The Geneva Faces and Voices (GEFAV) database

Abstract

Although many facial and vocal databases are available for research, very few of them have controlled the range of attractiveness of the stimuli that they offer. To fill this gap, we created the GEneva Faces and Voices (GEFAV) database, providing standardized faces (static and dynamic neutral, smiling) and voices (speaking sentences, vowels) of young European adults. A total of 61 women and 50 men 18-35 years old agreed to be part of the GEFAV stimuli, and two rating studies involving 285 participants provided evaluations of the facial and vocal samples. The final set of stimuli was satisfactory in terms of attractiveness range (wide and rather symmetrical distribution over the attractiveness continuum) and the reliability of the ratings (high consistency between the two rating studies, high interrater agreement in the final rating study). Moreover, the database showed an adequate validity, since a series of findings described by earlier research on human attractiveness were confirmed-namely, that facial and vocal attractiveness are predicted by femininity and health in women, and by masculinity, dominance, and trustworthiness in men. In future studies, the GEFAV stimuli may be used intact or transformed, individually or in multimodal combinations, to investigate a wide range of mechanisms, such as the behavioral, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological processes involved in social cognition.

Androstadienone’s influence on the perception of facial and vocal attractiveness is not sex specific

“…All participants were presented with the same 120 stimuli, consisting of pictures of neutral faces and voice excerpts (saying the French word "bonjour") of 30 men and 30 women from the GEneva Faces and Voices Database (GEFAV; Ferdenzi et al, 2015). All 60 GEFAV donors were native French speakers, of European origin and 18-35 years old.…”

“…With this aim, we collected attractiveness evaluations of male and female participants, the latter being allocated to a "fertile" group or a "non-fertile" group according to the phase of their menstrual cycle at the time they participated in the study. We used a highly standardized set of social stimuli that were varied in attractiveness, including male and female faces and -for the first time in androstadienone studiesvoices, taken from the GEneva Faces and Voices database (GEFAV: Ferdenzi et al, 2015). We used both faces and voices because we wanted to test whether the effects that have mostly been tested in the visual domain would replicate in another relevant modality.…”

Perception of Men's Beauty and Attractiveness by Women with Low Sexual Desire

“…Control women (n = 16, aged 20–36 years) were students and staff of the University of Geneva. They were first recruited for a larger study [22] by means of posters and web announcements and were asked whether they would also take part in the present study. Forty‐one out of 57 female participants agreed to take part.…”

“…We used random sample presentation within each block. Each of the 16 control participants was randomly assigned to 1 of the 21 different sets of male stimuli constituted for the need of the larger study [22]. These sets, comprising 19 to 20 men randomly taken from 40 available men, partially overlapped with each other.…”

“…They were explained that “Unlike the question on beauty, please rely here on your own perception, and assess to what extent you could feel attracted to the presented person, assuming that it is for a casual/longstanding relationship. Note: A person may be attractive to you but not to someone else.” Additional scales (masculinity and trustworthiness) were also presented for the purpose of the larger study [22] but will not be analyzed here. To limit cross‐influence of the ratings, the scales were presented separately on five successive screens: beauty and attractiveness in random order on the first, third, and fifth screen, and masculinity and trustworthiness in random order on the second and fourth screen.…”