Research confirms deeper voices are attractive

Teenage girls are attracted to deeper male voices while younger girls are intimidated by them, new research from the University of St Andrews Department of Psychology has found.

The study, entitled 'Face and voice attractiveness judgments change during adolescence', sought to examine 'mate choice decisions' during adolescence, a time when they are 'becoming relevant', according to the abstract.

Tasmin Sexton, a postdoctoral researcher who led the study, said: "People start trying out adult relationships during their teenage years, and during this time we see changes in perceptions of what's most attractive. It's then that you're learning about what's attractive in a partner

"It's also a time when your peers are changing a lot in their appearance—for example, boys' faces become more masculine, and their voices deepen in pitch—so maybe teens are responding to the changes they see around them."

Adolescents aged 11-15 were asked to evaluate faces and voices which were digitally manipulated to be more or less masculine and deeper or higher in pitch. They found that younger girls were intimidated by the deeper voices, and associated them with characters like Darth Vader, while older ones found them more attractive.

Younger boys preferred the higher pitched female voices as well, and as they got older they began to prefer less feminine, male faces.

The research team concluded that this indicates that attractiveness judgments are "facultatively calibrated to the individual's life stage, only reaching adult values upon sexual maturity when mate choice decisions become relevant".

This builds upon previous research at St Andrews. In 2006, research published by a team led by Dr David Feinberg in the journal Hormones and Behaviour found that women prefer deeper male voices when their chance of conception is higher.

Recent research from a team of researchers at Harvard University corroborates these findings, showing that men with deeper voices tend to have more children than men with high-pitched ones.