ArticleEvolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society2017
Are there vocal cues to human developmental stability? Relationships between facial fluctuating asymmetry and voice attractiveness.
Article in Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 67 citations in OpenAlex.
- How Personality Traits Affect the Perception of Facial and Vocal Attractiveness.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Mate assessment based on physical characteristics: a review and reflection.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Non-visual cues and indirect strategies that enable discrimination of asymmetric mates.Ecology and evolution · 2022Review
- Vocal modulation in human mating and competition.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Do 3D Face Images Capture Cues of Strength, Weight, and Height Better than 2D Face Images do?Adaptive human behavior and physiology · 2021Article
- Linking human male vocal parameters to perceptions, body morphology, strength and hormonal profiles in contexts of sexual selection.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Article
- No evidence for an association between facial fluctuating asymmetry and vocal attractiveness in men or women.Evolutionary human sciences · 2020Article
- Sex Differences in Facial and Vocal Attractiveness Among College Students in China.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Measuring asymmetry from high-density 3D surface scans: An application to human faces.PloS one · 2018Article
- Voice in different phases of menstrual cycle among naturally cycling women and users of hormonal contraceptives.PloS one · 2017Article
- Attractiveness Is Multimodal: Beauty Is Also in the Nose and Ear of the Beholder.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Review
- Presidential, But Not Prime Minister, Candidates With Lower Pitched Voices Stand a Better Chance of Winning the Election in Conservative Countries.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
- Your Cheatin' Voice Will Tell on You: Detection of Past Infidelity from Voice.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors at 5 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Fluctuating asymmetry (FA), deviation from perfect bilateral symmetry, is thought to reflect an organism's relative inability to maintain stable morphological development in the face of environmental and genetic stressors. Previous research has documented negative relationships between FA and attractiveness judgments in humans, but scant research has explored relationships between the human voice and this putative marker of genetic quality in either sex. Only one study (and in women only) has explored relationships between vocal attractiveness and asymmetry of the face, a feature-rich trait space central in prior work on human genetic quality and mate choice. We therefore examined this relationship in three studies comprising 231 men and 240 women from two Western samples as well as Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Voice recordings were collected and rated for attractiveness, and FA was computed from two-dimensional facial images as well as, for a subset of men, three-dimensional facial scans. Through meta-analysis of our results and those of prior studies, we found a negative association between FA and vocal attractiveness that was highly robust and statistically significant whether we included effect sizes from previously published work, or only those from the present research, and regardless of the inclusion of any individual sample or method of assessing FA (e.g., facial or limb FA). Weighted mean correlations between FA and vocal attractiveness across studies were -.23 for men and -.29 for women. This research thus offers strong support for the hypothesis that voices provide cues to genetic quality in humans.
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Registered trials
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