پیش بینی تغییرات در ترجیحات زنان برای مردسالاری صوتی با تغییرات در استرادیول بزاقی

Although many studies have reported that women's preferences for masculine physical characteristics in men change systematically during the menstrual cycle, the hormonal mechanisms underpinning these changes are currently poorly understood. Previous studies investigating the relationships between measured hormone levels and women's masculinity preferences tested only judgments of men's facial attractiveness. Results of these studies suggested that preferences for masculine characteristics in men's faces were related to either women's estradiol or testosterone levels. To investigate the hormonal correlates of within-woman variation in masculinity preferences further, here we measured 62 women's salivary estradiol, progesterone, and testosterone levels and their preferences for masculine characteristics in men's voices in five weekly test sessions. Multilevel modeling of these data showed that changes in salivary estradiol were the best predictor of changes in women's preferences for vocal masculinity. These results complement other recent research implicating estradiol in women's mate preferences, attention to courtship signals, sexual motivation, and sexual strategies, and are the first to link women's voice preferences directly to measured hormone levels.

Recent meta-analyses suggest that women's preferences for masculine men are stronger during the late follicular (i.e., high-fertility) phase of the menstrual cycle than during the early follicular or luteal (i.e., low-fertility) phases (Gildersleeve et al., in press; but see Wood et al., 2014). For example, this pattern of results has been reported in studies of women's preferences for men's faces (Johnston et al., 2001 and Penton-Voak et al., 1999), bodies (Little et al., 2007), voices (Feinberg et al., 2006 and Puts, 2005), body odors (Havlicek et al., 2005), and behavioral displays (Gangestad et al., 2004). Researchers have suggested that increased preferences for masculine men during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle may function to increase offspring health (Gangestad and Thornhill, 2008) and/or dominance (Scott et al., 2013).