Human vocal behavior within competitive and courtship contexts and its relation to mating success

Abstract

Beyond the linguistic content of their speech, speakers of both sexes convey diverse biological and psychosocial information through their voices, which are important when assessing potential mates and competitors. However, studies investigating the relationships between mating success and acoustic inter-individual differences are scarce. In this study, we investigated such relationships in both sexes in courtship and competitive interactions-as they correspond to the two different types of sexual selection-using an experimental design based on a simulated dating game. We assessed which type of sexual selection best predicted mating success, here defined as the self-reported number of sexual partners within the past year. Our results show that only acoustic inter-individual differences in the courtship context for both men and women predicted their mating success. Men displaying faster articulation rate and louder voices reported significantly more sexual partners; in contrast, men displaying higher intonation reported a greater negative effect of roughness and breathiness on their mating success. Women who displayed relatively less breathy voices and shorter speech duration reported significantly fewer sexual partners. These novel findings are discussed in light of the mate choice context and the relative contribution of both types of sexual selection shaping acoustic features of speech.

Does he sound cooperative? Acoustic correlates of cooperativeness

“…Average contributions to the public good, testosterone levels, and acoustic characteristics were similar to results from previous studies using similar subject pools (Suire et al , ; Tognetti, Dubois, Faurie, & Willinger, ). Participants allocated slightly less than half of their endowment to the public good (Mean ± SD = 8.45 ± 6.96 tokens).…”

“…In addition, we did not conduct a perceptual study using our recordings to examine whether listeners use acoustic features as a social cue in a behavioural economic task. Indeed, we recorded individuals' free speech due to its stronger ecological validity (Puts et al, 2007;Suire et al, 2018), but this type of recordings is not suitable for perceptual studies, as recordings roughly differ in duration and semantic content. Finally, we used state-of-the-art methodology in economics to quantify and categorize individuals according to type (Fischbacher et al, 2001).…”

“…A single investigator conducted all the recordings (MBD) which took place in a quiet room of the laboratory of Experimental Economics in Montpellier. We recorded spontaneous speech due to its stronger ecological validity compared with scripted speech (Puts, Hodges, C ardenas, & Gaulin, 2007;Suire, Raymond, & Barkat-Defradas, 2018). Thus, participants were asked to describe a picture regarding global warming ( Figure S1).…”

Speech Acoustic Features: A Comparison of Gay Men, Heterosexual Men, and Heterosexual Women

“…All recordings took place between 2:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. Each participant heard the French version of the story “The North Wind and the Sun” from the International Phonetic Association and were asked to tell the story back to the research assistant. The rationale for using semi-spontaneous speech is that it is more ecologically valid than sustained vowels or read speech while controlling for semantic content, as the latter produce very different acoustic speech characteristics that do not represent how an individual vocally behaves in social interactions (Laan, 1997 ; Suire, Raymond, & Barkat-Defradas, 2018 ). Speech samples were recorded using a linear PCM recorder (DR-O7 MKII, Tascam©) with a sampling rate of 22 kHz, 16-bit, mono, and then saved as.wav files.…”

Male Vocal Quality and Its Relation to Females’ Preferences

“…where Df is the formant dispersion (in Hz), N is the total number of formants measured, and F i is the frequency (in Hz) of formant i. Lastly, we computed the formants' position (Pf) using the method described in Puts, Apicella, and Cardenas (2012), which has been argued to be sexually more dimorphic than Df. To compute the formants' position, we used female vocal stimuli that were drawn from the same study of the male vocal stimuli (n female ¼ 68, Suire et al, 2018). Descriptive statistics of the male vocal stimuli for each acoustic feature are reported in Table 1 and their zero-order correlations in Table 2.…”