ArticleScientific reports2021
Low fundamental and formant frequencies predict fighting ability among male mixed martial arts fighters.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Intrasexual Selection for Upper Limb Length in Homo sapiens.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- Group size and mating system predict sex differences in vocal fundamental frequency in anthropoid primates.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The Time Course of Person Perception From Voices: A Behavioral Study.Psychological science · 2023Article
- Articulatory effects on perceptions of men's status and attractiveness.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Facial width-to-height ratio predicts fighting success: A direct replication and extension of Zilioli et al. (2014).Aggressive behavior · 2022Article
- Exploratory Systematic Review of Mixed Martial Arts: An Overview of Performance of Importance Factors with over 20,000 Athletes.Sports (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Vocal Cues to Male Physical Formidability.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The Research of Chinese Martial Arts Cross-Media Communication System Based on Deep Neural Network.Computational intelligence and neuroscience · 2022Article
- Predicting strength from aggressive vocalizations versus speech in African bushland and urban communities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Human voice pitch measures are robust across a variety of speech recordings: methodological and theoretical implications.Biology letters · 2021Article
- Linking voice pitch to fighting success in male amateur mixed martial arts athletes and boxers.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
- Application of Data Mining in the Analysis of Martial Arts Athlete Competition Skills and Tactics.Journal of healthcare engineering · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human voice pitch is highly sexually dimorphic and eminently quantifiable, making it an ideal phenotype for studying the influence of sexual selection. In both traditional and industrial populations, lower pitch in men predicts mating success, reproductive success, and social status and shapes social perceptions, especially those related to physical formidability. Due to practical and ethical constraints however, scant evidence tests the central question of whether male voice pitch and other acoustic measures indicate actual fighting ability in humans. To address this, we examined pitch, pitch variability, and formant position of 475 mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters from an elite fighting league, with each fighter's acoustic measures assessed from multiple voice recordings extracted from audio or video interviews available online (YouTube, Google Video, podcasts), totaling 1312 voice recording samples. In four regression models each predicting a separate measure of fighting ability (win percentages, number of fights, Elo ratings, and retirement status), no acoustic measure significantly predicted fighting ability above and beyond covariates. However, after fight statistics, fight history, height, weight, and age were used to extract underlying dimensions of fighting ability via factor analysis, pitch and formant position negatively predicted "Fighting Experience" and "Size" factor scores in a multivariate regression model, explaining 3-8% of the variance. Our findings suggest that lower male pitch and formants may be valid cues of some components of fighting ability in men.
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