Abstract
Laughter is a ubiquitous social signal. Recent work has highlighted distinctions between spontaneous and volitional laughter, which differ in terms of both production mechanisms and perceptual features. Here, we test listeners' ability to infer group identity from volitional and spontaneous laughter, as well as the perceived positivity of these laughs across cultures. Dutch (n = 273) and Japanese (n = 131) participants listened to decontextualized laughter clips and judged (i) whether the laughing person was from their cultural in-group or an out-group; and (ii) whether they thought the laughter was produced spontaneously or volitionally. They also rated the positivity of each laughter clip. Using frequentist and Bayesian analyses, we show that listeners were able to infer group membership from both spontaneous and volitional laughter, and that performance was equivalent for both types of laughter. Spontaneous laughter was rated as more positive than volitional laughter across the two cultures, and in-group laughs were perceived as more positive than out-group laughs by Dutch but not Japanese listeners. Our results demonstrate that both spontaneous and volitional laughter can be used by listeners to infer laughers’ cultural group identity.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)’.
Highlights
Laughter is a frequently occurring and socially potent nonverbal vocalization, which is frequently used to signal affiliation, reward or cooperative intent, and often helps to maintain and strengthen social bonds [1,2]
The results showed that both Dutch and Japanese participants rated spontaneous laughter as more positive than volitional laughter, both when the laughter type was categorized based on production and when it was categorized in terms of perception
We found no advantage for volitional laughter; neither frequentist nor Bayesian analysis yielded any support for the notion that participants would be better at identifying group membership from volitional as compared to spontaneous laughter
Summary
Laughter is a frequently occurring and socially potent nonverbal vocalization, which is frequently used to signal affiliation, reward or cooperative intent, and often helps to maintain and strengthen social bonds [1,2]. The main factor driving the enhanced speaker identity perception from volitional laughter was not perceptual properties like authenticity as judged by listeners (i.e. how fake or genuine a laugh sounds), but whether the laughs were produced spontaneously or volitionally [8] This greater encoding of identity-related information in volitionally produced laughter suggests that humans may produce more individuated vocal signals through volitional modulation of the voice. Ritter & Sauter [21] tested whether group identity could be inferred from laughter The stimuli included both posed and spontaneous laughs, produced by Dutch, English, French, American, Japanese and Namibian speakers. Dutch and Japanese participants listened to those clips and judged (i) whether the laughing person was from their own or another culture; and (ii) whether they perceived the laughter as spontaneous or volitional (spontaneousperc, volitionalperc) They rated the positivity of each laughter clip. Including both measures allows us to understand differences in group identification and perceived positivity across spontaneously and volitionally produced laughs, as well as in relation to how spontaneous or volitional the sounds are
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