Xu, Y;
Lee, A;
Wu, W-L;
Liu, X;
Birkholz, P;
(2013)
Human vocal attractiveness as signaled by body size projection.
PLoS One
, 8
(4)
, Article e62397. 10.1371/journal.pone.0062397.
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Abstract
Voice, as a secondary sexual characteristic, is known to affect the perceived attractiveness of human individuals. But the underlying mechanism of vocal attractiveness has remained unclear. Here, we presented human listeners with acoustically altered natural sentences and fully synthetic sentences with systematically manipulated pitch, formants and voice quality based on a principle of body size projection reported for animal calls and emotional human vocal expressions. The results show that male listeners preferred a female voice that signals a small body size, with relatively high pitch, wide formant dispersion and breathy voice, while female listeners preferred a male voice that signals a large body size with low pitch and narrow formant dispersion. Interestingly, however, male vocal attractiveness was also enhanced by breathiness, which presumably softened the aggressiveness associated with a large body size. These results, together with the additional finding that the same vocal dimensions also affect emotion judgment, indicate that humans still employ a vocal interaction strategy used in animal calls despite the development of complex language.
Type: | Article |
---|---|
Title: | Human vocal attractiveness as signaled by body size projection |
Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0062397 |
Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0062397 |
Language: | English |
Additional information: | © 2013 Xu et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences |
URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1391689 |
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