistent with the idea that specific charismatic leaders' vocal behaviors depend on a fine combination of vocal abilities that are shared across cultures and genders, combined with culturally- and linguistically-filtered vocal strategies.
... Vocal, non-verbal behaviors such as prosody, tone, loudness, breathiness, accent, pitch envelope, and tempo are all parameters that are most often unconsciously controlled when speaking, but they implicitly convey a great deal of information. For instance, pitch intervals can reveal changes in mood [8] or hormone levels [9], tempo information can be a marker of depression [10]. Prosody and especially pitch accentuation can also be used to modify semantic content [11]. ...
Changing the way one hears one’s own voice, for instance by adding delay or shifting the pitch in real-time, can alter vocal qualities such as speed, pitch contour, or articulation. We created new types of auditory feedback called Speech Companions that generate live musical accompaniment to the spoken voice. Our system generates harmonized chorus effects layered on top of the speaker’s voice that change chord at each pseudo-beat detected in the spoken voice. The harmonization variations follow predeter-mined chord progressions. For the purpose of this study we generated two versions: one following a major chord progression and the other one following a minor chord progression. We conducted an evaluation of the effects of the feedback on speakers and we present initial findings assessing how different musical modulations might potentially affect the emotions and mental state of the speaker as well as semantic content of speech, and musical vocal parameters.
... We did not assess menstrual cycle phase in female raters. Although early studies (Feinberg et al., 2006;Puts, 2005Puts, , 2006 suggested that women's preferences for masculine voices change over the ovulatory cycle, two recent large, well-powered within-subjects studies failed to replicate this effect (Jünger et al., 2018). Hence, if there is an effect of cycle phase on women's preferences for male fo, the effect is likely to be undetectable in a between-subjects analysis of a sample of the present size. ...
Pitch is the most perceptually salient feature of the voice, yet it is approximately five standard deviations lower in men than in women, a degree of sexual dimorphism exceeding that of all extant nonhuman apes. Evidence from Western samples suggests that low-frequency vocalizations may have augmented male mating success ancestrally by intimidating competitors and/or attracting mates. However, data are lacking from small-scale societies. We therefore investigated sexual selection on male pitch (measured by fundamental frequency, fo) in a population of Bolivian forager-horticulturists, the Tsimané. We found that experimentally lowering fo in audio clips of men speaking increased perceptions of fighting ability but did not affect perceptions of prestige and decreased their attractiveness to women. Further, men with lower speaking fo reported higher numbers of offspring, and this was mediated by the reproductive rates of men's wives, suggesting that men with lower fo achieved higher reproductive success by having access to more fertile mates. These results thus provide new evidence that men's fo has been shaped by intrasexual competition.
... In particular, those with attractive voices have their first sexual intercourse earlier than their peers and they usually have more affairs and sexual partners (Hughes et al. 2004). The male voices with medium or lower fundamental frequency (pitch) are more attractive for women (Collins 2000;Hodges-Simeon et al. 2010, 2011Riding et al. 2006;Zuckerman and Miyake 1993), and women prefer low pitched male voices (Feinberg et al. 2006;Puts 2005). According to some studies, males as well as females perceive low voices as sexy and use a lower pitched voice when speaking to the more attractive, opposite-sex person (Hughes et al. 2002(Hughes et al. , 2010Tuomi and Fischer 1979). ...
Various physical characteristics of a partner—visual, auditory, tactile and kinetic, olfactory, and gustatory—can affect human mate choice and romantic attraction. Evolutionary factors, as well as socioeconomic and cultural parameters play their role in these sensory preferences. A series of studies in societies varying in social, economic, and cultural parameters (10 samples in six countries with 2740 participants in total) explored cross-cultural similarities and differences of sensory preferences that people have in their romantic attraction. The results revealed that social development of countries and their cultural parameters allow prediction of preferences of certain sensory parameters in one’s romantic partner’s appearance. The most general distinctions of sensory preferences are in the societies with different degree of modernization, along with corresponding social and cultural parameters. The stable biologically and evolutionarily determined characteristics of physical appearance, such as smell, skin, body, etc., are important for one’s sensory preferences in romantic attraction in less modernized societies, which are characterized by greater power distance, lower individualism, indulgence, and emancipative values. On the other hand, the characteristics of romantic partner’s appearance, which are more flexible and easier to change, such as expressive behavior, dress, dance, etc., are more important in more modernized societies with lower Power Distance, high value of Individualism, Indulgence, and Emancipation.
Cette étude porte sur le français langue première et vise deux objectifs : comparer la conscience morphologique (CM) de bilingues et monolingues ; déterminer la contribution de la CM à la lecture et préciser si elle est modérée par le bilinguisme. La CM est mesurée par des tâches de complètement de phrases par une forme fléchie ou dérivée et d’extraction de la base, et la lecture par des tests standardisés (EVALEC et Alouette). Soixante-neuf bilingues français-portugais en 1 re , 3 e et 5 e année ont été comparées à 69 monolingues. Les résultats montrent systématiquement une supériorité bilingue en CM et une contribution de celle-ci à la lecture-fluence en 1 re année et à la lecture-précision aux niveaux suivants, pour les bilingues comme pour les monolingues. Ces résultats approfondissent la notion d’avantage bilingue et le rôle de la CM en lecture en particulier sur la précision en lecture.
Life in societies has evolved as a response of organisms to environmental conditions. Dominance hierarchy forms an inner structure of a society which allows society members to stay together without repeated fighting. Access to resources is provided by hierarchical status. In the absence of resources, the lowest ranking individuals are the most at risk. Certain patterns of dominance hierarchy persist in modern people in Euro-American societies. Moreover, special patterns have occurred, such as parallel membership in various subgroups, voluntary access to some of the subgroups, reverse hierarchy, and tendencies towards equality. In spite of these changes, hierarchy still influences the life of an individual. The probability of survival, reproduction, communication and transfer of information may serve as examples. Both high hierarchical disparity and isolation cause stress and health problems. Feelings of guilt, fear, and stress can be used as markers of a harmful disparity. Warning signs include the lack of supportive interpersonal relationships, prestige, social norms, and cultural products that could mitigate the hierarchical difference. In this review, we address the principles and functioning of dominance hierarchy, describe the structure of hierarchy in modern societies, and explain how the rank of the individual is determined and shapes the life of a person. We briefly summarize the basic patterns of dominant and submissive behaviour. The rank of the individual is predictable and so is the behaviour connected to his/her rank. This allows us to predict where particular aid and attention are required.
