Eric Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
When it comes to corny pick-up lines and geeky flirting strategies, science doesn’t seem to favor the smooth operator with her, or his, routine phrases–this, according to a new study out of the University of Stirling.
Researchers found that certain “paralingual” features of the human voice can give the speaker’s game away and let the listener pick up on that sexual attraction that the “flirter” thought was hidden.
It’s all down to changes in the pitch and modulation of the voice and, for the determined flirter, there’s more bad news. There may be nothing you can do about it. The vocal cues that lift your chances of success, or blow them out of the water, are often instinctive and unconscious. These are very subtle cues. We are not aware of them, either while speaking or listening, but they affect our responses just the same.
The research findings are published in the journal Evolution & Human Behaviour under the title “Vocal modulation during courtship increases proceptivity even in naive listeners.” During their research, lead author, Juan David Leongómez and his colleagues found that when heterosexual men, for instance, flirted with a beautiful woman, their voices changed.
First, the voices got deeper. The team discovered that “Men’s minimum pitch was lower when responding to attractive than unattractive women”.
Secondly, the men’s voices suddenly became more variable in pitch when the speaker entered flirt mode. During “verbal courtship” then men unconsciously put on the deep masculine voice but do a bit of surreptitious and ultra-subtle “singing”. We might not hear it but it’s a little like the love-sick songbird on top of a post, warbling to attract a mate. The best singers get the best birds, according to ornithological experts.
The researchers tried to rule out any linguistic effect by testing both native male English and Czech speakers in their experiments. They also allowed for any effects from speech content.
The study recognized that we already know how speakers modulate their voice when talking to infants and babies, but said that “we know little about subtle variation in acoustic parameters during speech in adult social interactions.” Previous tests of the perception of such variations have, they say, been hindered by the listeners’ understanding of “semantic content” as those studies usually confined speech to the enunciation of standard sentences, which affected their validity.
Also, “paralinguistic modulation” in one language may be a result of certain parameters which are specific to that language. The University of Stirling team tried to avoid these problems by “recording speech directed to attractive or unattractive potential partners or competitors”, and then testing the responses by “naive listeners” in both English and Czech.
Subsequent analysis of acoustic parameters found that “men’s voices varied F0 (fundamental frequency) most in speech towards potential attractive versus unattractive mates, while modulation of women’s F0variability was more sensitive to competitors, with higher variability when those competitors were relatively attractive”. Both men’s and women’s voices varied most when responding to attractive individuals.
The vocal modulation may be subtle and unconscious but, to be effective, it must be detectable to achieve proceptivity (a positive response) towards the speaker. The study showed that “speech directed towards attractive individuals was preferred by naive listeners of either language over speech by the same speaker to unattractive individuals, even when voices were stripped of several acoustic properties by low-pass filtering, which renders speech unintelligible”.
In other words – it’s the way you tell it, not what you say, that really counts. Serious flirters, it seems need to get their vocal modulating down tight.
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