The perception of spontaneous and volitional laughter across 21 societies

Author

Gregory A. BRYAN
Daniel M. FESSLER
Riccardo FUSAROLI
Edward CLINT
Dorsa AMIR
Brenda CHAVEZ
Kaleda K. DENTON
Cinthya DIAZ
Lealaiailoto T. DURAN
Jana FANCOVICOVA
Michal FUX
Erni F. GINTING
Youssef HASAN
Anning HU
Shanmukh V. KAMBLE
Tatsuya KAMEDA
Kiri KURODA
Norman P. LI, Singapore Management UniversityFollow
et al

Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

7-2018

Abstract

Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human socialinteraction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language andculture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by differentvocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh wasreal or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysisrevealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners’ judgments fairly uniformlyacross societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring thepotential importance of nonverbal vocal communicative phenomena in human affiliation and cooperation.

Keywords

laughter, vocal communication, cross-cultural, emotion, speech, open data

Discipline

Experimental Analysis of Behavior | Multicultural Psychology | Social Psychology

Research Areas

Psychology

Publication

Psychological Science

Volume

29

Issue

9

First Page

1515

Last Page

1525

ISSN

0956-7976

Identifier

10.1177/0956797618778235

Publisher

SAGE Publications (UK and US)

Citation

BRYAN, Gregory A., FESSLER, Daniel M., FUSAROLI, Riccardo, CLINT, Edward, AMIR, Dorsa, CHAVEZ, Brenda, DENTON, Kaleda K., DIAZ, Cinthya, DURAN, Lealaiailoto T., FANCOVICOVA, Jana, FUX, Michal, GINTING, Erni F., HASAN, Youssef, HU, Anning, KAMBLE, Shanmukh V., KAMEDA, Tatsuya, KURODA, Kiri, LI, Norman P., & al, et.(2018). The perception of spontaneous and volitional laughter across 21 societies. Psychological Science, 29(9), 1515-1525.

Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2799

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Comments

Data available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/ dataverse/laughterperception

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618778235