Research suggests that the perception of attractiveness is multimodal, however, it is unclear how visual and auditory cues interact. Voice pitch seems important, as men judge high-pitched female voices to be more attractive, possibly due to their association with youthfulness, fertility, and femininity. We investigated whether an increase in voice pitch in female voices would lead to increased ratings of attractiveness, femininity, and health, and decreased age ratings. In a within-subject design we found higher-pitched female voices were rated more attractive, more feminine, and younger, but not healthier compared to non-manipulated voices. However, when manipulated and control voices were presented simultaneously with synchronized face videos, voice manipulations did not affect the ratings of the faces. These results support the multiple-message hypothesis that voices and faces signal different aspects of an individual’s overall quality. Further experiments will have to examine the effect of face attractiveness manipulations on voice ratings.

Attractiveness research is typically conducted using static photographs of human faces, often cropped or otherwise edited. We present a database of videos of faces, while talking with synchronized audio that will facilitate more ecologically valid, multimodal research into face and voice attractiveness. Our database contains videos, synchronized voice recordings, and photographs of 20 male and 20 female German speakers under different emotional conditions (neutral, sad, happy, angry, flirty). Recordings were simultaneously made from three different angles (frontal, profile, 3/4 view) in front of a green screen. We report the results of a comprehensive validation of this database to make it usable for multisensory empirical aesthetics research, but also for face or emotion research. An online study was conducted to collect ratings on several dimensions including general attractiveness, allowing us to uncover the effects of predictors for facial attractiveness in a natural setting.

It has long been debated whether aesthetics is something uniquely human. Our ongoing project aims to empirically address comparative aesthetics in a collaboration between psychologists and biologists. Defining aesthetic responses as approach behaviour associated with sensory pleasure and corresponding physiological states, we are exploring whether humans and non-human animals share similar mechanisms in their evaluation of sexually attractive stimuli. Specifically, we compare humans and ring doves (Streptopelia risoria), a species whose courtship behaviour and physiology have been extensively investigated in behavioural and neuroendocrinology research. Both species form pair bonds, communicate using visual and auditory signals, and can be tested in laboratory conditions with conspecifics or using video and auditory stimuli. Truly comparative work involves using as similar an experimental approach as possible for both human and animal participants. Here we report our comparative methods and experimental paradigms, and some recent results.

A large literature on human facial attractiveness has adopted an evolutionary approach (Little et al., 2011). Much less research has examined cues in other modalities, such as smell (Groyecka et al., 2017) and audition (Zäske et al., 2020). Although these different modalities may interact significantly in human mate choice (Feinberg, 2008), it is not yet understood how humans integrate cues from different sensory modalities. In the literature on animal communication, the most prominent theories suggest that different modalities either signal different qualities of an individual (multiple messages hypothesis) or communicate the same information (back-up signal hypothesis; Moller & Pomiankowski, 1993). These theories tend to disregard the possible interaction of different sensory modalities, and the role of multisensory integration.