The Role of Contextual Information in Classifying Spontaneous Social Laughter

Abstract

Laughter is a ubiquitous and important social signal, but its nature is yet to be fully explored. One of the open empirical questions is about the role of context in the interpretation of laughter. Can laughs presented on their own convey specific feelings and social motives? How influential is social context when a person tries to understand the meaning of a laugh? Here we test the extent to which the classification of laughs produced in different situations is guided by knowing the context within which these laughs were produced. In the current study, stimuli were spontaneous laughs recorded in social situations engineered to elicit amusement, embarrassment, and schadenfreude. In a between-subjects design, participants classified these laughs being assigned to one of the four experimental conditions: audio only, audio-visual, side-by-side videos of two interactants, and side-by-side videos accompanied by a brief vignette. Participants’ task was to label each laugh as an instance of amusement, embarrassment, or schadenfreude laugh, or “other.” Laughs produced in situations inducing embarrassment were classified more accurately than laughs produced in other situations. Most importantly, eliminating information about the social settings in which laughs were produced decreased participants’ classification accuracy such that accuracy was no better than chance in the experimental conditions providing minimal contextual information. Our findings demonstrate the importance of context in the interpretation of laughter and highlight the complexity of experimental investigations of schadenfreude displays.

Recognition of emotions in German laughter across cultures

“…whether one feels being laughed at. This suggestion is in line with empirical findings by Rychlowska et al 18 who found that listeners were able to classify natural laughter that was uttered in situations evoking amusement, embarrassment, and schadenfreude only with contextual information, but not based on the acoustical signal alone. In line with this, Suarez and colleagues suggested that laughter carries distinct emotions, but that contextual information is necessary to distinguish the affective state of the laugher 19 .…”

“…However, some studies did not observe that the mere acoustical signal of laughter can communicate affective states 18 , 19 . The reasons for these discrepant findings are not clear but might at least partially be caused by differences in the methodological design.…”

“…In line with this, Suarez and colleagues suggested that laughter carries distinct emotions, but that contextual information is necessary to distinguish the affective state of the laugher 19 . Therefore, the first aim of the current paper was to provide further findings to the currently contradictory empirical evidence regarding the communication of the affective state in laughter 12 , 18 . For this, we conducted a study similar to Szameitat et al 12 , but in a much larger and more diverse sample.…”