Teen girls love men with deep voices, while young girls feel intimated

London, Sep 15 (ANI): Teenage girls find men with deeper voices more attractive, while younger girls find them intimidating and prefer those with low-pitched voices, according to new research from St Andrews University.

While younger girls felt lower-pitched voices reminded them of scary characters like Darth Vader, older girls preferred deep voices like that of American singer Barry White.

For the study, academics manipulated the images and the voices of males digitally, to make the faces more or less masculine and the voices sound lower or higher in pitch.

And then, they asked adolescents between the ages of 11 and 15 years old to rate the faces and voices for attractiveness.

They wanted to discover how the perception of who and what is attractive changes during this crucial time in human development.

According to psychologists, the preference changes might help guide teenagers as they begin their first romantic relationships.

The researchers found the older girls had clearer preferences for boys with deeper voices.

Boys who were further through puberty had stronger preferences for more masculine faces in other boys, while the more developed girls had the strongest preferences for low-pitched male voices.

But, the researchers found that for the younger girls the deeper voices might have sounded intimidating.

One girl said that the low voices reminded her of Darth Vader, but for the older girls, they were more attractive.

"Think Barry White," said the researchers.

Tamsin Saxton, a postdoctoral research fellow at the university's school of psychology, who led the research, said: "People start trying out adult relationships during their teenage years, and we see changes in perceptions of what's most attractive. It's then that you're learning about what's attractive in a partner."

"It's also a time when your peers are changing a lot in their appearance, for example, boys' faces become more masculine, and their voices deepen in pitch, so maybe teens are responding to the changes they see around them," she added.

The study, titled "Face and voice attractiveness judgment change during adolescence" will be published in the scientific journal Evolution and Human Behaviour. (ANI)