Literature on psychological function of testosterone in humans has emphasized its association with such traits as aggressiveness and impulsivity. In addition, increasing number of studies have shown the linkage between testosterone level and individual difference in the strength of preference for other’s sexually dimorphic traits. According to theorists in the field of evolutionary psychology, the preference pattern for sexual dimorphisms had evolved as an adaptive mechanism to increase the odds of reproductive success. But, so far, there are few systematic syntheses of literatures to validate such evolutionary explanation from the perspective of androgenic function. This chapter aims to give an overview of the existing findings on the association between testosterone and preference pattern in humans and discuss their implications for evolutionary explanation of human attractiveness perception.
The interface of sexual behavior and evolutionary psychology is a rapidly growing domain, rich in psychological theories and data as well as controversies and applications. With nearly eighty chapters by leading researchers from around the world, and combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference work in the field. Providing a broad yet in-depth overview of the various evolutionary principles that influence all types of sexual behaviors, the handbook takes an inclusive approach that draws on a number of disciplines and covers nonhuman and human psychology. It is an essential resource for both established researchers and students in psychology, biology, anthropology, medicine, and criminology, among other fields. Volume 1: Foundations of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology addresses foundational theories and methodological approaches.
Much of evolutionary psychology has focused on species-typical behavior or sex differences. However, recent attention has turned to considering the role of individual differences in shaping human behavior, in particular in the realm of sexual strategies. While some research still focused broadly on sex differences, there is a growing body of work that examines within-sex differences in sexual strategies. This work includes genetic and environmental influences on individual differences factors including flexible responses to ecological contingencies such as sex ratio and mortality rates. These within-sex individual differences can be divided into directly selected individual differences in mating strategies (genetically influenced biases toward developing longer-term or shorter-term mating relationships), indirectly selected individual differences in mating strategies (variations in mating strategy that might be influenced developmentally by individual differences in strategically relevant traits), indirectly selected individual differences in mating strategies that are influenced developmentally by external environmental contingencies (which could include environmental unpredictability or resource scarcity), and combinations of all three acting concurrently in one individual. This chapter will examine all three options and some of the evidence collected to date on their role.
The interface of sexual behavior and evolutionary psychology is a rapidly growing domain, rich in psychological theories and data as well as controversies and applications. With nearly eighty chapters by leading researchers from around the world, and combining theoretical and empirical perspectives, The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference work in the field. Providing a broad yet in-depth overview of the various evolutionary principles that influence all types of sexual behaviors, the handbook takes an inclusive approach that draws on a number of disciplines and covers nonhuman and human psychology. It is an essential resource for both established researchers and students in psychology, biology, anthropology, medicine, and criminology, among other fields. Volume 1: Foundations of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology addresses foundational theories and methodological approaches.
Darwin found that many animals had characteristics that were difficult to explain in terms of natural selection (i.e., the gradual process in which organisms better adapted to their environment survive and reproduce more successfully over sufficiently long time periods). He proposed a new selective force, sexual selection, which refers to the process generated by differential sexual access to opposite-sex mates. The process of sexual selection, in its classic conceptualization, consisted of two components: male–male competition, resulting in built-in weapons, and female choice, resulting in ornaments. Following Darwin, sexual selection is often divided into two forms: (1) intrasexual selection, in which members of one sex, most often males, compete with one another to gain sexual access to opposite-sex mates; and (2) intersexual selection, in which individuals of one sex, most often females, choose among individuals of the opposite sex as mates. The two forms of sexual selection have been investigated in humans across cultures, producing a large body of work on psychological similarities and differences between women and men in the context of mating. Post-mating sexual selection and its effect on sexual psychology have also gained increasing research attention in the last two decades. Two post-mating strategies in sexual selection are discussed: sperm competition (the competition between the sperm of two or more males to fertilize the egg(s) of a single female) and mate guarding (behaviors used to maintain reproductive opportunities and sexual access to a mate). Previous applications of sexual selection to sexual psychology and future directions in integration of multiple perspectives in evolutionary social sciences are discussed.
Studies indicate that individuals preferring masculinity/femininity in one domain also prefer it in other domains. Heterosexual men and women and gay men have reported consistent preferences for masculinity/femininity across the faces and voices of their preferred sex. This study explored the femininity preferences of 417 Chinese lesbian and bisexual women in terms of face, voice pitch, vocal tract length, and personality traits and explored the effect of sexual self-labels (femme, butch, and androgyne) on these preferences. We found that lesbian and bisexual women showed a stronger preference for feminized faces, voice pitch, vocal tract length, and personality traits than masculinized versions, and these preferences were highly consistent across the four domains. Moreover, femininity preference was moderated by sexual self-labels, with butches preferring more feminine voice pitch, vocal tract length, and personality traits than femmes and androgynes. However, no significant difference was found for facial femininity preferences among different sexual self-labels. These findings present evidence of consistent femininity preference across visual, auditory, and personality traits and suggest that, regardless of sexual orientation, multiple cues may be used together when determining the attractiveness of individuals. Furthermore, these results support the hypothesis that the partner preference of lesbian and bisexual women mirrors that of heterosexual men.
Researchers focus on non-verbal communication to better understand how relationships of various types are initiated, maintained, deepened, and sometimes terminated. Non-verbal communication is typically less filtered than verbal communication, thus non-verbal cues often reveal the “truth” of what is happening inside a relationship. However, we know less about non-verbal cues in relationships in trouble—ones that experience turmoil. Turmoil emerges in relationships going through turbulence, defined as periods of uncertainty and flux in partner interdependence during significant relationship transitions. Non-verbal communication central to romantic relationships experiencing turmoil and turbulence is the focus of this chapter, with specific attention paid to touch/affection, proxemics, eye behaviour, vocalics, and dyadic synchrony.
