The Attention Bias To Voice Affected By Women’s Menstrual Cycle

In the evolutionary process, both sexes spend a lot of effort to attract the opposite sex, they try to make themselves look more attractive than the competitors. The voice is an important way to show their individual sexual attractiveness. Men with more deep voice often suggests that they have more abundant resources and strong power, and high-pitched feminine voice is closely associated with fertility. Voice that contains significant gender characteristics are often more attractive. However, individual preferences for the opposite sex are affected by the circumstance. Based on this, Voice as a signal of one’s sexual attractive level may also be affected by situations, in which the menstrual cycle is an important factor.The Ovulation Shift Hypothesis suggests that natural selection may have influenced the psychological aspects of women in ovulation phase, they have higher sexual interest. Studies have shown that, compared to non-ovulation women, ovulation women prefer masculine and symmetrical faces, more social advantages men, muffled voice, more creative men, and perform more attractive in social activities.Competitive strategy is the competition among the same sex members, to compete for gaining mates. Study on "sexual selection" pointed out that women mainly used two strategies in intra-sexual competition: one is self-promotion, meaning that they strive to improve their own attractiveness; the other is competitor derogation, namely to reduce the potential rivals’ attractiveness ratings. Consequently, ovulation women in order to get a good partner in the assessment of p otential competitors should be very sensitive to feminine voice, and they may monitor the rivals’ feminine voice. Hence, with the combination of dichotic listening and point detection paradigm, we explored different menstrual cycle phase female’s attention bias to voice sex and attractiveness. The first study was designed to investigate the attention bias of female in different menstrual cycle phase from a perspective of gender of voice and found that ovulation female showed significant attention bias to female voice, female in the luteal phase showed attention bias to male voice. In study 2, we aimed to explore the female’s attentional bias to high and low attractive male and female voices under different menstrual cycle phase. The results showed that ovulation women did not exist attention bias for voice attraction, female in the luteal phase showed attention bias to male attractive sound. The current results of these study show that the menstrual cycle does affect the attention bias to the gender and attraction of voice, which is in line with the sexual strategy theory of evolutionary psychology, and affected by the different hormone levels changed as the menstrual cycle phase change.