Beauty is not only in the eyes of the beholder, but also in their ears and smell. At least that is what emerges from a study conducted by an international group of European researchers and published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology .
We are not discovering a great what if we tell you that enjoying a good physical appearance determines to a large extent our level of attractiveness in front of others, but it may surprise you something more to know that we often underestimate two important elements in that same field: our voice and our smell.
This research, which has consisted of a review of 73 studies published in the last three decades, points out how little the role that voice and smell play in our attractiveness has been studied, and how important these auditory factors and olfactory are together with the visual, since these experts consider that the perception of the attractiveness of people includes all these factors. That is, it is multimodal .
“Perceiving others through the three channels gives a more reliable and wider variety of information about those people “, highlights Agata Groyecka, lead author of this report and researcher at the University of Wrocklaw (Poland).
Among the findings related to hearing, there are some that were more intuitive, such as in the case of people who guessed someone’s gender and age based only on the voice, but those who listened also demonstrated their skill at detecting aspects as varied in a voice as domination, cooperation, emotional state, and also the size of the speaker’s body . Also, other studies have shown that people could deduce similar information based only on the smell of individuals. “I hope this review inspires researchers to further explore the role of hearing and smell in social relationships,” says Groyecka.