Avatar identification is one of the most promising research areas in games user research. Greater identification with one's avatar has been associated with improved outcomes in the domains of health, entertainment, and education. However, existing studies have focused almost exclusively on the visual appearance of avatars. Yet audio is known to influence immersion/presence, performance, and physiological responses. We perform one of the first studies to date on avatar self-similar audio. We conducted a 2 x 3 (similar/dissimilar x modulation upwards/downwards/none) study in a Java programming game. We find that voice similarity leads to a significant increase in performance, time spent, similarity identification, competence, relatedness, and immersion. Similarity identification acts as a significant mediator variable between voice similarity and all measured outcomes. Our study demonstrates the importance of avatar audio and has implications for avatar design more generally across digital applications.
Robust gender differences exist in the acoustic correlates of clearly articulated speech, with females, on average, producing speech that is acoustically and phonetically more distinct than that of males. This study investigates the relationship between several acoustic correlates of clear speech and subjective ratings of vocal attractiveness. Talkers were recorded producing vowels in /bVd/ context and sentences containing the four corner vowels. Multiple measures of working vowel space were computed from continuously sampled formant trajectories and were combined with measures of speech timing known to co-vary with clear articulation. Partial least squares regression (PLS-R) modeling was used to predict ratings of vocal attractiveness for male and female talkers based on the acoustic measures. PLS components that loaded on size and shape measures of working vowel space—including the quadrilateral vowel space area, convex hull area, and bivariate spread of formants—along with measures of speech timing were highly successful at predicting attractiveness in female talkers producing /bVd/ words. These findings are consistent with a number of hypotheses regarding human attractiveness judgments, including the role of sexual dimorphism in mate selection, the significance of traits signalling underlying health, and perceptual fluency accounts of preferences.
Sexual selection appears to have shaped the acoustic signals of diverse species, including humans. Deep, resonant vocalizations in particular may function in attracting mates and/or intimidating same-sex competitors. Evidence for these adaptive functions in human males derives predominantly from perception studies in which vocal acoustic parameters were manipulated using specialist software. This approach affords tight experimental control but provides little ecological validity, especially when the target acoustic parameters vary naturally with other parameters. Furthermore, such experimental studies provide no information about what acoustic variables indicate about the speaker—that is, why attention to vocal cues may be favored in intrasexual and intersexual contexts. Using voice recordings with high ecological validity from 160 male speakers and biomarkers of condition, including baseline cortisol and testosterone levels, body morphology and strength, we tested a series of pre-registered hypotheses relating to both perceptions and underlying condition of the speaker. We found negative curvilinear and negative linear relationships between male fundamental frequency (fo) and female perceptions of attractiveness and male perceptions of dominance. In addition, cortisol and testosterone negatively interacted in predicting fo, and strength and measures of body size negatively predicted formant frequencies (Pf). Meta-analyses of the present results and those from two previous samples confirmed that fonegatively predicted testosterone only among men with lower cortisol levels. This research offers empirical evidence of possible evolutionary functions for attention to men’s vocal characteristics in contexts of sexual selection.
Surprisingly, the study of human voice evolution has long been conducted without any reference to its biological function. Yet, following Darwin’s original concept, John Ohala was the first linguist to assume the functional role of sexual selection to explain vocal dimorphism in humans. Nevertheless, it is only at the very beginning of the millennial that the study of voice attractiveness developed, revealing that beyond its linguistic role, voice also conveys important psycho-socio-biological information that have a significant effect on the speaker’s mating and reproductive success. In this review article, our aim is to synthesize 20 years of research dedicated to the study of vocal preferences and to present the evolutionary benefits associated with such preferences.
Gender differences in language can be signs of cognitive differences, but can also by themselves be the cause for such differences. Females have a slight linguistic advantage over males, but effect sizes are small, and gender explains very little of the variance seen in the normal population (1%–2%). However, males outnumber females in the lowest 10th percentile in language tests (2:1), causing males to more often be diagnosed with developmental disorders, which rely on tests of language development.
Thus, gender differences in language are negligible, if you focus on the whole population, but if you focus on language deficits, gender differences are outspoken. Differences in voice and word use can be observed among the genders, making it possible to predict gender from these measures with a high degree of certainty. A subtle finding is that women use more first person pronouns. This is also observed in depression, which is more prevalent in females, opening up a potential link. Sex chromosome trisomies are often accompanied by language deficits, but the causes for this are not known. No gender differences are observed in the linguistic symptoms of neurodegenerative disorders. Poststroke aphasia is more prevalent among women than among men, but this seems to be an age-effect. A link between the brain and gender differences in language is thus missing.
Beyond the linguistic content it conveys, voice is one of the fundamental aspects of human communication. It conveys an array of bio-psycho-social information about a speaker and enables the expression of a wide range of emotional and affective states so as to elicit a whole range of auditory impressions. Such aspects are of a great importance in determining the outcomes of competitive and courtship interactions as they influence the access to mating partners and thus reproduction. Sexual selection, the mechanism that promotes biological and social traits that confer a reproductive benefit, provides an interesting theoretical framework to understand the functional role of the human voice from an evolutionary perspective. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the research that lies at the crossroad of the human voice and evolutionary biology.
Social attractiveness in human leaders is defined as charisma, the set of leadership characteristics such as vision, emotions, and dominance used by leaders to share beliefs, persuade listeners, and achieve goals. Charisma is expressed through voice quality manipulations reflecting physiologically-based qualities and culturally-acquired habits to display leadership. These manipulations are adapted by the speakers to the social environment where they intend to be perceived as charismatic. Charisma in political speech is observed here to unveil the biological abilities versus the culturally-mediated strategies in leaders’ speech according to different social contexts in which political communication takes place. Manipulations of vocal pitch, loudness, and phonation types are shown to cause both cross-cultural and culture-specific social attractiveness and consequently, are key factors for charisma effectiveness. Charismatic voice is then intentionally and unintentionally controlled by the human leaders to carry the perlocutionary salience of persuasive speech and influence listeners’ choice of leadership.
What information, if any, do our faces signal about our genetic quality, developmental history and personality? Most of us walk past hundreds or even thousands of faces every day. Why do most ‘plain Janes’ fail to register, while others cause gazes to linger and hearts to flutter? Are there universal rules of attraction, or is beauty always in the eye of the beholder? David Perrett, who has been at the forefront of research on the human face in recent decades, sets out to answer these questions in this comprehensive and accessible review of the ever-expanding evolutionary psychology of attraction.
