Way You Laugh Shows Your Culture

Researchers explored how the two types of laughter differ across cultures, with the expectation that spontaneous laughter might sound more positive.

Listeners can detect whether a laughing person is from their own or another cultural group by only hearing a brief laughter segment, according to a report published in a special issue on Voice Modulation of Philosophical Transactions B.

Laughter is a strong nonverbal vocalization, which is frequently used to signal affiliation, reward, or cooperative intent, and often helps to maintain and strengthen social bonds.

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‘Listeners can detect whether a laughing person is from their own or another cultural group from hearing brief laughter.’

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 individual speakers were able to identify voluntary laughter than spontaneous laughter.

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Furthermore, emotional expressive styles like laughter systematically differ across cultural groups. These differences are notable to listeners, making perceivers more accurate in recognizing emotions from vocal expressions produced by individuals from their cultural group as compared to others.

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam with international colleagues build on this work and examined whether laughter type influences the identification not only of individuals but also of groups.

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In their study, they employed laughter clips that were spontaneously or voluntarily produced by Dutch and Japanese individuals. Dutch (n = 273) and Japanese (n = 131) participants listened to these decontextualized laughter clips and:

Judged whether the laughing person was from their cultural in-group or an out-group
Judged whether they thought the laughter was produced spontaneously or voluntarily
Rated the positivity of each laughter clip

Analyzing these data, they found that listeners were able to detect group membership from both spontaneous and voluntary laughter, and equally well.

Spontaneous laughter was rated as more positive than voluntary laughter across the two cultures, and in-group laughs were perceived as more positive than out-group laughs by Dutch but not Japanese listeners.

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Contrary to prediction, they found no advantage for the notion that participants would be better at identifying group membership from voluntary laughter.

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.

Source-Medindia