Does averaging voices influence attractiveness?

Vocal attractiveness influences important social outcomes. While most research on the acoustic parameters that influence vocal attractiveness has focused on the possible roles of sexually dimorphic characteristics of voices, such as fundamental frequency (i.e., pitch) and formant frequencies (i.e., a correlate of body size), other work has reported that increasing vocal averageness increases attractiveness. Here we investigated the roles these three characteristics play in judgments of the attractiveness of male and female voices. In Study 1, we found that increasing vocal averageness significantly decreased distinctiveness ratings, demonstrating that participants could detect manipulations of vocal averageness. However, in Study 2, we found no evidence that increasing averageness significantly increased attractiveness ratings of voices. In Study 3, we found that fundamental frequency was negatively correlated with male vocal attractiveness and positively correlated with female vocal attractiveness. By contrast with these results for fundamental frequency, vocal attractiveness and formant frequencies were not significantly correlated. Collectively, our results suggest that averageness may not necessarily influence attractiveness judgments of voices and are consistent with previous work reporting associations between attractiveness and voice pitch.

语音吸引力对重要的社会结果产生显著影响。尽管大多数关于影响语音吸引力的声学参数的研究集中于声音性二态特征的潜在作用，如基频（即音高）和共振峰频率（即身体大小的相关指标），但其他研究报道指出，提高语音的平均性可以提升吸引力。在本研究中，我们探讨了这三个特征在判断男性和女性语音吸引力中所扮演的角色。在第一项研究中，我们发现提高语音的平均性显著降低了独特性评分，表明参与者能够察觉到语音平均性的操纵。然而，在第二项研究中，我们没有发现提高平均性显著提升了语音吸引力评分的证据。在第三项研究中，我们发现基频与男性语音吸引力呈负相关，与女性语音吸引力呈正相关。与基频的结果形成对比，语音吸引力和共振峰频率之间并未发现显著的相关性。总体而言，我们的研究结果暗示平均性可能并不必然影响语音吸引力的判断，并与先前关于吸引力和声音音高之间相关性的研究结果相一致。