Katarzyna Pisanski

Vocal indicators of body size in men and women: a meta-analysis

Animals often use acoustical cues, such as formant frequencies, to assess the size of potential mates and rivals. Reliable vocal cues to size may be under sexual selection. In most mammals and many other vertebrates, formants scale with vocal tract length allometrically and predict variation in size more reliably than fundamental frequency or pitch (F0). In humans, however, it is unclear from previous work how well voice parameters predict body size independently of age and sex. We conducted a meta-analysis to establish the strength of various voice–size relationships in adult men and women. We computed mean weighted correlations from 295 coefficients derived from 39 independent samples across five continents, including several novel and large cross-cultural samples from previously unpublished data. Where possible, we controlled for sample size, sample sex, mean age, geographical location, study year, speech type and measurement method, and ruled out publication bias. Eleven of 12 formant-based vocal tract length (VTL) estimates predicted mens and womens heights and weights significantly better than did F0. Individual VTL estimates explained up to 10% of the variance in height and weight, whereas F0 explained less than 2% and correlated only weakly with size within sexes. Statistically reliable size estimates from F0 required large samples of at least 618 men and 2140 women, whereas formant-based size estimates required samples of at least 99 men and 164 women. The strength of voice–size relationships varied by sample size, and in some cases sex, but was largely unaffected by other demographic and methodological variables. We confirm here that, analogous to many other vertebrates, formants provide the most reliable vocal cue to size in humans. This finding has important implications for honest signalling theory and the capacity for human listeners to estimate size from the voice.

Predatory journals recruit fake editor

An investigation finds that dozens of academic titles offered ‘Dr Fraud’ — a sham, unqualified scientist — a place on their editorial board. Katarzyna Pisanski and colleagues report.

Cross-Cultural Variation in Mate Preferences for Averageness, Symmetry, Body Size, and Masculinity

Sexual selection has greatly influenced the evolved biology, psychology, and culture of humans and favors individuals who choose healthy and fertile mates. Physical traits that cue quality are generally preferred and perceived as attractive. However, because such traits often involve cost-benefit trade-offs, mate preferences are expected to vary among cultures as a function of local ecology and social environment and among individuals as a function of one’s personal experiences and life history. As such, it is essential to understand how ontogenetic and environmental factors influence mate preferences that may be locally adaptive and context specific. Here the authors review a growing body of comparative research, demonstrating predictable patterns in men’s and women’s preferences for facial averageness, facial symmetry, stature, body mass, and facial and vocal masculinity or femininity both between and within cultures. The authors consider potential factors influencing variation in preferences that include resource availability, disease prevalence, paternal investment, visual experience, and cultural norms.

Changes in salivary estradiol predict changes in women's preferences for vocal masculinity

Although many studies have reported that womens preferences for masculine physical characteristics in men change systematically during the menstrual cycle, the hormonal mechanisms underpinning these changes are currently poorly understood. Previous studies investigating the relationships between measured hormone levels and womens masculinity preferences tested only judgments of mens facial attractiveness. Results of these studies suggested that preferences for masculine characteristics in mens faces were related to either womens estradiol or testosterone levels. To investigate the hormonal correlates of within-woman variation in masculinity preferences further, here we measured 62 womens salivary estradiol, progesterone, and testosterone levels and their preferences for masculine characteristics in mens voices in five weekly test sessions. Multilevel modeling of these data showed that changes in salivary estradiol were the best predictor of changes in womens preferences for vocal masculinity. These results complement other recent research implicating estradiol in womens mate preferences, attention to courtship signals, sexual motivation, and sexual strategies, and are the first to link womens voice preferences directly to measured hormone levels.

Men's judgments of women's facial attractiveness from two- and three-dimensional images are similar.

Although most research on human facial attractiveness has used front-facing two-dimensional (2D) images, our primary visual experience with faces is in three dimensions. Because face coding in the human visual system is viewpoint-specific, faces may be processed differently from different angles. Thus, results from perceptual studies using front-facing 2D facial images may not be generalizable to other viewpoints. We used rotating three-dimensional (3D) images of womens faces to test whether mens attractiveness ratings of womens faces from 2D and 3D images differed. We found a significant positive correlation between mens judgments of womens facial attractiveness from 2D and 3D images (r = 0.707), suggesting that attractiveness judgments from 2D images are valid and provide similar information about womens attractiveness as do 3D images. We also found that womens faces were rated significantly more attractive in 3D images than in 2D images. Our study verifies a novel method using 3D facial images, which may be important for future research on viewpoint-specific social perception. This method may also be valuable for the accurate measurement and assessment of facial characteristics such as averageness, identity, attractiveness, and emotional expression.

Voice-based assessments of trustworthiness, competence, and warmth in blind and sighted adults

The study of voice perception in congenitally blind individuals allows researchers rare insight into how a lifetime of visual deprivation affects the development of voice perception. Previous studies have suggested that blind adults outperform their sighted counterparts in low-level auditory tasks testing spatial localization and pitch discrimination, as well as in verbal speech processing; however, blind persons generally show no advantage in nonverbal voice recognition or discrimination tasks. The present study is the first to examine whether visual experience influences the development of social stereotypes that are formed on the basis of nonverbal vocal characteristics (i.e., voice pitch). Groups of 27 congenitally or early-blind adults and 23 sighted controls assessed the trustworthiness, competence, and warmth of men and women speaking a series of vowels, whose voice pitches had been experimentally raised or lowered. Blind and sighted listeners judged both men’s and women’s voices with lowered pitch as being more competent and trustworthy than voices with raised pitch. In contrast, raised-pitch voices were judged as being warmer than were lowered-pitch voices, but only for women’s voices. Crucially, blind and sighted persons did not differ in their voice-based assessments of competence or warmth, or in their certainty of these assessments, whereas the association between low pitch and trustworthiness in women’s voices was weaker among blind than sighted participants. This latter result suggests that blind persons may rely less heavily on nonverbal cues to trustworthiness compared to sighted persons. Ultimately, our findings suggest that robust perceptual associations that systematically link voice pitch to the social and personal dimensions of a speaker can develop without visual input.

