Citation

Bryant GA, Fessler DMT, Fusaroli R, Clint E, Amir D, Chávez B, Denton KK, Díaz C, Duran LT, Fanćovićová J, Fux M, Ginting EF, Hasan Y, Hu A, Kamble SV, Kameda T, Kuroda K, Li NP, Luberti FR, Peyravi R, Prokop P, Quintelier KJP, Shin HJ, Stieger S, Sugiyama LS, van den Hende EA, Viciana-Asensio H, Yildizhan SE, Yong JC, Yuditha T, Zhou Y. Psychol. Sci. 2018; 29(9): 1515-1525.

Affiliation

14 Department of Sociology, Fudan University.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797618778235

PMID

30044711

Abstract

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

Language: en

Keywords

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