Attractiveness Judgments of F0-Manipulated Mandarin Voices Across Heterosexual and Homosexual Listener Groups

Fundamental frequency (F0) is a salient acoustic cue in voice perception, but how F0-related attractiveness judgments vary across listeners with different sexual orientations remains insufficiently understood. This study examined attractiveness ratings under controlled F0 manipulation in Mandarin voice stimuli produced by one male and one female announcer. Eighty adults were recruited: 20 heterosexual male, 20 heterosexual female, 20 homosexual male, and 20 homosexual female participants. An adaptive three-alternative forced-choice pretest with 12 listeners established a group-level F0 just-noticeable difference (JND) of 0.215 ERB. Seven F0 levels, from −3 to +3 JNDs around each speaker’s own baseline, were then presented three times in the main experiment. Because each listener group rated only the target-voice sex that matched its presumed attraction pattern, the study compares two observed listener–target configurations rather than fully crossing listener sex, sexual orientation, and target-voice sex. Linear mixed-effects models showed that attractiveness ratings for the male voice decreased as F0 increased in both heterosexual female and homosexual male listeners, with no reliable difference in slopes. For the female voice, ratings increased with F0 in both heterosexual male and homosexual female listeners, while the homosexual-female group additionally showed a significant nonlinear component, with a fitted maximum near +2.4 JND. These findings indicate that, within these two listener–target configurations and these two controlled source voices, F0-related attractiveness judgments generally followed target-sex-related directions, whereas between-group variation was more evident in response strength and curve shape. The study contributes to experimental research on social voice perception and provides a controlled Mandarin-language baseline for future cross-linguistic comparisons of vocal social evaluation; it does not itself test intercultural variation.