Articulatory effects on perceptions of men's status and attractiveness.

Research on heterosexual mating has demonstrated that acoustic parameters (e.g., pitch) of men's voices influence their attractiveness to women and appearance of status and formidability to other men. However, little is known about how men's tendency to clearly articulate their speech influences these important social perceptions. In the current study, we used a repeated-measures design to investigate how men's articulatory clarity or conformity influenced women's (N = 45) evaluations of men's attractiveness for both short- and long-term relationships, and men's (N = 46) evaluations of physical formidability and prestige. Results largely supported our hypotheses: men who enunciated phonemes more distinctly were more attractive to women for long-term relationships than short-term relationships and were perceived by other men to have higher prestige than physical dominance. These findings suggest that aspects of articulatory behavior that influence perceptions of prestige and long-term mating attractiveness may indicate an early social history characterized by high socioeconomic status, likely owing to crystallization of articulatory patterns during the critical period of language development. These articulatory patterns may also be honest signals of condition or disposition owing to the nature of complex, multicomponent traits, which deserve further empirical attention.

Personality correlates of COVID-19 infection proclivity: Extraversion kills.

The current research sought to shed light on the behavioral science that underlies the spread of SARS-CoV-2. We tested the extraversion hypothesis, which suggests that the sociability facet of extraversion may predispose people to becoming infected with the coronavirus via greater human-to-human contact. Since extraverts seek out social opportunities and seem less likely to follow containment measures related to social distancing, we hypothesized that people who have previously become infected would exhibit greater extraversion than would those who have not contracted the virus. We measured overall extraversion and three of its facets-sociability, assertiveness, and energy levels-as well as political orientation. We collected data from 217 adults, aged 40 and older, from the US and the UK, of whom 53 had had the virus at some point prior to the study, and 164 had not. Participants who had had COVID-19 were more dispositionally sociable and were also more conservative-leaning compared to participants who had never had COVID-19. Implications regarding the behavioral science underlying the current pandemic are discussed.