Abstract
Puberphonia refers to a vocal disorder that involves the persistence of a high-pitched voice beyond the age at which vocal maturation is expected to have occurred. We considered the romantic signaling function of the voice by examining whether puberphonia impacted the romantic desirability and perceived attractiveness of the target for short-term and long-term relationships ratings that female raters provided for male targets. We also wanted to examine whether perceptions of these targets (e.g., low levels of masculinity, high levels of femininity) would play a role in the association that puberphonia had with perceived romantic desirability and attractiveness for relationships. Participants were 1,732 heterosexual women who listened to an audio recording of a male target reading a neutral passage either before (pre-treatment) or after (post-treatment) receiving voice therapy to correct his puberphonia. Female raters provided their perceptions of the target after listening to the audio recording. The results revealed that compared with post-treatment targets, pre-treatment targets were rated as being lower in their levels of masculinity, self-esteem, extraversion, and emotional stability but higher in their levels of femininity and agreeableness. In addition, participants rated the pre-treatment targets to be less romantically desirable than post-treatment targets. Perceptions of the targets (e.g., masculinity, self-esteem) mediated the association that puberphonia treatment had with romantic desirability and attractiveness for relationships. Results provide further evidence that vocal characteristics such as pitch may serve as important signals in interpersonal interactions and that men with puberphonia were viewed as less romantically desirable than other individuals, in part, because they are perceived as possessing relatively low levels of masculinity and self-esteem.
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Notes
It is important to note that vocal acoustic analysis indicated that all other parameters such as shimmer (the amplitude variation of the sound wave), jitter (the parameter of frequency variation from cycle to cycle), HNR (Harmonic to Noise Ratio), and intensity were found to fall within the normal range. Measurements of F0 disturbance jitter and shimmer, has proven to be useful in describing the vocal characteristics. In addition, no voice/pitch breaks, or other voice quality differences were found.
Preliminary analyses examined the direct and indirect associations that puberphonia treatment had with romantic desirability and attractiveness for relationships for each of the three targets separately. The results of those analyses were highly consistent across targets despite some differences in the average perceptions of the targets (e.g., Target 1 was perceived to be slightly more masculine than Target 2 or Target 3). Given the consistency of the direct and indirect associations across these analyses, we only present the combined results for the targets in the interest of parsimony.
We conducted exploratory sequential mediation analyses to examine whether puberphonia treatment had indirect associations with the attractiveness of the targets for long-term or short-term relationships with the perceived characteristics of the targets (i.e., masculinity, femininity, self-esteem, and personality traits) and the romantic desirability of the targets (i.e., warmth-trustworthiness, attractiveness-vitality, and status-resources) serving as sequential mediators. There was some support for sequential mediation. For example, puberphonia treatment had a positive indirect association with attractiveness for a short-term relationship through perceived masculinity via attractiveness-vitality. However, it is important to note that these sequential mediation effects were relatively small in magnitude.
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We would like to acknowledge the research assistants of Hadassah Academic College and Sapir Academic College, Israel, for their valuable assistance with the data collection. Grateful thanks are also extended to all those who participated so willingly.
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Conceptualization: Avi Besser and Virgil Zeigler-Hill; Methodology: Avi Besser and Sari Lotem, Data Collection: Yuval Besser, Formal analysis and investigation: Virgil Zeigler-Hill and Avi Besser; The first draft of the manuscript was written by Avi Besser and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Besser, A., Zeigler-Hill, V., Lotem, S. et al. When a man sounds like a woman: The consequences of puberphonia for perceived romantic desirability and attractiveness for relationships. Curr Psychol 42, 16739–16750 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02837-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02837-1