Social Context Disambiguates the Interpretation of Laughter

Abstract

Despite being a pan-cultural phenomenon, laughter is arguably the least understood behaviour deployed in social interaction. As well as being a response to humour, it has other important functions including promoting social affiliation, developing cooperation and regulating competitive behaviours. This multi-functional feature of laughter marks it as an adaptive behaviour central to facilitating social cohesion. However, it is not clear how laughter achieves this social cohesion. We consider two approaches to understanding how laughter facilitates social cohesion – the ‘representational’ approach and the ‘affect-induction’ approach. The representational approach suggests that laughter conveys information about the expresser’s emotional state, and the listener decodes this information to gain knowledge about the laugher’s felt state. The affect-induction approach views laughter as a tool to influence the affective state of listeners. We describe a modified version of the affect-induction approach, in which laughter is combined with additional factors – including social context, verbal information, other social signals and knowledge of the listener’s emotional state – to influence an interaction partner. This view asserts that laughter by itself is ambiguous: the same laughter may induce positive or negative affect in a listener, with the outcome determined by the combination of these additional factors. Here we describe two experiments exploring which of these approaches accurately describes laughter. Participants judged the genuineness of audio–video recordings of social interactions containing laughter. Unknown to the participants the recordings contained either the original laughter or replacement laughter from a different part of the interaction. When replacement laughter was matched for intensity, genuineness judgements were similar to judgements of the original unmodified recordings. When replacement laughter was not matched for intensity, genuineness judgements were generally significantly lower. These results support the affect-induction view of laughter by suggesting that laughter is inherently underdetermined and ambiguous, and that its interpretation is determined by the context in which it occurs.

Social Context Influences the Acoustic Properties of Laughter

“…How do you know? If laughter simply conveyed genuine or artificial positive affect (Bryant & Aktipis, 2014;Lavan, Scott, & McGettigan, 2015), then you would have to rely on knowledge about the social context and your coworkers to disambiguate their laughter's meaning (Curran et al, 2018).…”

Social context influences the acoustic properties of laughter

“…How do you know? If laughter simply conveyed genuine or artificial positive affect (Bryant & Aktipis, 2014;Lavan et al, 2015), then you would have to rely on kno ledge about the social conte t and our co orkers to disambiguate their laughter s meaning (Curran et al, 2018).…”

“…In particular, prior work suggests laughter can serve at least three social tasks (Wood & Niedenthal, 2018): inducing positive affect in the recipient to reward their behavior (Owren & Bachorowski, 2003); signaling affiliation, undoing social tension and smoothly coordinating interactions (Mehu & Dunbar, 2008); and punishing norm violations and exerting dominance over the target (Szameitat et al, 2009). Of course, context often provides information about the meaning of a laugh (Curran et al, 2018), so a person need only exaggerate rewarding, affiliative, or dominant features of their laughter to the extent that is necessary to disambiguate their intent (Wood & Niedenthal, 2018). And a given laugh may accomplish multiple tasks simultaneously (Scarantino, 2018).…”

Recognizing affiliation in colaughter and cospeech

“…A fairly substantial body of work strongly suggests that laughter functions, at least in part, to communicate positive affect and cooperative intentions among groups of mutually trusting individuals in ongoing relationships. The notion that laughter helps people signal affiliative intentions is central to all current functional approaches [13,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. But few theorists have considered seriously the ubiquitous phenomenon of laughter in groups.…”