Faking it: deliberately altered voice pitch and vocal attractiveness Paul J. Fraccaro a , Jillian J. M. O’Connor a , Daniel E. Re b , Benedict C. Jones c , Lisa M. DeBruine c , David R. Feinberg a, * a Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada b School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, U.K. c Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, U.K. article info Article history: Received 21 March 2012 Initial acceptance 9 May 2012 Final acceptance 28 September 2012 Available online xxx MS. number: A12-00235R Keywords: functional honesty honest signal vocal attractiveness vocal dominance voice pitch Previous research has shown that men prefer higher-pitched women’s voices and women prefer lower- pitched men’s voices. However, both men and women can modulate their voice pitch, which can affect others’ perceptions of the voice. Here we tested whether deliberate pitch changes affect speakers’ vocal attractiveness. Our results suggest that deliberately exaggerating sex-typical voice pitch (i.e. lowering pitch in men and raising pitch in women) does not necessarily increase vocal attractiveness but that exaggerating sex-atypical voice pitch (i.e. raising pitch in men and lowering pitch in women) may decrease vocal attractiveness. By contrast with these findings for attractiveness, listeners interpreted lowered-pitch voices as sounding more dominant than habitually pitched voices in same-sex voices, which may aid in avoiding the costs associated with intrasexual competition. These findings suggest that the way humans perceive deliberate manipulations of voice pitch can mitigate the potential costs of using an alterable cue to assess attractiveness, and that functional honesty may only evolve in domains where such honesty would be favourable to perceivers. Ó 2012 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Fundamental frequency is tied to the rate of vibration of the vocal folds (see Titze 1994 for an overview of vocal production). Here we refer to the perception of fundamental frequency and/or the resulting harmonic spectrum as ‘pitch’. Previous research has demonstrated that, in general, men prefer relatively high-pitched women’s voices (Collins & Missing 2003; Feinberg et al. 2008b; Jones et al. 2008, 2010; Borkowska & Pawlowski 2011; Puts et al. 2011). Men’s attractiveness ratings of women’s voices are posi- tively correlated with women’s voice pitch (Collins & Missing 2003; Feinberg et al. 2008b), and men prefer women’s voices manipu- lated to have higher voice pitch to voices manipulated to have lower voice pitch (Feinberg et al. 2008b; Apicella & Feinberg 2009; Jones et al. 2010; O’Connor et al. 2011; Puts et al. 2011). Conversely, women prefer lower-pitched men’s voices (Collins 2000; Feinberg et al. 2005; Hodges-Simeon et al. 2010). Women’s attractiveness judgments of men’s voices are negatively associated with men’s voice pitch (Collins 2000), and women prefer experimentally manipulated lower-pitched voices to higher-pitched voices (Feinberg et al. 2005; Puts 2005; Vukovic et al. 2008, 2010a, 2011; Hodges-Simeon et al. 2010; Jones et al. 2010; O’Connor et al. 2011 , 2012). Preferences for exaggerated sex-typical traits may reflect pref- erences for high-quality mates (Thornhill & Gangestad 1999; Feinberg 2008). Masculine characteristics are positively related to indices of long-term health (Rhodes et al. 2003; Thornhill & Gangestad 2006; Gangestad et al. 2010) and physical strength (Fink et al. 2007), and may advertise the robustness of an individ- ual’s immune system (Moore et al. 2011; Rantala et al. 2012). Moreover, among men, exaggerated sex-typical (i.e. masculine) vocal and facial characteristics have positive effects on perceptions of dominance (Perrett et al. 1998; Feinberg et al. 2006; Puts et al. 2006, 2007 , 2012; Jones et al. 2010; Watkins et al. 2010). Since vocal and facial masculinity are positively correlated among men (Saxton et al. 2006, 2009) and may share a common hormonal basis (Harries et al. 1997; Dabbs & Mallinger 1999; Verdonck et al. 1999; Penton-Voak & Chen 2004; Roney et al. 2006; Evans et al. 2008), women’s preferences for lower-pitched men’s voices may reflect a preference for cues to long-term health and/or dominance (e.g. Puts et al. 2012). Among women, voice pitch is negatively associated with health risk factors (Vukovic et al. 2010a). Women’s voice pitch is also positively related to oestrogen levels (Abitbol et al. 1999), which, within the normal range, are positively related to healthy repro- ductive development (Alonso & Rosenfield 2002). Between indi- viduals, ratings of women’s vocal attractiveness are positively correlated with voice pitch (Collins & Missing 2003; Feinberg et al. 2008b) and attractive body configurations (Collins & Missing 2003; * Correspondence: D. R. Feinberg, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster, University, Hamilton, ON L8S 4K1, Canada. E-mail address: feinberg@mcmaster.ca (D. R. Feinberg). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Animal Behaviour journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/anbehav 0003-3472/$38.00 Ó 2012 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.10.016 Animal Behaviour xxx (2012) 1e10 Please cite this article in press as: Fraccaro, P. J., et al., Faking it: deliberately altered voice pitch and vocal attractiveness, Animal Behaviour (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.10.016