We spend a lot of time at the Emory Voice Center helping people restore their voices. With the recent pandemic we are all leaning on our voice just a little more than usual - whether that be an increased number of conference calls, "Zoom happy hours", or trying to have a front yard party with a mask. Not only that, but dating (especially first steps) has gotten a little....complicated?
We have been thinking about how the voice impacts your perception of attractiveness. On cue, Netflix released "Love is Blind" - a social dating experiment where people talked to complete strangers, separated by an opaque frosted glass wall with the hope of choosing a forever partner. There were some....unique voices that made quite a stir in the public eye (Jessica's "babe").
So can in fact a voice make or break your perception of attractiveness? More below from our resident expert, Brian Petty, CCC-SLP:
10-ish words:
The quality of your voice can affect how you are perceived by others.
100-ish words:
The quality of your voice tells people a lot of things about you.
Listeners make decisions about a person’s general health, youthfulness, intelligence, emotional state, trustworthiness, and competence just based on the sound of your voice. Those vocal characteristics include things like pitch, breathiness, resonance, and other acoustic properties, and are distinct from speech characteristics like regional accents and articulation. People use voice along with other factors such as facial features and body symmetry to determine how attractive a person is, which can make a big difference in whether someone is considered a good choice for mating, whether they are considered socially favorable, and whether that person is offered better job opportunities, among many other things.
1000-ish words:
The quality of your voice conveys a lot of information about you beyond your regional accent or the content of your spoken words.
Vocal quality includes such parameters as pitch, resonance, breathiness, and harshness, among others. Whether a listener considers a voice attractive is part of a process by which we determine mate selection, and we all make assessments about vocal attractiveness just like we make the same assessments about someone’s face or body. These assessments are made almost immediately, and can make relatively accurate determinations about a speaker’s sex (Lass et al., 1976), height and weight (van Dommelen and Moxness, 1995), and age (Ptacek and Sander, 1966). We even make judgments on more complex concepts such as emotional states (Scherer et al., 2001) and threat potential (Puts et al., 2012), just based on how a voice sounds. Men and women usually agree on which voices are and are not attractive, whether the speaker is male or female (Babel et al., 2014), and general preferences such as higher than average pitch in females and lower than average pitch in males have been found to be relatively consistent across cultures (Puts et al., 2012).
The decisions that we make based on the sound of a speaker’s voice may have an impact on how generally attractive we find a person to be. This is important, because how attractive a person is considered to be can influence many parts of a person’s life. When we find someone attractive, we often attribute favorable characteristics to that person whether that person deserves them or not. Attractive people have been found to be judged as more socially desirable and have access to better jobs (Dion et al., 1972), are considered to be more persuasive (Chaiken, 1979), more trustworthy or competent (Zebrowitz et al., 2014), and are even perceived to have better academic performance (Talaman et al, 2016). This phenomenon is called the “attractiveness halo” effect, and has been shown through many studies to affect our lives in deep and fundamental ways (Langlois et al., 2000).
Much of the study of the attractiveness halo focuses on judgments of such things as facial attractiveness or body symmetry. We can see in popular culture how people react when a person’s handsome or beautiful face doesn’t match the sound of their voice. When the American motion picture industry transitioned from silent films to “talkies”, some actors who were very popular in the silent era became less employable when audiences heard their voices. Actors such as John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Norma Talmadge who were romantic leads in the silent era saw their careers decline because their voices were perceived as less attractive than their silent film persona. In addition to any vocal quality anomalies these artists may have had, early sound equipment made some voices sound unnatural and high-pitched, which for a leading man like Fairbanks, was a real problem. Other actors like Raymond Griffith, whose childhood throat injury caused him to only speak in a hoarse whisper, found that the addition of a soundtrack to his movies spelled the end of his acting career. (He went on to work behind the scenes, founding 20th Century Fox.)
-Brian Petty, CCC-SLP
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