Synopsis
A wide range of behaviors including reproductive behaviors of birds relies upon acoustic information. While there is a large body of literature documenting the gonadal hormone sensitivity ofnvocal production, only some studies showed gonadal hormone-sensitive auditory mechanisms of birds. Neuroethological studies of the auditory system of males and females are urgently needed to understand the dynamics of vocal communication of bird species in their natural environments.
Although it remains contentious, women's changeable attraction to masculine faces has been used to inform evolutionary ideas about human mating strategies. Typical experiments in this area use two-alternative-forced-choice (2afc) over a few pairs of similar images. The reliability of these measures is analysed suggesting that many studies have too few trials to be reliable. In the current experiment, fertility shifts in preferences for masculinised faces (and Africanised faces) were explored using both attractiveness ratings and a 2afc method over 80 pairs. The 2afc method showed a fertility shift in preferences whereas attractiveness ratings did not show a shift. Further, it was demonstrated how the size of the preferences shown in the 2afc tasks correlated with general face-matching performance. It is concluded that fertility is associated with improved face-processing accuracy and hence 2afc designs have poor validity as measures of masculinity preference. These issues of validity and reliability may have contributed to the contentious nature of fertility effects on preferences. Further, validity and reliability need to be considered in any study where a change in preference is identified using a comparative-preference task.
Objectives:
Despite a weak evidence base, daily use of mindfulness-based self-help smartphone applications (apps) is said to promote wellbeing. However, many do not use these apps in the way that app developers and mindfulness proponents recommend. We sought to determine whether the "Calm" app works, and whether it does so even when it is used intermittently.
Methods:
Employing a mixed-methods design, we recruited a self-selected sample of 269 students from a Scottish university (81% female, 84% white, mean age 23.89) to engage with a seven-day introductory mindfulness course, delivered using Calm, currently one of the most popular, yet under-researched, apps.
Results:
Daily course engagement was associated with significant gains in wellbeing (p ≤.001, d = 0.42), trait mindfulness (p ≤.001, d = 0.50) and self-efficacy (p ≤.014, d = 0.21). Intermittent course engagement was also associated with significant gains in wellbeing (p ≤.028, d = 0.34), trait mindfulness (p ≤.010, d = 0.47) and self-efficacy (p ≤.028, d = 0.32). This study is therefore the first to demonstrate that the Calm app is associated with positive mental health outcomes. It also shows that regular use is not essential. A thematic analysis of qualitative data supported these quantitative findings. However it also revealed that some participants had negative experiences with the app.
Conclusions for practice:
Mindfulness-based self-help apps such as Calm have the potential to both enhance and diminish users' wellbeing. Intermittent mindfulness practice can lead to tangible benefits. Therefore, mindfulness proponents should not recommend daily practice, should increase awareness of the potential for negative outcomes, and resist the idea that mindfulness practice works for everyone. Developers of mindfulness apps ought to make specific features customisable in order to enhance their effectiveness.
A study was conducted to determine the effects of vocal cues on judgments of dominance in an interpersonal influence context. Physical measures of human vocal cues and participant ratings of dominance were obtained from videotapes of actors delivering short influence messages. After controlling for linguistic and visual content of messages, results indicated that mean amplitude and amplitude standard deviation were positively associated with dominance judgments, whereas speech rate was negatively associated with dominance judgments. An unexpected interaction revealed that mean fundamental frequency (F0) was positively associated with dominance judgments for male speakers but not significantly associated with dominance judgments for female speakers. F0 standard deviation was not significantly associated with dominance judgments. Results support the conclusion that dominance judgments are inferred from multiple sources of information and that some vocal markers of dominance are more influential than others.
Sexual selection is a well established evolutionary process based on preferences for specific traits in one sex by members of the other sex. It is important in the evolution of morphological traits, and several sexually dimorphic traits in humans, such as facial hair and facial shape1, are assumed to be the outcome of such a process. Here we demonstrate that taller men are reproductively more successful than shorter men, indicating that there is active selection for stature in male partners by women.
During human evolutionary history, there were “trade-offs” between expending time and energy on child-rearing and mating, so both men and women evolved conditional mating strategies guided by cues signaling the circumstances. Many short-term matings might be successful for some men; others might try to find and keep a single mate, investing their effort in rearing her offspring. Recent evidence suggests that men with features signaling genetic benefits to offspring should be preferred by women as short-term mates, but there are trade-offs between a mate's genetic fitness and his willingness to help in child-rearing. It is these circumstances and the cues that signal them that underlie the variation in short- and long-term mating strategies between and within the sexes.
Previous research in North America has supported the view that male in-volvement in committed, romantic relationships is associated with lower testosterone (T) levels. Here, we test the prediction that undergraduate men involved in committed, romantic relationships (paired) will have lower T levels than men not involved in such relationships (unpaired). Further, we also test whether these differences are more apparent in samples collected later, rather than earlier, in the day. For this study, 107 undergraduate men filled out a questionnaire and collected one saliva sample (from which a subject's T level was measured) at various times across the day. As in pre-vious studies, men involved in committed, romantic relationships had lower salivary T levels, though only during later times of the day. Further-more, additional analysis of the variation among unpaired subjects indi-cated that men without prior relationship experience had lower T levels than experienced men. Finally, while paired men as a group had lower T levels than unpaired men, those men at the earliest stage (less than six months) of a current relationship had higher T levels than unpaired men as well as men in longer-term relationships. These results suggest that vari-ation in male testosterone levels may reflect differential behavioral alloca-tion to mating effort.
