Laughter and culture

Abstract

Like most human non-verbal vocalizations, laughter is produced by speakers of all languages, across all known societies. But despite this obvious fact (or perhaps because of it), there is little comparative research examining the structural and functional similarity of laughter across speakers from different cultures. Here, we describe existing research examining (i) the perception of laughter across disparate cultures, (ii) conversation analysis examining how laughter manifests itself during discourse across different languages, and (iii) computational methods developed for automatically detecting laughter in spoken language databases. Together, these three areas of investigation provide clues regarding universals and cultural variations in laughter production and perception, and offer methodological tools that can be useful for future large-scale cross-cultural studies. We conclude by providing suggestions for areas of research and predictions of what we should expect to discover. Overall, we highlight how important questions regarding human vocal communication across cultures can be addressed through the examination of spontaneous and volitional laughter. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience’.

Development of the Laughter Production and Perception Questionnaire (LPPQ): A Novel Tool to Investigate Human Laughter Behaviour

“…The majority of the items that loaded onto these three principal components in the English version of the questionnaire also loaded onto the same components in the Chinese version. These results are consistent with prior research demonstrating the cross-cultural recognition of laughter as a non-verbal vocalization(Bryant & Bainbridge, 2022;Sauter et al, 2010). Specifically, these findings suggest that laughter is universally perceived and produced as a positive expression across all societies, as evidenced by the similar loadings on Frequency and Liking of laughter of the laughter questionnaire.…”

“…Previous studies have primarily focused on the cross-cultural perception and recognition of laughter (Bryant & Bainbridge, 2022;Sauter et al, 2010), whereas this study is the first to explore the self-reported experience of laughter across cultures.…”

“…In general, the laughter questionnaire shows that individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds share a universal understanding of laughter as a social emotion and behaviour. Notably, laughter is considered as a positive expression across all societies (Bryant & Bainbridge, 2022;Sauter et al, 2010), which is reflected in the components Frequency and Liking. Moreover, there is a mutual understanding among people regarding the social meaning of other people's laughter.…”

Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience

“…Then four reviews frame laughter studies in the fields of anthropology (Dunbar [ 2 ]), ethology (Davila-Ross & Palagi [ 3 ]), psychology (Scott et al . [ 4 ]) and cross-cultural studies (Bryant & Bainbridge [ 5 ]). A second section is entirely dedicated to new empirical data, with studies tackling the issue of laughter in the fields of behavioural studies (Burke et al .…”

“…Then four reviews frame laughter studies in the fields of anthropology (Dunbar [ 2 ]), ethology (Davila-Ross & Palagi [ 3 ]), psychology (Scott et al . [ 4 ]) and cross-cultural studies (Bryant & Bainbridge [ 5 ]).…”