The perception of spontaneous and volitional laughter across 21 societies

• Main Authors: 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
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: laughter; vocal communication; cross-cultural; emotion; speech; open data; Experimental Analysis of Behavior; Multicultural Psychology; Social Psychology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2799; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4056/viewcontent/The_Perception_of_Spontaneous_and_Volitional_Laughter_Across_21_Societies.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.