Experimenters examining male facial attractiveness have concluded that the attractive male face is (1) an average male face, (2) a masculinized male face, or (3) a feminized male face. Others have proposed that symmetry, hormone markers, and the menstrual phase of the observer are important variables that influence male attractiveness. This study was designed to resolve these issues by examining the facial preferences of 42 female volunteers at two different phases of their menstrual cycle. Preferences were measured using a 40-s QuickTime movie (1200 frames) that was designed to systematically modify a facial image from an extreme male to an extreme female configuration. The results indicate that females exhibit (1) a preference for a male face on the masculine side of average, (2) a shift toward a more masculine male face preference during the high-risk phase of their menstrual cycle, and (3) no shift in other facial preferences. An examination of individual differences revealed that women who scored low on a “masculinity” test (1) showed a larger menstrual shift, (2) had lower self-esteem, and (3) differed in their choice of male faces for dominance and short-term mates. The results are interpreted as support for a hormonal theory of facial attractiveness whereby perceived beauty depends on an interaction between displayed hormone markers and the hormonal state of the viewer.
Accuracy and simplicity of analytical expressions for the relations between frequency and critical bandwidth as well as critical-band rate (in Bark) are assessed for the purpose of applications in speech perception research and in speech technology. The equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB) is seen as a measure of frequency resolution, while the classical critical-band rate is considered a measure of tonotopic position. For the conversion of frequency to critical-band rate, and vice versa, the inversible formula z=[26.81/(1+1960/f )]–0.53 is proposed. Within the frequency range of the perceptually essential vowel formants (0.2–6.7 kHz), it agrees to within ±0.05 Bark with the Bark scale, originally published in the form of a table.
For a cohort of military officers, graduates of the class of 1950 of the United States Military Academy at West Point, dominant facial appearance was a cosnistent and important predictor of rank attainment at the academy and - for those who graduated from staff college - for high final rank. For men performing below the average, however, dominant facial appearance was a handicap for promotion. High rank came with high fitness. Thus, facial dominance can be an evolutionarily stable honest signal of dominant behavior, a crucial dimension of the potential for high stastus in a male dominance hierarchy. These findings may apply also to civilian populations.
To study the effect of body fat distribution in women of reproductive age on fecundity.
Prospective cohort study of all women who had entered a donor insemination programme.
One fertility clinic serving a large part of the midwest of the Netherlands.
Of 542 women attending the clinic for artificial insemination for the first time, 500 women were eligible for study.
Probability of conception per cycle and number of insemination cycles before pregnancy or stopping treatment.
A 0.1 unit increase in waist-hip ratio led to a 30% decrease in probability of conception per cycle (hazard ratio 0.706; 95% confidence interval 0.562 to 0.887) after adjustment for age, fatness, reasons for artificial insemination, cycle length and regularity, smoking, and parity. Increasing age was significantly related to lower fecundity (p < 0.05); very lean and obese women were less likely to conceive (p < 0.10) as were women with subfertile partners (p < 0.10). All other exposure variables were not significantly related to fecundity.
Increasing waist-hip ratio is negatively associated with the probability of conception per cycle, before and after adjustment for confounding factors. Body fat distribution in women of reproductive age seems to have more impact on fertility than age or obesity.
The changes in the male voice in relation to the biological characteristics of puberty were assessed longitudinally in 26 boys. Speaking and singing fundamental frequencies were analysed in relation to the Tanner staging of puberty, saliva testosterone levels, and the Cooksey classification of voice analysis. There were abrupt changes in voice characteristics between Tanner stages G3 and G4 and more gradually from stages C3 to C5 of Cooksey. Although testosterone concentrations were not predictive of the changes, there was a correlation with testis volume. Voice fundamental frequencies were seen to change abruptly in late puberty, in contrast with previous studies. There is a good correlation between the Tanner and Cooksey methods of classification during male puberty.
Magnetic resonance imaging was used to quantify the vocal tract morphology of 129 normal humans, aged 2-25 years. Morphometric data, including midsagittal vocal tract length, shape, and proportions, were collected using computer graphic techniques. There was a significant positive correlation between vocal tract length and body size (either height or weight). The data also reveal clear differences in male and female vocal tract morphology, including changes in overall vocal tract length and the relative proportions of the oral and pharyngeal cavity. These sex differences are not evident in children, but arise at puberty, suggesting that they are part of the vocal remodeling process that occurs during puberty in males. These findings have implications for speech recognition, speech forensics, and the evolution of the human speech production system, and provide a normative standard for future studies of human vocal tract morphology and development.
Secondary sexual characteristics may indicate quality of the immune system and therefore a preference for masculinity may confer genetic benefits to offspring; however, high masculinity may be associated with costs of decreased paternal investment. The current study examined women's preferences for masculinity in male faces by using computer graphics to allow transformation between feminine and masculine versions of individual male faces. We found that preferences for masculinity are increased when women either have a partner or are considering a short-term relationship. Such preferences are potentially adaptive, serving to: (i) maximize parental investment and cooperation in long-term relationships by biasing choices towards feminine faced males, and (ii) maximize possible good-gene benefits of short-term or extra-pair partners by biasing choices towards masculine faced males. We also found that individuals using oral contraception do not show the above effects, indicating that such hormonal intervention potentially disrupts women's choices for evolutionarily relevant benefits from males.
Exaggerated sexual dimorphism and symmetry in human faces have both been linked to potential 'good-gene' benefits and have also been found to influence the attractiveness of male faces. The current study explores how female self-rated attractiveness influences male face preference in females using faces manipulated with computer graphics. The study demonstrates that there is a relatively increased preference for masculinity and an increased preference for symmetry for women who regard themselves as attractive. This finding may reflect a condition-dependent mating strategy analogous to behaviours found in other species. The absence of a preference for proposed markers of good genes may be adaptive in women of low mate value to avoid the costs of decreased parental investment from the owners of such characteristics.
Recent evidence suggests that certain features on the human face indicate hormonal levels during growth, and that women judge the attractiveness of potential partners based on the appearance of these features. One entrenched notion is male facial features that are affected by testosterone are used as direct cues in mate preference. Testosterone may be particularly revealing as it is purported to be an honest indicator of male fitness. Increased testosterone may impose an immunocompetence handicap on the bearer and only the best males can carry this handicap. To date, tests of this theory have been indirect, and have relied on digital manipulations that represent unrealistic continuums of masculine and feminine faces. We provide a much more direct test by manipulating digitally male faces to mimic known shape variation, caused by varying levels of testosterone through puberty. We produced a continuum of faces that ranged from low to high levels of testosterone in male faces and asked women to choose the points on the continuum that appeared most attractive and most physically dominant. Our data indicate that high testosterone faces reveal dominance. However, there is no evidence of directional selection for increased (or decreased) testosterone in terms of attractiveness to the opposite sex. We discuss the relevance and applicability of evolutionary interpretations of our data and, contrary to predictions, provide evidence of stabilizing selection acting on testosterone through mate preferences.
