Social Laughter Research Articles

Subtle Social Critique in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer

Subtle Social Critique in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer

Laughter, mental health and cancer: a case study of Ros Ben-Moshe

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to meet Ros Ben-Moshe, a cancer survivor – or rather thriver – and lecturer in positive psychology at La Trobe University, describes how she uses laughter to boost levity and mental health. Design/methodology/approach This case study is divided into two parts: an autoethnographic life story of Ros Ben-Moshe, followed by 10 questions and answers. Findings Regular laughter is an enjoyable way to stimulate the feel-good chemicals dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins. A laughter mindset is an important tool for overall wellbeing. It can help build connections and re-frame negative situations. Research limitations/implications This is a personal narrative and gives the perspective of one person who harnessed the benefits of laughter following a cancer diagnosis. Practical implications Laughter can be used strategically to reset our internal mindset and prime ourselves towards optimal mental health and wellbeing, even while struggling with serious health issues. Research into how and when to prescribe laughter for mental health and overall wellbeing is therefore of interest. Social implications Social laughter is important and rewarding. For those anxious about social laughter, finding people to laugh with who do not judge you is recommended, as are affirmations to lessen anxiety. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first case study and interview with a cancer survivor on the topic of laughter, cancer and mental health.

Mu-opioid receptor system modulates responses to vocal bonding and distress signals in humans.

Laughter is a contagious prosocial signal that conveys bonding motivation; adult crying conversely communicates desire for social proximity by signalling distress. Endogenous mu-opioid receptors (MORs) modulate sociability in humans and non-human primates. In this combined PET-fMRI study (n = 17), we tested whether central MOR tone is associated with regional brain responses to social signals of laughter and crying. MOR availability was measured with positron emission tomography (PET) using the high-affinity agonist radioligand [11C]carfentanil. Haemodynamic responses to social laughter and crying vocalizations were measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Social laughter evoked activation in the auditory cortex, insula, cingulate cortex, amygdala, primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, and primary and secondary motor cortex; crying sounds led to more restricted activation in the auditory cortex and nearby areas. MOR availability was negatively correlated with the haemodynamic responses to social laughter in the primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, primary and secondary motor cortex, posterior insula, posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus, cuneus, temporal gyri and lingual gyrus. For crying-evoked activations, MOR availability was negatively correlated with medial and lateral prefrontal haemodynamic responses. Altogether our findings highlight the role of the MOR system in modulating acute brain responses to both positive and negative social signals. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience'.

Joking at the Limits of Protest in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go

ABSTRACT This article takes up the centrality of jokes in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go and analyzes them in ways that push on the limits of social protest fiction, a genre understood as anything but comedic. Tracing a relationship between interiority, what I call “the frictions of social laughter,” and deferment in Himes’s novel shows how pockets of life are made possible within inhospitable environments produced by racist power structures. Ultimately, by exploring the challenges of laughing together, this article shows that the role that laughter and joking plays in the novel’s expanded vision for Black life is larger than previously understood, going beyond the merely instrumental.

The Role of Contextual Information in Classifying Spontaneous Social Laughter

Laughter is a ubiquitous and important social signal, but its nature is yet to be fully explored. One of the open empirical questions is about the role of context in the interpretation of laughter. Can laughs presented on their own convey specific feelings and social motives? How influential is social context when a person tries to understand the meaning of a laugh? Here we test the extent to which the classification of laughs produced in different situations is guided by knowing the context within which these laughs were produced. In the current study, stimuli were spontaneous laughs recorded in social situations engineered to elicit amusement, embarrassment, and schadenfreude. In a between-subjects design, participants classified these laughs being assigned to one of the four experimental conditions: audio only, audio-visual, side-by-side videos of two interactants, and side-by-side videos accompanied by a brief vignette. Participants’ task was to label each laugh as an instance of amusement, embarrassment, or schadenfreude laugh, or “other.” Laughs produced in situations inducing embarrassment were classified more accurately than laughs produced in other situations. Most importantly, eliminating information about the social settings in which laughs were produced decreased participants’ classification accuracy such that accuracy was no better than chance in the experimental conditions providing minimal contextual information. Our findings demonstrate the importance of context in the interpretation of laughter and highlight the complexity of experimental investigations of schadenfreude displays.

