Towards a social functional account of laughter: Acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance

Abstract

Recent work has identified the physical features of smiles that accomplish three tasks fundamental to human social living: rewarding behavior, establishing and managing affiliative bonds, and negotiating social status. The current work extends the social functional account to laughter. Participants (N = 762) rated the degree to which reward, affiliation, or dominance (between-subjects) was conveyed by 400 laughter samples acquired from a commercial sound effects website. Inclusion of a fourth rating dimension, spontaneity, allowed us to situate the current approach in the context of existing laughter research, which emphasizes the distinction between spontaneous and volitional laughter. We used 11 acoustic properties extracted from the laugh samples to predict participants’ ratings. Actor sex moderated, and sometimes even reversed, the relation between acoustics and participants’ judgments. Spontaneous laughter appears to serve the reward function in the current framework, as similar acoustic properties guided perceiver judgments of spontaneity and reward: reduced voicing and increased pitch, increased duration for female actors, and increased pitch slope, center of gravity, first formant, and noisiness for male actors. Affiliation ratings diverged from reward in their sex-dependent relationship to intensity and, for females, reduced pitch range and raised second formant. Dominance displayed the most distinct pattern of acoustic predictors, including increased pitch range, reduced second formant in females, and decreased pitch variability in males. We relate the current findings to existing findings on laughter and human and non-human vocalizations, concluding laughter can signal much more that felt or faked amusement.

Beyond the big five as predictors of dispositions toward ridicule and being laughed at: The HEXACO model and the dark triad

“…Given the importance of humor and laughter in interpersonal situations involving humiliating feelings and feelings of superiority, humor and laughter can arguably be used as a sort of interpersonal strategy (e.g., Rees & Monrouxe, ; Renner & Heydasch, ). There is prior research indicating that humor and laughter may be conveniently used for conveying dominance or expressing inadmissible ideas under the semblance of seeking mere fun (Wood et al ., ; Ziv & Gadish, ). Future research could examine the role of avoiding and initiating laughter toward oneself and others in normal and “dark” (e.g., antisocial) personality types.…”

“…Laughter plays an essential communicative role in human life. Although this emotion‐related behavior is mainly associated with approach‐oriented affective states, laughter may also be used to denote rejection or a sense of superiority over others (Wood, Martin & Niedenthal, ). This potential ambiguity – laughing at me instead of laughing with me – may elicit a misinterpretation of the intention of laughter and lead to diametrically opposite psychological outcomes.…”

The Perception of Spontaneous and Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies

“…In contrast, much less is known about how laughter is perceived. Research has explored distinctions between spontaneous and volitional laughter (Bryant & Aktipis, 2014;Lavan, Scott, & McGettigan, 2016;McGettigan et al, 2013), judgments of affiliation in colaughter (Bryant et al, 2016), and how perceivers ascribe social functions to laughter (Wood, Martin, & Niedenthal, 2017). The phylogeny of laughter suggests an avenue through which, by investigating perceptions of laughter, one of the earliest functions of laughter can be explored.…”

Developing a social functional account of laughter

“…Because of gender norms, it may be that males do not (or are not encouraged to) convey affiliation via signals of smallness, and females do not (or are not encouraged to) convey dominance via signals of largeness. Future work should further examine the moderating sex effect, which could be due to participants' gendered mental representations, sex differences in vocalizations, or socialized gender differences in how social intentions are conveyed (McKeown, Sneddon, & Curran, 2014;Provine, 2001;Wood et al, 2017). Martin et al (2017) speculate that smiles-which also appear to accomplish the social tasks of reward, affiliation, and dominance-gain their social significance via the effect they have on vocalizations.…”