The Perception of Spontaneous and Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies (original) (raw)

Laughter: A Stereotyped Human Vocalization

Ethology, 2010

Laughter is a common, species-typical human vocal act and auditory signal that is important in social discourse. In this first quantitative description of laughter, we identified stereotyped features of laugh-note structure, note duration (x̄ = 75 ms), internote interval (x̄ = 210–218 ms), and a decrescendo that contribute to laughter's characteristic sound. Laugh-notes and internote intervals have sufficient temporal symmetry and regularity to pass the reversal test; recordings of laughter sound laugh-like when played in reverse. The stereotypic, species-typical character of laughter facilitates the analysis of the neurobehavioral mechanisms of laugh detection and generation and the more general problems associated with the production, perception, and evolution of human auditory signals of which speech is a special case.

Social and acoustic determinants of perceived laughter intensity

2020

Existing research links subjective judgments of perceived laughter intensity with features such as duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency, and voicing. We examine these associations in a new database of social laughs produced in situations inducing amusement, embarrassment, and schadenfreude. We also test the extent to which listeners’ judgments of laughter intensity vary as a function of the social situation in which laughs were produced.

Not All Laughs are Alike: Voiced but Not Unvoiced Laughter Readily Elicits Positive Affect

Psychological Science, 2001

We tested whether listeners are differentially responsive to the presence or absence of voicing, a salient, distinguishing acoustic feature, in laughter. Each of 128 participants rated 50 voiced and 20 unvoiced laughs twice according to one of five different rating strategies. Results were highly consistent regardless of whether participants rated their own emotional responses, likely responses of other people, or one of three perceived attributes concerning the laughers, thus indicating that participants were experiencing similarly differentiated affective responses in all these cases. Specifically, voiced, songlike laughs were significantly more likely to elicit positive responses than were variants such as unvoiced grunts, pants, and snortlike sounds. Participants were also highly consistent in their relative dislike of these other sounds, especially those produced by females. Based on these results, we argue that laughers use the acoustic features of their vocalizations to shape...