Vocal Expression of Affective States in Spontaneous Laughter reveals the Bright and the Dark Side of Laughter

It has been shown that the acoustical signal of posed laughter can convey affective information to the listener. However, because posed and spontaneous laughter differ in a number of significant aspects, it is unclear whether affective communication generalises to spontaneous laughter. To answer this question, we created a stimulus set of 381 spontaneous laughter audio recordings, produced by 51 different speakers, resembling different types of laughter. In Experiment 1, 159 participants were presented with these audio recordings without any further information about the situational context of the speakers and asked to classify the laughter sounds. Results showed that joyful, tickling, and schadenfreude laughter could be classified significantly above chance level. In Experiment 2, 209 participants were presented with a subset of 121 laughter recordings correctly classified in Experiment 1 and asked to rate the laughter according to four emotional dimensions, i.e., arousal, dominance, sender’s valence, and receiver-directed valence. Results showed that laughter types differed significantly in their ratings on all dimensions. Joyful laughter and tickling laughter both showed a positive sender’s valence and receiver-directed valence, whereby tickling laughter had a particularly high arousal. Schadenfreude had a negative receiver-directed valence and a high dominance, thus providing empirical evidence for the existence of a dark side in spontaneous laughter. The present results suggest that with the evolution of human social communication laughter diversified from the former play signal of non-human primates to a much more fine-grained signal that can serve a multitude of social functions in order to regulate group structure and hierarchy.

Vocal aspect of social laughter during virtual interaction

O presente artigo enfoca os diversos tipos de riso registrados durante interações sociais reais realizadas em um ambiente de imersão virtual. Neste experimento, investigamos se os seres humanos são capazes de discriminar risos sociais de risos espontâneos e gargalhadas audiovisuais, sem terem acesso a nenhum contexto de produção do riso. Para tal, realizamos dois experimentos perceptuais considerando apenas o estímulo auditivo, por um lado, e o estímulo audiovisual, por outro. Os sujeitos dos testes de percepção são falantes nativos franceses e japoneses. Cada sujeito ouviu e ouviu e viu 162 risadas e escolheu uma resposta entre três possibilidades: social, espontânea ou irreconhecível. Os resultados de ambos os experimentos mostram que todos os participantes são capazes de discriminar esses dois tipos de riso com um grau de confiança bastante elevado, mesmo sem as informações contextuais: a taxa de identificação correta para o riso espontâneo é de cerca de 70%, com uma quantidade semelhante de riso social considerando tanto os estímulos visuais quanto os audiovisuais. A seguir, foram extraídas medidas acústicas para cada risada, a fim de investigar possíveis diferenças entre os dois tipos de riso. A análise multifatorial demonstra que os comportamentos perceptuais e algumas características acústicas (F0 e duração) estão correlacionados. Observarmos, particularmente, uma diferença significativa entre o riso social e o riso espontâneo através dos traços da duração total e da duração do vozeamento. Por último, realizamos mais um experimento perceptual sobre a subcategorização dos risos sociais com base em três fatores sociais: estado físico do falante, envolvimento do falante e distância psicológica. Os resultados mostram que o riso social é evocado de forma semelhante no que diz respeito ao estado físico do falante e envolvimento do falante. Entretanto, no que diz respeito à distância social, há divergência de percepção entre franceses e japoneses sendo que nestes últimos predomina a percepção da distância psicológica.

Philosophical Culture of Laughter and the Psychology of Humor

The study of the phenomenon of laughter opens up opportunities in understanding the phenomenon of culture, since humor is an important element of culture, reflects the characteristics of national consciousness and attitude, is a means of regulating and preserving social values. The phenomenon of humor in Russian psychology is not fully disclosed, so it is important to turn to philosophy, cultural studies, in terms of which several areas of the study of the comic are of interest for psychology: the comic as deviation from the norm and the destruction of the sign system; distinguishingphysiological laughter and social (cultural)laughter; the proportion of emotions and intellect in the comic. The analysis makes it possible to assert that the phenomenon of the comic is essential to study in all its manifestations in wholeness and unity: the physiological laughter and the comic laughter, the unity of emotion and intellect in understanding and creating the comic. It has been revealed that humor possesses a powerful potential, allowing the individual not to easily accept the norms and laws of society, but show some flexibility in the interpretation of these norms.

