Women Have Mastered the ‘Sexy Voice’ - Men Have Not

Guys, leave the sweet-talking to the ladies. According to a recent study, while men deem women more attractive when they manipulate their voice to sound more sultry, women tend to not care when men try to sound "sexy." In-fact, in many cases women actually find a man attempting a sexy voice a "turn-off."

The study, published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, details how researchers measured the differences in how men and women respond to different intentional manipulations of the voice. The most noticeable of differences in gender reaction concerned voice manipulations intended to convey sexiness and confidence.

According to the study, researchers from Albright College in Pennsylvania asked 20 men and 20 women to intentionally manipulate the sound of their voices in order to portray four distinct traits. These transits included attractiveness, confidence, dominance, and intelligence. Members of both he same and opposite sex were then asked to listen to these voice portrayals alone and rate them on how sexy, confident, commanding, or smart the speaker sounded (without seeing the speaker).

Interestingly, while both sexes proved relatively successful at sounding dominant or intelligent to their listeners, women proved the most successful at manipulating their voices to sound more dominant and were singularly successful at sounding sexy.

According to the study, when women attempted to sound sexy, most men rated the voices they heard as highly attractive. However, when women listened to men trying to sound sexy, their rating of the men's' attractiveness largely remained unchanged.

Similarly, men were hugely successful at convincing women of their confidence with a confident voice, but women were not successful in conveying their confidence to men through their voice alone.

The researchers also determined a few consistencies among trait portrayals between all the participants. A "sexy" voice impression for both men and women consisted of slowing their speech and lowering the pitch of their voice, but women also took on a hoarser nature to their voice. Both sexes also raised their pitch and volume to sound more dominant -- a trait they both adequately portrayed to the other sex.

The study was published in the March issue of the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior