Share
Women with higher pitched voices are more attracted to men with deep voices. Along the same lines, prior studies have shown women with desirable waist-to-hip ratios and more beautiful faces find masculine faces more attractive:
Previous studies have found that indices of women’s attractiveness predict variation in their mate preferences. For example, objective measures of women’s attractiveness (waist-hip ratio and other-rated facial attractiveness) are positively related to the strength of their preferences for masculinity in men’s faces. Here, we examined whether women’s preferences for masculine characteristics in men’s voices were related to their own vocal characteristics. We found that women’s preferences for men’s voices with lowered (i.e., masculinized) pitch versus raised (i.e., feminized) pitch were positively associated with women’s own average voice pitch. Because voice pitch is positively correlated with many indices of women’s attractiveness, our findings suggest that the attractiveness of the perceiver predicts variation in women’s preferences for masculinity in men’s voices. Such attractiveness-contingent preferences may be adaptive if attractive women are more likely to be able to attract and/or retain masculine mates than relatively unattractive women are. Interestingly, the attractiveness-contingent masculinity preferences observed in our study appeared to be modulated by the semantic content of the judged speech (positively valenced vs. negatively valenced speech), suggesting that attractiveness-contingent individual differences in masculinity preferences do not necessarily reflect variation in responses to simple physical properties of the stimulus.
Source: “Women’s own voice pitch predicts their preferences for masculinity in men’s voices” from Behavioral Ecology (2010) 21 (4):767-772.
Join 25K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.
Related posts:
An easy way for women to be more attractive to men and men to be more attractive to women
Are beautiful people more intelligent?
Do we change our voice when we talk to attractive people of the opposite sex?