PB 4 Neural correlates of intent attribution and laughter processing in children and adolescents

Introduction The attribution of intent during social interaction is a cornerstone of the social adjustment process ( Crick and Dodge, 1994 ). In particular, the tendency to attribute hostile intent has consistently been associated with and argued to play a role in the development and maintenance of aggressive behavior in childhood and adolescence ( Dodge, 2006 ). However, little is known about the neural correlates of hostile intent attributions ( Erdley et al., 2010 ). We used fMRI and behavioral measures to investigate intent attributions and attention biases for hostile social stimuli using social laughter processing in children and adolescents under consideration of gender and age effects. Methods 35 girls and 28 boys in three age groups (9–12, 13–15 and 16–18y; mean 15.3, SD 2.39) without current psychiatric diagnoses rated 1.5s audiovisual laugh sequences in a 3T MRI scanner. 20 friendly, 20 tickling and 20 taunting sequences ( Szameitat et al., 2009 ) were rated as friendly or taunting on a four-point scale. Rating, reaction time (RT) and attention bias (RT friendly – RT taunting laughter) differences were calculated with three 2 (gender) × 3 (age group) × 3 (laughter type) mixed model ANOVAs. Participants with excessive movement or spurious responding were removed from analysis. Neural responses were calculated in SPM8 in a whole brain analysis of the BOLD response to each laughter type and the correlations to hostile intent rating, physical aggression ( Buss and Perry, 1992 ) and callous unemotional traits ( Frick, 2003 ). Results A significant main effect of laughter type ( F = 100.62, p F = 2.829, p = .068) and the main effect of age on attention bias ( F = 2.634, p = .083) approached significance, with younger participants showing attention bias to taunting and older participants to friendly laughter. Callousness and physical aggression correlated with hostile ratings of friendly ( r = .288, p r = .315, p r = −.404, p A broad network showed increased BOLD response during laughter processing, including bilateral medial and superior temporal gyri (MTG, STG), inferior and medial frontal gyri (IFG, MFG), caudate nuclei and left superior parietal lobe (whole brain FWE p Conclusions The current study found an extended neural network involved in laughter processing in children and adolescents, similar to that found in adults ( Szameitat et al., 2010 ). In addition, attribution of hostile intent in laughter was found to associate with changes in BOLD signal strength across these processing areas. This association strength was modulated by youth’s aggressive behavior and callous personality traits.

Social Laughter Triggers Endogenous Opioid Release in Humans.

The size of human social networks significantly exceeds the network that can be maintained by social grooming or touching in other primates. It has been proposed that endogenous opioid release after social laughter would provide a neurochemical pathway supporting long-term relationships in humans (Dunbar, 2012), yet this hypothesis currently lacks direct neurophysiological support. We used PET and the μ-opioid-receptor (MOR)-specific ligand [11C]carfentanil to quantify laughter-induced endogenous opioid release in 12 healthy males. Before the social laughter scan, the subjects watched laughter-inducing comedy clips with their close friends for 30 min. Before the baseline scan, subjects spent 30 min alone in the testing room. Social laughter increased pleasurable sensations and triggered endogenous opioid release in thalamus, caudate nucleus, and anterior insula. In addition, baseline MOR availability in the cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices was associated with the rate of social laughter. In a behavioral control experiment, pain threshold-a proxy of endogenous opioidergic activation-was elevated significantly more in both male and female volunteers after watching laughter-inducing comedy versus non-laughter-inducing drama in groups. Modulation of the opioidergic activity by social laughter may be an important neurochemical pathway that supports the formation, reinforcement, and maintenance of human social bonds.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Social contacts are vital to humans. The size of human social networks significantly exceeds the network that can be maintained by social grooming in other primates. Here, we used PET to show that endogenous opioid release after social laughter may provide a neurochemical mechanism supporting long-term relationships in humans. Participants were scanned twice: after a 30 min social laughter session and after spending 30 min alone in the testing room (baseline). Endogenous opioid release was stronger after laughter versus the baseline scan. Opioid receptor density in the frontal cortex predicted social laughter rates. Modulation of the opioidergic activity by social laughter may be an important neurochemical mechanism reinforcing and maintaining social bonds between humans.

