The animal nature of spontaneous human laughter

Bryant, Gregory A.; Aktipis, C. Athena

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.03.003

Cited by 180 publications

(222 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Evolutionarily, higher entropy is related to poorer or more primitive control by neural circuits; however, at the same time, it attracts more attention by third parties and is more efficient as an emotional mover. In the human case, the neural circuit in charge of producing laughter's inarticulate sounds, partially the vagal system with its laryngeal nerve branch, has less controlling capabilities than the circuits in charge of spoken language (or contrived laughter for that matter); and something similar would happen with the rest of the physical phonatory-articulatory system involved [4,20,42]. Thus, spontaneous laughter would have higher entropic content respect to language, which is even higher in toddlers and infants-also in accordance with the higher arousal level that usually accompanies their laughter displays.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given that it has a considerable social effect on the receiver side, it may be easily subject to manipulation and faked by the emitter. As pointed out [20], contrived laughter is relatively well distinguished from spontaneous laughter by means of a series of differences in duration, pitch, F 0 , loudness, and entropy, and this is an aspect that has to be carefully considered in the case of depression. Quite probably, the depressed patient, with his/her lower arousal, is even "too honest" in the disclosure of this socially unwanted condition.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…About the specific phonation involved, the facial counterparts, the diaphragmatic and bodily movements, and the systemic repercussions (cardiovascular, immune, central and autonomous nervous system, etc. ), they will not be dealt with here [1,4,20], although they are essential to fulfill the "hidden" evolutionary missions of laughter and to explain most of the present therapeutic applications [13,21].…”

Section: The Social Meaning Of Laughtermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The Entropy of Laughter: Discriminative Power of Laughter’s Entropy in the Diagnosis of Depression

Navarro

Moral

Cuesta-Álvaro

et al. 2016

Entropy

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Abstract:Laughter is increasingly present in biomedical literature, both in analytical neurological aspects and in applied therapeutic fields. The present paper, bridging between the analytical and the applied, explores the potential of a relevant variable of laughter's acoustic signature-entropy-in the detection of a widespread mental disorder, depression, as well as in gauging the severity of its diagnostic. In laughter, the Shannon-Wiener entropy of the distribution of sound frequencies, which is one of the key features distinguishing its acoustic signal from the utterances of spoken language, has not been a specific focus of research yet, although the studies of human language and of animal communication have pointed out that entropy is a very important factor regarding the vocal/acoustic expression of emotions. As the experimental survey of laughter in depression herein undertaken shows, it was possible to discriminate between patients and controls with an 82.1% accuracy just by using laughter's entropy and by applying the decision tree procedure. These experimental results, discussed in the light of the current research on laughter, point to the relevance of entropy in the spontaneous bona fide extroversion of mental states toward other individuals, as the signal of laughter seems to imply. This is in line with recent theoretical approaches that rely on the optimization of a neuro-informational free energy (and associated entropy) as the main "stuff" of brain processing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Social Meaning Of Laughtermentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The Entropy of Laughter: Discriminative Power of Laughter’s Entropy in the Diagnosis of Depression

Navarro

Moral

Cuesta-Álvaro

et al. 2016

Entropy

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“…Fortunately, this is beginning to change, as a series of recent studies have analyzed spontaneous laughter and found some acoustic differences between the spontaneous and volitional varieties (Bryant & Aktipis, 2014;Lavan, Scott, & McGettigan, 2015). In addition to laughter, Parsons and coauthors (2014) also collected authentic sounds of crying and neutral vocalizations from online videos.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given the evolutionary arms race between signalers and receivers, authentic emotional markers can be expected to be honest, hard-to-fake signals (Searcy & Nowicki, 2005). The documented differences between authentic and volitional smiles (Ekman, Davidson, & Friesen, 1990) and laughs (Bryant & Aktipis, 2014;Lavan et al, 2015) raise the possibility that systematic differences may also exist for other emotional signals. Furthermore, overcoming the methodological complications associated with naturalistic data has practical applications.…”

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confidence: 99%

Nonlinguistic vocalizations from online amateur videos for emotion research: A validated corpus

2016

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This study introduces a corpus of 260 naturalistic human nonlinguistic vocalizations representing nine emotions: amusement, anger, disgust, effort, fear, joy, pain, pleasure, and sadness. The recognition accuracy in a rating task varied greatly per emotion, from <40% for joy and pain, to >70% for amusement, pleasure, fear, and sadness. In contrast, the raters' linguistic-cultural group had no effect on recognition accuracy: The predominantly English-language corpus was classified with similar accuracies by participants from Brazil, Russia, Sweden, and the UK/USA. Supervised random forest models classified the sounds as accurately as the human raters. The best acoustic predictors of emotion were pitch, harmonicity, and the spacing and regularity of syllables. This corpus of ecologically valid emotional vocalizations can be filtered to include only sounds with high recognition rates, in order to study reactions to emotional stimuli of known perceptual types (reception side), or can be used in its entirety to study the association between affective states and vocal expressions (production side).

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Laughter as a scientific problem: An adventure in sidewalk neuroscience

Provine

2015

J of Comparative Neurology

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Laughter is a stereotyped, innate, human play vocalization that provides an ideal simple system for neurobehavioral analyses of the sort usually associated with such animal models as walking, wing-flapping, and bird song. Laughter research is in its early stages, where the frontiers are near and accessible to simple observational procedures termed "sidewalk neuroscience." The basic, nontechnical approach of describing the act of laughter and when humans do it has revealed a variety of phenomena of social and neurological significance. Findings include the acoustic structure of laughter, the minimal voluntary control of laughter, contagiousness, the "punctuation effect" that describes the placement of laughter in conversation, the dominance of speech over laughter, the role of breath control in the evolution of speech, the evolutionary trajectory of laughter in primates, and the role of laughter in human matching and mating. If one knows where to look and how to see, advances in neuroscience are accessible to anyone and require minimal resources.

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The animal nature of spontaneous human laughter

Cited by 180 publications

References 49 publications

The Entropy of Laughter: Discriminative Power of Laughter’s Entropy in the Diagnosis of Depression

The Entropy of Laughter: Discriminative Power of Laughter’s Entropy in the Diagnosis of Depression

Nonlinguistic vocalizations from online amateur videos for emotion research: A validated corpus

Laughter as a scientific problem: An adventure in sidewalk neuroscience

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