Print Email Facebook Twitter The Perception of Spontaneous and Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies Title The Perception of Spontaneous and Volitional Laughter Across 21 Societies Author Bryant, Gregory A. (University of California) Fessler, Daniel M. T. (University of California) Fusaroli, Riccardo (Aarhus University) Clint, Edward (University of California) Amir, Dorsa (Yale University) Chavez, Brenda (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) Denton, Kaleda K. (University of California) Díaz, Cinthya (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) Duran, Lealaiauloto Togiaso (University of California) Fančovičová, J. (University of Trnava) van den Hende, E.A. (TU Delft Responsible Marketing and Consumer Behavior) Date 2018 Abstract Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter—laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners’ judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communicative phenomena in human affiliation and cooperation. Subject cross-culturalemotionlaughteropen dataspeechvocal communication To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6628ef99-79ae-431e-9b59-2eb7861bb881 DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618778235 ISSN 0956-7976 Source Psychological Science, 29 (9), 1515-1525 Bibliographical note Accepted author manuscript Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2018 Gregory A. Bryant, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Riccardo Fusaroli, Edward Clint, Dorsa Amir, Brenda Chavez, Kaleda K. Denton, Cinthya Díaz, Lealaiauloto Togiaso Duran, J. Fančovičová, E.A. van den Hende, More Authors Files PDF Laughter_perception_Psych ... CEPTED.pdf 696.12 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:6628ef99-79ae-431e-9b59-2eb7861bb881/datastream/OBJ/view