In some species, female condition correlates positively with preferences for male secondary sexual traits. Women's preferences for sexually dimorphic characteristics in male faces (facial masculinity) have recently been reported to covary with self-reported attractiveness. As women's attractiveness has been proposed to signal reproductive condition, the findings in human (Homo sapiens) and other species may reflect similar processes. The current study investigated whether the covariation between condition and preferences for masculinity would generalize to 2 further measures of female attractiveness: other-rated facial attractiveness and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR). Women with high (unattractive) WHR and/or relatively low other-rated facial attractiveness preferred more "feminine" male faces when choosing faces for a long-term relationship than when choosing for a short-term relationship, possibly reflecting diverse tactics in female mate choice.
Laser-induced pinpoint bulk damage of deuterated potassium dihydrogen phosphate at 351 nm is shown to depend on the propagation direction relative to the crystallographic axes and on growth temperature in addition to the previously reported dependence on continuous filtration. Pulse-length scaling is also consistent with earlier reports. The leading hypothesis for the cause of pinpoint damage is absorbing nanoparticle impurities, and our results are consistent with but not conclusive for that model. Advances in technology have led to greatly improved damage resistance.
Physical characteristics, such as breast size and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), function as important features used by human males to assess female attractiveness. Males supposedly pay attention to these features because they serve as cues to fecundity and health. Here, we document that women with higher breast-to-underbreast ratio (large breasts) and women with relatively low WHR (narrow waists) have higher fecundity as assessed by precise measurements of daily levels of 17-beta-oestradiol (E2) and progesterone. Furthermore, women who are characterized by both narrow waists and large breasts have 26% higher mean E2 and 37% higher mean mid-cycle E2 levels than women from three groups with other combinations of body-shape variables, i.e. low WHR with small breasts and high WHR with either large or small breasts. Such gains in hormone levels among the preferred mates may lead to a substantial rise in the probability of conception, thus providing a significant fitness benefit.
There is information in speech sounds about the length of the vocal tract; specifically, as a child grows, the resonators in the vocal tract grow and the formant frequencies of the vowels decrease. It has been hypothesized that the auditory system applies a scale transform to all sounds to segregate size information from resonator shape information, and thereby enhance both size perception and speech recognition [Irino and Patterson, Speech Commun. 36, 181-203 (2002)]. This paper describes size discrimination experiments and vowel recognition experiments designed to provide evidence for an auditory scaling mechanism. Vowels were scaled to represent people with vocal tracts much longer and shorter than normal, and with pitches much higher and lower than normal. The results of the discrimination experiments show that listeners can make fine judgments about the relative size of speakers, and they can do so for vowels scaled well beyond the normal range. Similarly, the recognition experiments show good performance for vowels in the normal range, and for vowels scaled well beyond the normal range of experience. Together, the experiments support the hypothesis that the auditory system automatically normalizes for the size information in communication sounds.
Previous studies demonstrating changes in women's face preferences have emphasized increased attraction to cues to possible indirect benefits (e.g. heritable immunity to infection) that coincides with periods of high fertility (e.g. the late follicular phase of the menstrual cycle). By contrast, here we show that when choosing between composite faces with raised or lowered apparent health, women's preferences for faces that are perceived as healthy are (i) stronger during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle than during the late follicular, fertile phase, (ii) stronger in pregnant women than in non-pregnant women and (iii) stronger in women using oral contraceptives than in women with natural menstrual cycles. Change in preference for male faces was greater for short- than long-term relationships. These findings indicate raised progesterone level is associated with increased attraction to facial cues associated with possible direct benefits (e.g. low risk of infection) and suggest that women's face preferences are influenced by adaptations that compensate for weakened immune system responses during pregnancy and reduce the risk of infection disrupting foetal development.
Facial dominance of West Point cadets, measured from their graduation portraits, is known to be related to cadets' ranks at
the military academy, but it has been reported to be unrelated to their ranks in later career (Mazur, Mazur & Keating 1984).
With improved methods of data collection and analysis, we show that cadets' facial dominance, while still unrelated to their
ranks at midcareer, is related to promotions in late career, 20 or more years after the portraits were taken. These results
suggest that the absence of physical features from current models of status attainment is a serious omission.
Differences exist between males and females in fat distribution, skeletal morphology, muscle mass, and body shape. We investigated sex differences in shoulder to hip ratios (SHR) and waist to hip ratios (WHR), and their relationships to different features of sexual behavior. Males with high SHR and females with low WHR reported sexual intercourse at an earlier age, more sexual partners, more extra-pair copulations (EPC), and having engaged in more instances of intercourse with people who were involved in another relationship (i.e., having themselves been EPC partners). The predictive value of these morphological features was highly sex-specific.
Body weight, length, and vocal tract length were measured for 23 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) of various sizes using radiographs and computer graphic techniques. linear predictive coding analysis of tape-recorded threat vocalizations were used to determine vocal tract resonance frequencies ("formants") for the same animals. A new acoustic variable is proposed, "formant dispersion," which should theoretically depend upon vocal tract length. Formant dispersion is the averaged difference between successive formant frequencies, and was found to be closely tied to both vocal tract length and body size. Despite the common claim that voice fundamental frequency (F0) provides an acoustic indication of body size, repeated investigations have failed to support such a relationship in many vertebrate species including humans. Formant dispersion, unlike voice pitch, is proposed to be a reliable predictor of body size in macaques, and probably many other species.
Dominance competition among males of the same group is characteristic for most primates including humans, with the outcome—rank—being positively associated with fitness. However, because we do not observe an evolutionary arms race toward hyperdominance in primate social systems, the evolution of ever more dominating behavior characteristics may be checked by increased costs in fitness to top rank. Empirical evidence for such costs, particularly in humans, however, is almost nonexistent. Here, for the first time, we can demonstrate for a cohort of male humans, military officers, all graduates of the class of 1950 of the U.S. Military Academy, constituting a closed and cohesive social group, that competitive qualities leading to top rank may have a negative effect on fitness.