Mirthful and polite laughter: structural models and their duration

Foreign researchers have been investigating laughter, as a paralinguistic element, and its acoustic properties for about two decades. However, laughter has not been in the field of interest of Lithuanian phoneticians so far. This article analyses two most common types of social laughter: polite and mirthful. The aim of the research is to determine differences of structure and duration of structural units of polite and mirthful laughter. The research material consists of 100 samples of spontaneous, non-overlapping polite and mirthful laughter (50 of each type). The recordings were annotated and boundaries of laughter units were determined by using PRAAT programme. The analysis of the structure and duration of structural units of polite and mirthful laughter revealed that polite laughter does not tend to last long: its episodes consist of one bout of one to three syllables; the most common is a two-syllable laughter bout. The episode of mirthful laughter can consist of more than one bout; the bouts of this type of laughter consist of one to fifteen syllables, although the most common samples are of three or four syllables. In most cases, one-bout laughter that consists of one or two syllables is considered to be polite; laughter that is longer than three syllables can always be identified as mirthful. Bouts of both polite and mirthful laughter consist of three syllables. In that case, the difference between the two types of laughter can be seen in duration: bouts of mirthful laughter always last longer than bouts of polite laughter of the same structure.

A Study on the Effects of Functional Diversity on Team Creativity: The Mediating Role of Team Intrinsic Motivation and the Moderating Role of Task Interdependence

지금까지 기능적 다양성이 개인이나 조직유효성에 미치는 영향과 관련하여 많은 연구들이 이루어졌다. 기능적 다양성이 조직유효성에 미치는 결과 중에서도, 창의성은 오늘날과 같이 고도로 경쟁적인 환경에서 조직의 생존과 장기적인 성과에 매우 중요하기 때문에 경영학 연구자들로부터 많은 관심을 받아오고 있다.BR 지금까지의 기능적 다양성 연구들은 기능적 다양성이 개인이나 팀창의성에 미치는 영향에 대한 이해를 넓혀주는 데 큰 역할을 해왔다. 하지만 몇 가지 중요한 이슈들, 즉 내재적 동기부여가 기능적 다양성과 팀창의성 간의 관계를 매개하는 지에 대한 연구, 팀원들 간의 과업 상호의존이 기능적 다양성과 팀 내재적 동기부여의 간의 관계를 조절하는 지의 여부, 그리고 서구권에서 행해진 기능적 다양성에 관한 경영학 분야에서의 이전의 연구결과들이 비서구권에서도 일반화되는지에 대한 실증연구를 다루는 데는 적지 않은 한계가 있다.BR 이러한 맥락에서 본 연구의 목적은 팀의 기능적 다양성이 팀창의성에 미치는 영향을 분석하고 아울러 양자 사이에 팀 내재적 동기부여가 매개역할을, 과업 상호의존이 조절역할을 하는 가를 국내 기업들을 대상으로 검증하는 데 있다. 이러한 목적을 달성하기 위해 본 연구의 조사대상기업은 상대적으로 창의성의 발현이 용이한 하이테크제조회사, 소프트웨어개발회사, 제약회사, 광고회사 등 8개의 국내 기업의 61개 연구개발부서의 팀을 선정하여 총 354세트의 설문지를 배부하였다. 동일방법편의를 극복하기 위해 설문참여자들 중 부하직원에게는 기능적 경력사항, 팀 내재적 동기부여 및 과업 상호의존을 응답하도록 하고, 상사에게는 기능적 경력사항과 팀창의성을 응답하도록 하였다. 부하직원-상사의 269쌍(dyad)을 분석에 사용했는데, 분석 결과 팀의 기능적 다양성이 팀창의성에 정의 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났을 뿐만 아니라 내재적 동기부여는 기능적 다양성이 팀창의성에 미치는 정의 관계에서 매개역할을, 그리고 과업 상호의존은 기능적 다양성과 내재적 동기부여 사이에서 부분적으로 조절역할을 하는 것으로 나타났다. 끝으로 이러한 연구결과를 토대로 이론적, 실천적 함의를 구체적으로 살펴보았다.

