Vocal attractiveness in underweight men: Support for the "bad genes" hypothesis of vocal attractiveness?
Abstract
Male body size (height and weight) as a predictor of vocal attractiveness have been studied in the past, but to our knowledge no positive results were found. Although humans make spontaneous impressions of body size based on voice, those impressions only seldom correlate with actual body size.
Partly, because common major body size stereotype and male vocal attractiveness predictor - F0 is not a good predictor of actual body size. We examined unpublished data from two west African countries (Namibia and Cameroon) used in our previous study on vocal attractiveness (Šebesta et al., in prep.).
In the Namibian sample (n=47) we found a positive correlation of weight (rp=368, p=.012; controlled for age) and height (r=349, p=.016) to vocal attractiveness, but null results in sample from Cameroon (n=45). This may be due to the fact that a large proportion of Namibian participants had BMI 18.5.
Results cannot be explained by differences in height or weight variability. The results are discussed in relation to the bad genes hypothesis and the nature of human body size perception from acoustic cues.