In order to study the hormonal correlates of the tradeoff between mating and parenting effort in human males, we examined the salivary testosterone (T) levels of 58 Boston-area men who were either unmarried (n=29), married without children (n=14), or married with children (n=15). Additionally, we asked participants to complete a questionnaire that surveyed their demographic, marital, and parenting backgrounds. We tested the hypotheses that (1) T levels will be lower in married than in unmarried men and (2) married men with children will have lower T levels than unmarried men and married men without children. We also tested a series of hypotheses relating variation in parenting and spousal relationships to T. We found that married men with and without children had significantly lower evening T than unmarried men. No significant differences in T were found among the groups in morning samples. Among married men without children, higher scores on a “spousal investment” measure and more hours spent with a man's wife on his last day off work were both associated with lower T levels. We suggest that lower T levels during the day among fathers may facilitate paternal care in humans by decreasing the likelihood that a father will engage in competitive and/or mating behavior.
Research has failed to reach consensus on the characteristics of attractive male faces. Different studies have reported preferences for phenotypically average faces, and faces with both exaggerated and reduced sexual dimorphism. Recent studies demonstrate cyclic changes in female sexual behavior and preferences for odors and facial characteristics that may reflect conditional mating strategies. We employed computer graphic techniques to manipulate the “masculinity” or “femininity” of a composite male face by exaggerating or reducing the shape differences between female and male average faces. Five stimuli with varying levels of masculinity and femininity were presented in a national U.K. magazine, with a questionnaire. Female respondents in the follicular phase of their menstrual cycle (n = 55) were significantly more likely to choose a masculine face than those in menses and luteal phases (n = 84). This study provides further evidence that when conception is most likely, females prefer testosterone-related facial characteristics that may honestly advertise immunocompetence.
Women vary with respect to monogamous/polyandrous inclinations, as indexed by the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI). Possible sources of SOI variation include variation in perceptions relating to the utility of different mating tactics and variation in one's degree of masculinity/femininity, among other things. In three studies with undergraduate participants SOI, an index of self-perceived attractiveness and two measures of masculinization, namely scores on the Vandenberg Mental Rotation test (V-MRT) and 2D:4D digit ratios, were measured. Self-perceived attractiveness predicted SOI in the first study, but not in the second study. Right 2D:4D did predict SOI in the second study. In the third study, both self-perceived attractiveness and right 2D:4D predicted SOI, and so did V-MRT scores. However, the strongest single predictor of SOI in Study 3 was the reported amount spent on alcohol during the average month.
We investigated the relationship between ratings of voice attractiveness and sexually dimorphic differences in shoulder-to-hip ratios (SHR) and waist-to-hip ratios (WHR), as well as different features of sexual behavior. Opposite-sex voice attractiveness ratings were positively correlated with SHR in males and negatively correlated with WHR in females. For both sexes, ratings of opposite-sex voice attractiveness also predicted reported age of first sexual intercourse, number of sexual partners, number of extra-pair copulation (EPC) partners, and number of partners that they had intercourse with that were involved in another relationship (i.e., were themselves chosen as an EPC partner). Coupled with previous findings showing a relationship between voice attractiveness and bilateral symmetry, these results provide additional evidence that the sound of a person's voice may serve as an important multidimensional fitness indicator.
We investigated the relation between visual and vocal attractiveness in women as judged by men. We recorded 34 women speaking four vowels and measured the peak frequency, the first five harmonic frequencies, the first five formant frequencies and formant dispersion. The women were also photographed (head shot), several body measures were taken and their ages were recorded. The voices were played to male judges who were asked to assess the women's age and vocal attractiveness from the recording. The men were then asked to assess the attractiveness of the photographs. Men were in strong agreement on which was an attractive voice and face; and women with attractive faces had attractive voices. Higher-frequency voices were assessed as being more attractive and as belonging to younger women (the lowest frequency produced is a good indicator of age in women in general). Larger women had lower voices and were judged as having less attractive faces and voices. Taller women had narrower formant dispersion as predicted. The results imply that different measures of attractiveness are in agreement and signal similar qualities, such as female age, body size and possibly hormonal profile. Copyright 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
This paper investigates the relationship between formant frequencies and body size in human adults. In Experiment I, correlation coefficients were obtained between acoustic correlates of the five Spanish vowels uttered by 82 speakers as a function of speakers’ heights and weights. In Experiment II correlations were calculated from formant parameters obtained by means of a long-term average analysis of connected speech from 91 speakers. Results of both experiments showed that, in contrast to Fitch's (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 102 (1997) 1213) findings in macaque vocalizations, the relationship within sex between formant parameters and body size is very weak in human adults. At the same time, it is evident that correlations within the female group are greater than in male group. These results imply that the pattern of individual vocal tract development is relatively free from skeletal size constraints, due to the human descent of larynx from standard mammal position. This disassociation of vocal tract-body size is more important in human males.
We measured salivary testosterone levels and voice pitch, or fundamental frequency,among 61 male and 88 female college students. Higher levels of testosterone were significantlyassociated with lower pitched voices among males but not among females. The magnitude of theeffect was approximately the same as the magnitude of other relationships that have beenreported between testosterone and behavior. There are two plausible explanations of a linkbetween testosterone and pitch. One explanation is physiological, in which testosterone changesthe bulk, length, or tension of the vocal folds. The other is psychological, in which testosteroneaffects the vocal style that an individual uses as part of a social interaction strategy.
In human voices, low fundamental frequency is thought to be a cue to masculinity and reproductive capability and large vocal tracts are associated with large body size of the speaker. Female preferences for males with low fundamental frequencies and large vocal tract lengths are potentially adaptive. Although sexually dimorphic characteristics of male voices have been studied, the impact of manipulations of secondary sexual characteristics on preferences for male voices has not. We manipulated fundamental frequencies and apparent vocal tract lengths of young adult male voices, both independently and simultaneously, and assessed their impact on female ratings of masculinity, size, age and attractiveness. Lowering the fundamental frequencies and/or increasing apparent vocal tract lengths of male voices increased females' ratings of the masculinity, size and age of the speaker. Peer group females preferred male voices with (1) lowered fundamental frequencies to those with raised fundamental frequencies, and (2) original frequencies to male voices with raised fundamental frequencies and decreased apparent vocal tract lengths (a combined manipulation to reflect acoustic characteristics of 16-year-old male voices). This suggests that male voices with acoustic characteristics that reflect full sexual maturity may be attractive. Although no general preference was observed for male voices with increased or decreased apparent vocal tract lengths, female preferences for male voices with increased apparent vocal tract lengths were positively related to females' own body size. This latter finding may indicate assortative preferences for acoustic cues to body size.