Perception and Automatic Recognition of Laughter from Whole-Body Motion: Continuous and Categorical Perspectives

Despite its importance in social interactions, laughter remains little studied in affective computing. Intelligent virtual agents are often blind to users’ laughter and unable to produce convincing laughter themselves. Respiratory, auditory, and facial laughter signals have been investigated but laughter-related body movements have received less attention. The aim of this study is threefold. First, to probe human laughter perception by analyzing patterns of categorisations of natural laughter animated on a minimal avatar. Results reveal that a low dimensional space can describe perception of laughter “types”. Second, to investigate observers’ perception of laughter (hilarious, social, awkward, fake, and non-laughter) based on animated avatars generated from natural and acted motion-capture data. Significant differences in torso and limb movements are found between animations perceived as laughter and those perceived as non-laughter. Hilarious laughter also differs from social laughter. Different body movement features were indicative of laughter in sitting and standing avatar postures. Third, to investigate automatic recognition of laughter to the same level of certainty as observers’ perceptions. Results show recognition rates of the Random Forest model approach human rating levels. Classification comparisons and feature importance analyses indicate an improvement in recognition of social laughter when localized features and nonlinear models are used.

The social life of laughter

Laughter is often considered to be the product of humour. However, laughter is a social emotion, occurring most often in interactions, where it is associated with bonding, agreement, affection, and emotional regulation. Laughter is underpinned by complex neural systems, allowing it to be used flexibly. In humans and chimpanzees, social (voluntary) laughter is distinctly different from evoked (involuntary) laughter, a distinction which is also seen in brain imaging studies of laughter.

Classification of social laughter in natural conversational speech

We report progress towards developing a sensor module that categorizes types of laughter for application in dialogue systems or social-skills training situations. The module will also function as a component to measure discourse engagement in natural conversational speech. This paper presents the results of an analysis into the sounds of human laughter in a very large corpus of naturally occurring conversational speech and our classification of the laughter types according to social function. Various types of laughter were categorized into either polite or genuinely mirthful categories and the analysis of these laughs forms the core of this report. Statistical analysis of the acoustic features of each laugh was performed and a Principal Component Analysis and Classification Tree analysis were performed to determine the main contributing factors in each case. A statistical model was then trained using a Support Vector Machine to predict the most likely category for each laugh in both speaker-specific and speaker-independent manner. Better than 70% accuracy was obtained in automatic classification tests.

Different Types of Laughter Modulate Connectivity within Distinct Parts of the Laughter Perception Network

Laughter is an ancient signal of social communication among humans and non-human primates. Laughter types with complex social functions (e.g., taunt and joy) presumably evolved from the unequivocal and reflex-like social bonding signal of tickling laughter already present in non-human primates. Here, we investigated the modulations of cerebral connectivity associated with different laughter types as well as the effects of attention shifts between implicit and explicit processing of social information conveyed by laughter using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Complex social laughter types and tickling laughter were found to modulate connectivity in two distinguishable but partially overlapping parts of the laughter perception network irrespective of task instructions. Connectivity changes, presumably related to the higher acoustic complexity of tickling laughter, occurred between areas in the prefrontal cortex and the auditory association cortex, potentially reflecting higher demands on acoustic analysis associated with increased information load on auditory attention, working memory, evaluation and response selection processes. In contrast, the higher degree of socio-relational information in complex social laughter types was linked to increases of connectivity between auditory association cortices, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and brain areas associated with mentalizing as well as areas in the visual associative cortex. These modulations might reflect automatic analysis of acoustic features, attention direction to informative aspects of the laughter signal and the retention of those in working memory during evaluation processes. These processes may be associated with visual imagery supporting the formation of inferences on the intentions of our social counterparts. Here, the right dorsolateral precentral cortex appears as a network node potentially linking the functions of auditory and visual associative sensory cortices with those of the mentalizing-associated anterior mediofrontal cortex during the decoding of social information in laughter.

Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold.

Although laughter forms an important part of human non-verbal communication, it has received rather less attention than it deserves in both the experimental and the observational literatures. Relaxed social (Duchenne) laughter is associated with feelings of wellbeing and heightened affect, a proximate explanation for which might be the release of endorphins. We tested this hypothesis in a series of six experimental studies in both the laboratory (watching videos) and naturalistic contexts (watching stage performances), using change in pain threshold as an assay for endorphin release. The results show that pain thresholds are significantly higher after laughter than in the control condition. This pain-tolerance effect is due to laughter itself and not simply due to a change in positive affect. We suggest that laughter, through an endorphin-mediated opiate effect, may play a crucial role in social bonding.

Molière and social laughter

Molière and social laughter

Molière and social laughter

Molière and social laughter

Sitting Targets and the Joking Relationships

Sitting Targets and the Joking Relationships