Monday, March 7, 2011

Does Deep Voice Indicate A Cheatin' Heart?

Dan Vergano at USA Today wonders: Do people look to vocal pitch as a pointer to cheatin' hearts?

The researchers asked 49 men and 55 women, all college-age, to assess to audio clips of vowel sounds read by nine male and nine female voices, tuned to both a high-pitched and low-pitched tone. Among other questions, the volunteers were asked, "which person do you think is more likely to cheat on their partner?" and "which is more attractive?"

Because the male and female voices were just reading vowel sounds, "it wasn't about the content of what they said," O'Connor says in an interview. "It's not about how smooth they were."

Both men and women equally saw the women with the higher-pitched voices as more attractive and more likely to be cheaters. But women saw men with deep voices as more likely to be cheaters, at "significantly higher rates," than men did, offering some support for the idea of an evolutionary warning sign of infidelity in vocal pitch.

Read more here.

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