Amsterdam [Netherlands]: Can we infer someone's cultural group from their laugher? A new study by researchers from the University of Amsterdam with international colleagues shows that our laughter gives us away.
The findings of the study were published in the journal 'Philosophical Transactions B'.
The study included Dutch and Japanese producers of laughter and listeners. Listeners could detect whether a laughing person is from their own or another cultural group by only hearing a brief laughter segment. Spontaneous laughter was rated as most positive by both groups.
Laughter is a strong nonverbal vocalisation, which is frequently used to signal affiliation, reward, or cooperative intent, and often helps to maintain and strengthen social bonds. An important distinction is between spontaneous and voluntary laughter.
Spontaneous laughter is typically an uncontrolled reaction, for instance to hilarious jokes, and includes hard-to-fake acoustic features. Voluntary laughter is produced by purposefully modulating vocal output, for instance for a preening boss, reflecting a more deliberate communicative act like conveying polite agreement.
Recent research suggests that we are better able to identify individual speakers based on voluntary laughter than on spontaneous laughter. Voluntary laughter, being produced with greater vocal control, would encode more reliable information about the producer.
Furthermore, emotional expressive styles like laughter systematically differ across cultural groups. These differences are notable to listeners, making perceivers more accurate in recognising emotions from vocal expressions produced by individuals from their own cultural group as compared to others.
These findings add to the growing literature on laughter as a rich vocal signal that can be used by listeners to make a wide range of inferences about others, from their social relationships to their identity. (ANI)
