Adaptation effects of voice-pitch on attractiveness judgements

There are two competing theories about averageness and attractiveness. The average is attractive hypothesis states that people find average stimuli attractive because they closely resemble internal representations and are easy to process. The contrast hypothesis states that attractiveness depends on contrast from average such that exaggerated traits of stimuli in one direction increases attractiveness and exaggerated traits of stimuli in the opposite direction decrease attractiveness. Studies on facial attractiveness show that after adaptation to unattractive faces, unattractive faces become more normal looking, and more attractive, whereas attractive faces become less normal and less attractive. Voices are thought to be processed in a similar fashion to faces, and the strength of preferences for sex-typical voice and face features are positively correlated. After adaptation to female voices with sex-typical or sex-atypical voice pitch, the voices that participants adapted to sounded more normal. We tested if adaptation to sex-typical and sex-atypical voice pitch (the primary correlate of voice attractiveness) influences attractiveness of voices. Using identical stimuli and paradigm as prior work showing adaptation effects of voice pitch on normality judgments (Little et al., 2013), we tested for adaptation effects of high and low-pitched voices for both male and female vocalizers. We observed one potential adaptation effect when women listened to men’s voices, consistent with the “averageness is attractive” hypothesis, but there were no effects in any other condition. Overall, adaptation based on sex-typicality did not change attractiveness judgments consistently and the one effect seen here may reflect a false-positive result.