Tendency to laugh is a stable trait: Findings from a round-robin conversation study

Abstract

Is the tendency to laugh a stable trait? What does the amount of laughter tell us about the personality and state of the producer, and how does their laughter influence the people around them? To answer these questions, we used a round-robin design where participants (N=66) engaged in 10 different conversations with 10 same-gender strangers. This design allowed us to determine state- and trait-level differences in how much people laugh and to isolate different sources of variability in the amount of laughter per conversation. More than half of the variability in the amount a person laughs is attributable to individual differences. This tendency to laugh negatively predicts conversation enjoyment. A smaller amount of variability in the amount people laugh is due to qualities of their conversation partners. Partners who tend to elicit others’ laughter are perceived as more relatable. We examined the personality correlates of laughter and found that less intellectual and less empathically-concerned participants (i.e., nonserious participants) produced and elicited more laughter. In summary, how much a person laughs is not a straightforward function of enjoyment. Instead, it is a behavioral trait associated with being perceived as relatable, supporting laughters’ proposed function of conveying harmless, nonserious intentions.

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]). (ii) 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 [6], Proelss et al [7]), social psychology (Hess [8], Wood [9]), consciousness studies (Prochazkova et al…”

“…[6], Proelss et al . [7]), social psychology (Hess [8], Wood [9]), consciousness studies (Prochazkova et al . [10]), neuroimaging (Wattendorff et al .…”