ArticlePloS one2017
Towards a social functional account of laughter: Acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance.
Article in PloS one, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 76 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Case for Moving Beyond Verbal Labeling in Facial Expression Perception Research.Affective science · 2026Review
- Detecting social cues conveyed by laughter and associations with callous-unemotional traits in early childhood.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2026Article
- Effects of aging on recognition and dominance perception in laughter.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2026Article
- Sounds like a fight: listeners can infer behavioural contexts from spontaneous nonverbal vocalisations.Cognition & emotion · 2024Article
- Recognition of emotions in German laughter across cultures.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Articulation posture influences pitch during singing imagery.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2023Article
- Beyond Nature Versus Nurture: the Emergence of Emotion.Affective science · 2023Review
- Laughter and culture.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Laughter and its role in the evolution of human social bonding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Vocal Expression of Affective States in Spontaneous Laughter reveals the Bright and the Dark Side of Laughter.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Perception of group membership from spontaneous and volitional laughter.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Hearing Someone Laugh and Seeing Someone Yawn: Modality-Specific Contagion of Laughter and Yawning in the Absence of Others.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The origin of smiling, laughing, and crying: The defensive mimic theory.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Article
- Social Context Influences the Acoustic Properties of Laughter.Affective science · 2020Article
- Recognizing affiliation in colaughter and cospeech.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Good vibrations: A review of vocal expressions of positive emotions.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Review
- A Moan of Pleasure Should Be Breathy: The Effect of Voice Quality on the Meaning of Human Nonverbal Vocalizations.Phonetica · 2020Article
- Soundgen: An open-source tool for synthesizing nonverbal vocalizations.Behavior research methods · 2019Article
- Heterogeneity of long-history migration predicts smiling, laughter and positive emotion across the globe and within the United States.PloS one · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.