In recent years, though, science has told us that our seemingly arbitrary tastes often reflect unconscious choices that are based upon very relevant biological traits. In general, we find symmetric faces more attractive , likely because they reflect a healthy underlying genome.
Women typically prefer men with more distinctively masculine facial features because they indicate high testosterone levels and physical strength , while men prefer women with exaggerated youthful features , possibly because of the evolutionary advantages a male gets when coupling with a younger mate. Despite all this research into our visual appearances, though, scientists have done relatively little digging into our auditory preferences when it comes to sexual attraction.
Specifically, why do women generally prefer men with deep voices, and men prefer women with higher ones? Researchers from University College London found that, at least among a sample of 32 participants, high-pitched female voices females were found to be attractive because they indicated the speaker had a small body.
The team also considered the fact that members of the more recent group from the s were using the contraceptive pill, which could have led to hormonal changes that could have altered the vocal chords.
Yet the drop in pitch remained even when the team excluded those women from their sample. Instead, the researchers speculated that the transformation reflects the rise of women to more prominent roles in society, leading them to adopt a deeper tone to project authority and dominance in the workplace.
Former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher employed a professional speech coach to help her to sound more authoritative, deliberately dropping the pitch of her voice by a massive 60 Hz. And while most of us may not go to such great lengths, recent research shows that we all spontaneously adapt the pitch of our voices to signal our perceived social rank.
In one experiment , Joey Cheng of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign asked groups of four to seven participants to perform an unusual decision-making task that involved ranking the items that an astronaut would need to survive a disaster on the moon. For both men and women, the people who had lowered their pitch ended up with a higher social rank, and were considered to be more dominant in the group, while the people who had raised their pitch were considered to be more submissive and had a lower social rank.
Many animals, such as male frogs, lower their vocal pitch to assert their dominance over others nearby Credit: Getty Images. Whether consciously or unconsciously, women appear to be adapting their vocal profile to suit the opportunities that are available to them today.
The women generally preferred deeper "masculinised" voices to the higher-pitched, more "feminine" recordings. But when the men were saying "I really like you", it was the women who had the highest-pitched voices who had the strongest preference for men with deep voices. When the statement was "I really don't like you", the relationship between the woman's own voice pitch and her preference disappeared. So women aren't just attracted to a deep voice, lads.
You have to say nice things too. The preference didn't depend on the woman's age, what point she had reached in her menstrual cycle or whether she was on the pill.
Voice pitch indicates a woman's average oestrogen levels and so might be a cue advertising her health and fertility. The pitch of a woman's voice is highest at ovulation and her preference for men with "masculine" traits is also at its greatest.
Previous research at the Face Research Lab has shown that women perceive lower male voices to be more masculine. The researchers suggest that it may be adaptive for a woman with a high-pitched, attractive voice to prefer deep male voices because she may be more able to attract and hang onto a masculine partner than women with lower, less attractive voices.
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