Early work on loud calling in mammals emphasized the importance of dynamic characteristics such as calling rate as cues to fitness and fighting ability. In contrast, little is known of the potential for fine-scaled acoustic cues to provide receivers with direct information on fitness. Fundamental frequency has typically been considered a good potential indicator of body size in the literature, but resonance frequencies (formants), which should be constrained by the length of the vocal tract, have received less attention. We conducted a detailed acoustic analysis on an extensive database of roars from red deer stags, Cervus elaphus, in a free-ranging population to investigate which variables provided honest information on age, body weight and reproductive success. Although fundamental frequency was higher in young stags than in adults, it did not decrease with body weight within adults and source cues (i.e. those generated by the larynx) in general did not provide clear information on fitness-related characteristics. In contrast, minimum formant frequencies, reached during the part of the roar when the mobile larynx is most fully retracted towards the sternum, decreased with body weight and age and were strongly negatively correlated with our index of reproductive success. Such production-related acoustic cues to body size and fitness, rendered honest by an anatomical constraint limiting the downward movement of the larynx, provide receivers with accurate information that could be used to assess rivals and choose mates. Copyright 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
Salivary testosterone (ST) levels were measured in 84 boys aged 7.3-16.2 from the Edinburgh Growth Study. The correlation coefficient between matched plasma/saliva samples was 0.88. Six samples were collected over the course of one day from 0900 to 2100 h each month in the majority of the children for 4 consecutive months. Mean daily ST levels showed a significant rise between each pubertal stage (genital (G) and pubic hair (PH]. The rise in ST became more rapid once a mean testicular volume (MTV) of 10 ml had been reached. The diurnal rhythm was assessed by individual curve fitting on the log scale and by cosinor analysis. A rhythm was present prepubertally and developed into a pattern similar to that of the adult rhythm by stage G3. The monthly rate of rise of ST was greatest at stage G4. A significant rise in ST levels was detectable immediately prior to an increase in MTV to 3 ml. This allowed earlier recognition of the clinical onset of puberty at testicular volume of 3 ml, which in this group occurred at 10.9 (SD 0.9) years. ST is a non-invasive and sensitive method for the serial monitoring of gonadal function in the prepubertal and adolescent boy.
Body weight, length, and vocal tract length were measured for 23 rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) of various sizes using radiographs and computer graphic techniques. linear predictive coding analysis of tape-recorded threat vocalizations were used to determine vocal tract resonance frequencies ("formants") for the same animals. A new acoustic variable is proposed, "formant dispersion," which should theoretically depend upon vocal tract length. Formant dispersion is the averaged difference between successive formant frequencies, and was found to be closely tied to both vocal tract length and body size. Despite the common claim that voice fundamental frequency (F0) provides an acoustic indication of body size, repeated investigations have failed to support such a relationship in many vertebrate species including humans. Formant dispersion, unlike voice pitch, is proposed to be a reliable predictor of body size in macaques, and probably many other species.
Ultrasound measurements of the vocal folds were taken for a number of boys passing through puberty. The boys were grouped according to their pubertal stage as defined by Tanner and there was a gradual increase in the length of the vocal folds as puberty progressed. The fundamental frequency of the boys' speaking voice was recorded via laryngography and a good correlation between the length of the vocal folds and the frequency of the voice was seen. The sudden drop in frequency seen between Tanner stages 3 and 4 did not correlate with similar changes in the length of the vocal folds at this time but stroboscopic findings suggest a change in the structure and mass of the vocal folds at this time of maximum frequency change.
The objective of this study was to determine the effect of body fat distribution and hyperinsulinemia on the occurrence of ovulation. Fifty-six women (20-35 years old) either with overweight or obesity (body mass index >/=25) were studied. They were classified in two groups according to waist/hip ratio (WHR); one with predominance of adiposity in the upper body segment (n = 29, WHR >0.85) and the other with predominant adiposity in the lower body segment (n = 27, WHR </=0.85). Basal body temperature and serum progesterone were determined in each cycle during 6 months. Serum insulin levels were measured at baseline and 30, 60, 90, 120 and 180 min after a 75-gram oral glucose load. The mean insulin values in response to oral glucose load in patients with upper body segment obesity were significantly higher than those corresponding to women with lower body segment obesity. Furthermore, the ratio between ovulated cycles and all the cycles studied in patients with upper body segment obesity was significantly lower than that observed in patients with lower body segment obesity. Upper body obesity seems to affect the ovulatory process and this may be related to the presence of hyperinsulinemia.
In men, high levels of endogenous testosterone (T) seem to encourage behavior intended to dominate--to enhance one's status over--other people. Sometimes dominant behavior is aggressive, its apparent intent being to inflict harm on another person, but often dominance is expressed nonaggressively. Sometimes dominant behavior takes the form of antisocial behavior, including rebellion against authority and low breaking. Measurement of T at a single point in time, presumably indicative of a man's basal T level, predicts many of these dominant or antisocial behaviors. T not only affects behavior but also responds to it. The act of competing for dominant status affects male T levels in two ways. First, T rises in the face of a challenge, as if it were an anticipatory response to impending competition. Second, after the competition, T rises in winners and declines in losers. Thus, there is a reciprocity between T and dominance behavior, each affecting the other. We contrast a reciprocal model, in which T level is variable, acting as both a cause and effect of behavior, with a basal model, in which T level is assumed to be a persistent trait that influences behavior. An unusual data set on Air Force veterans, in which data were collected four times over a decade, enables us to compare the basal and reciprocal models as explanations for the relationship between T and divorce. We discuss sociological implications of these models.