Abstract
Laughter and yawning can both occur spontaneously and are highly contagious forms of social behavior. When occurring contagiously, laughter and yawning are usually confounded with a social situation and it is difficult to determine to which degree the social situation or stimulus itself contribute to its contagion. While contagious yawning can be reliably elicited in lab when no other individuals are present, such studies are more sparse for laughter. Moreover, laughter and yawning are multimodal stimuli with both an auditory and a visual component: laughter is primarily characterized as a stereotyped vocalization whereas yawning is a predominantly visual signal and it is not known to which degree the visual and auditory modalities affect the contagion of laughter and yawning. We investigated how these two sensory modalities contribute to the contagion of laughter and yawning under controlled laboratory conditions in the absence of a social situation that might confound their contagion. Subjects were presented with naturally produced laughter and yawning in three sensory modalities (audio, visual, audio-visual), and we recorded their reaction to these stimuli. Contagious responses differed for laughter and yawning: overall, laughter elicited more contagious responses than yawning, albeit mostly smiling rather than overt laughter. While the audio-visual condition elicited most contagious responses overall, laughter was more contagious in the auditory modality, and yawning was more contagious in the visual modality. Furthermore, laughter became decreasingly contagious over time, while yawning remained steadily contagious. We discuss these results based on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic trajectories of laughter and yawning.
Highlights
Laughter is commonly misconceived as a unique reaction to humor, but humor plays at best a subordinate role in eliciting laughter (Provine and Fischer, 1989; Provine, 1993; Ruch et al, 2019)
We compared the contagion of laughter and yawning in different sensory modalities in the absence of their common confound in the same subjects under controlled laboratory conditions, and while both laughter and yawning were contagious, we identified important differences in their contagion as a function of the factors we manipulated
Our main finding is that our videos depicting laughter and yawning reliably elicit contagious responses in all subjects, and that laughter and yawning are differentially contagious in different sensory modalities
Summary
Laughter is commonly misconceived as a unique reaction to humor, but humor plays at best a subordinate role in eliciting laughter (Provine and Fischer, 1989; Provine, 1993; Ruch et al, 2019). Its characteristic form occurs only in humans and is a stereotyped vocalization generated by involuntary rapid rhythmic contractions of the diaphragm and intercostal muscles during a prolonged exhalation with clearly defined acoustic properties (Bachorowski et al, 2001; Szameitat et al, 2011) that are even found in the congenitally deaf (Makagon et al, 2008). It punctuates speech in hearing and deaf individuals (Provine and Emmorey, 2006), which supports the notion that laughter is a deeply rooted sign of emotional communication which can develop even without auditory input. Laughter and smiling are hypothesized to have evolved from facial play signals in non-human primates, and an unresolved issue is whether laughter and smiling reflect distinct processes or a graded expression on a continuum, i.e., whether the visual and vocal aspects of facial play signals represent smiling and laughter, respectively, and whether they should be considered independently or jointly (Andrew, 1963; Lockard et al, 1977; Vettin and Todt, 2005; Waller and Dunbar, 2005)
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