Attractiveness Judgments of F0-Manipulated Mandarin Voices Across Heterosexual and Homosexual Listener Groups

Chun He; Yingjia Han; Ziwenjun Chen

doi:10.70693/jlis.v1i1.698

Authors

Chun He Guangxi University
Yingjia Han Guangxi University
Ziwenjun Chen Dali University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.70693/jlis.v1i1.698

Keywords:

vocal attractiveness, fundamental frequency (F0), sexual orientation, social voice perception, Mandarin

Abstract

Fundamental frequency (F0) is a salient acoustic cue in voice perception, but how F0-related attractiveness judgments vary across listeners with different sexual orientations remains insufficiently understood. This study examined attractiveness ratings under controlled F0 manipulation in Mandarin voice stimuli produced by one male and one female announcer. Eighty adults were recruited: 20 heterosexual male, 20 heterosexual female, 20 homosexual male, and 20 homosexual female participants. An adaptive three-alternative forced-choice pretest with 12 listeners established a group-level F0 just-noticeable difference (JND) of 0.215 ERB. Seven F0 levels, from −3 to +3 JNDs around each speaker’s own baseline, were then presented three times in the main experiment. Because each listener group rated only the target-voice sex that matched its presumed attraction pattern, the study compares two observed listener–target configurations rather than fully crossing listener sex, sexual orientation, and target-voice sex. Linear mixed-effects models showed that attractiveness ratings for the male voice decreased as F0 increased in both heterosexual female and homosexual male listeners, with no reliable difference in slopes. For the female voice, ratings increased with F0 in both heterosexual male and homosexual female listeners, while the homosexual-female group additionally showed a significant nonlinear component, with a fitted maximum near +2.4 JND. These findings indicate that, within these two listener–target configurations and these two controlled source voices, F0-related attractiveness judgments generally followed target-sex-related directions, whereas between-group variation was more evident in response strength and curve shape. The study contributes to experimental research on social voice perception and provides a controlled Mandarin-language baseline for future cross-linguistic comparisons of vocal social evaluation; it does not itself test intercultural variation.

References

Anikin, A., Barreda, S., & Reby, D. (2024). A practical guide to calculating vocal tract length and scale-invariant formant patterns. Behavior Research Methods, 56, 5588–5604. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02288-x

Babel, M., McGuire, G., & King, J. (2014). Towards a more nuanced view of vocal attractiveness. PLOS ONE, 9(2), e88616. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0088616

Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01

Belyk, M., Horak, L., Beone, C., & McGettigan, C. (2026). Vocal attractiveness in homosexual and heterosexual listeners. Royal Society Open Science, 13(2), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251815

Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2025). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 6.4.46) [Computer software]. https://www.praat.org/

Borkowska, B., & Pawlowski, B. (2011). Female voice frequency in the context of dominance and attractiveness perception. Animal Behaviour, 82(1), 55–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.03.024

Bruckert, L., Bestelmeyer, P., Latinus, M., Rouger, J., Charest, I., Rousselet, G. A., Kawahara, H., & Belin, P. (2010). Vocal attractiveness increases by averaging. Current Biology, 20(2), 116–120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.034

Evans, S., Neave, N., Wakelin, D., & Hamilton, C. (2008). The relationship between testosterone and vocal frequencies in human males. Physiology & Behavior, 93(4–5), 783–788. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2007.11.033

Feinberg, D. R., Jones, B. C., Little, A. C., Burt, D. M., & Perrett, D. I. (2005). Manipulations of fundamental and formant frequencies influence the attractiveness of human male voices. Animal Behaviour, 69(3), 561–568. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2004.06.012

Feinberg, D. R., DeBruine, L. M., Jones, B. C., & Perrett, D. I. (2008). The role of femininity and averageness of voice pitch in aesthetic judgments of women’s voices. Perception, 37(4), 615–623. https://doi.org/10.1068/p5514

Fitch, W. T., & Giedd, J. (1999). Morphology and development of the human vocal tract: A study using magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106(3), 1511–1522. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.427148

Glasberg, B. R., & Moore, B. C. J. (1990). Derivation of auditory filter shapes from notched-noise data. Hearing Research, 47(1–2), 103–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-5955(90)90170-T

He, C., Tang, Q., & Xian, W. (2026). Acoustic and perceptual evidence relevant to sexual selection in human voice dimorphism. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1938866. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1938866

Heidari, S., Babor, T. F., De Castro, P., Tort, S., & Curno, M. (2016). Sex and Gender Equity in Research: Rationale for the SAGER guidelines and recommended use. Research Integrity and Peer Review, 1, 2. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-016-0007-6

Hodges-Simeon, C. R., Gaulin, S. J. C., & Puts, D. A. (2010). Different vocal parameters predict perceptions of dominance and attractiveness. Human Nature, 21(4), 406–427. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-010-9101-5

Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W. B., & Martin, C. E. (1948). Sexual behavior in the human male. Saunders.

Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B., & Christensen, R. H. B. (2017). lmerTest package: Tests in linear mixed effects models. Journal of Statistical Software, 82(13), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v082.i13

Lenth, R. V. (2025). emmeans: Estimated marginal means, aka least-squares means (Version 2.0.2) [Computer software]. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=emmeans

Pérez-Ramírez, M., Reby, D., & Puts, D. A. (2020). Fundamental frequency of the female's voice: A cross-country empirical study on its influence on social and sexual selection. Personality and Individual Differences, 160, 109937. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.109937

Pisanski, K., & Bryant, G. A. (2019). The evolution of voice perception. In N. S. Eidsheim & K. Meizel (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of voice studies (pp. 269–300). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199982295.013.29

Psychology Software Tools. (2021). E-Prime (Version 3.0) [Computer software]. https://pstnet.com/products/e-prime/

Puts, D. A. (2005). Mating context and menstrual phase affect women's preferences for male voice pitch. Evolution and Human Behavior, 26(5), 388–397. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2005.03.001

Puts, D. A., Gaulin, S. J. C., & Verdolini, K. (2006). Dominance and the evolution of sexual dimorphism in human voice pitch. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27(4), 283–296. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2005.11.003

Puts, D. A., Jones, B. C., & DeBruine, L. M. (2012). Sexual selection on human faces and voices. Journal of Sex Research, 49(2–3), 227–243. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2012.658924

R Core Team. (2025). R: A language and environment for statistical computing (Version 4.5.1) [Computer software]. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/

Smith, E., Junger, J., Pauly, K., Kellermann, T., Dernt, B., & Habel, U. (2019). Cerebral and behavioural response to human voices is mediated by sex and sexual orientation. Behavioural Brain Research, 356, 89–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2018.07.029

Titze, I. R. (1989). Physiologic and acoustic differences between male and female voices. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 85(4), 1699–1707. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.397959

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), e62397. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0062397

Zheng, Y., Compton, B. J., Heyman, G. D., & Jiang, Z. (2020). Vocal attractiveness and voluntarily pitch-shifted voices. Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(2), 170–175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.01.002