Seven and up: individual differences in male voice fundamental frequency emerge before puberty and remain stable throughout adulthood

Voice pitch (the perceptual correlate of fundamental frequency, F0) varies considerably even among individuals of the same sex and age, communicating a host of socially and evolutionarily relevant information. However, due to the almost exclusive utilization of cross-sectional designs in previous studies, it remains unknown whether these individual differences in voice pitch emerge before, during or after sexual maturation, and whether voice pitch remains stable into adulthood. Here, we measured the F0 parameters of men who were recorded once every 7 years from age 7 to 56 as they participated in the British television documentary Up Series. Linear mixed models revealed significant effects of age on all F0 parameters, wherein F0 mean, minimum, maximum and the standard deviation of F0 showed sharp pubertal decreases between age 7 and 21, yet remained remarkably stable after age 28. Critically, mens pre-pubertal F0 at age 7 strongly predicted their F0 at every subsequent adult age, explaining up to 64% of the variance in post-pubertal F0. This finding suggests that between-individual differences in voice pitch that are known to play an important role in mens reproductive success are in fact largely determined by age 7, and may therefore be linked to prenatal and/or pre-pubertal androgen exposure.

Can blind persons accurately assess body size from the voice

Vocal tract resonances provide reliable information about a speakers body size that human listeners use for biosocial judgements as well as speech recognition. Although humans can accurately assess mens relative body size from the voice alone, how this ability is acquired remains unknown. In this study, we test the prediction that accurate voice-based size estimation is possible without prior audiovisual experience linking low frequencies to large bodies. Ninety-one healthy congenitally or early blind, late blind and sighted adults (aged 20–65) participated in the study. On the basis of vowel sounds alone, participants assessed the relative body sizes of male pairs of varying heights. Accuracy of voice-based body size assessments significantly exceeded chance and did not differ among participants who were sighted, or congenitally blind or who had lost their sight later in life. Accuracy increased significantly with relative differences in physical height between men, suggesting that both blind and sighted participants used reliable vocal cues to size (i.e. vocal tract resonances). Our findings demonstrate that prior visual experience is not necessary for accurate body size estimation. This capacity, integral to both nonverbal communication and speech perception, may be present at birth or may generalize from broader cross-modal correspondences.

Men's Preferences for Women's Femininity in Dynamic Cross-Modal Stimuli

Men generally prefer feminine womens faces and voices over masculine womens faces and voices, and these cross-modal preferences are positively correlated. Mens preferences for female facial and vocal femininity have typically been investigated independently by presenting soundless still images separately from audio-only vocal recordings. For the first time ever, we presented men with short video clips in which dynamic faces and voices were simultaneously manipulated in femininity/masculinity. Men preferred feminine mens faces over masculine mens faces, and preferred masculine mens voices over feminine mens voices. We found that men preferred feminine womens faces and voices over masculine womens faces and voices. Mens attractiveness ratings of both feminine and masculine faces were increased by the addition of vocal femininity. Also, mens attractiveness ratings of feminine and masculine voices were increased by the addition of facial femininity present in the video. Mens preferences for vocal and facial femininity were significantly and positively correlated when stimuli were female, but not when they were male. Our findings complement other evidence for cross-modal femininity preferences among male raters, and show that preferences observed in studies using still images and/or independently presented vocal stimuli are also observed when dynamic faces and voices are displayed simultaneously in video format.

Tennis grunts communicate acoustic cues to sex and contest outcome

Despite their ubiquity in human behaviour, the communicative functions of nonverbal vocalizations remain poorly understood. Here, we analysed the acoustic structure of tennis grunts, nonverbal vocalizations produced in a competitive context. We predicted that tennis grunts convey information about the vocalizer and context, similar to nonhuman vocal displays. Specifically, we tested whether the fundamental frequency (F0) of tennis grunts conveys static cues to a players sex, height, weight, and age, and covaries dynamically with tennis shot type (a proxy of body posture) and the progress and outcome of male and female professional tennis contests. We also performed playback experiments (using natural and resynthesized stimuli) to assess the perceptual relevance of tennis grunts. The F0 of tennis grunts predicted player sex, but not age or body size. Serve grunts had higher F0 than forehand and backhand grunts, grunts produced later in contests had higher F0 than those produced earlier, and grunts produced during contests that players won had a lower F0 than those produced during lost contests. This difference in F0 between losses and wins emerged early in matches, and did not change in magnitude as the match progressed, suggesting a possible role of physiological and/or psychological factors manifesting early or even before matches. Playbacks revealed that listeners use grunt F0 to infer sex and contest outcome. These findings indicate that tennis grunts communicate information about both the vocalizer and contest, consistent with nonhuman mammal vocalizations.