ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
The different shades of laughter: when do we laugh and when do we mimic other's laughter?
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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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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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- The development of play face mimicry: comparative insights from human infants, adults and orangutans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Environmental context effects on affective and cognitive empathy in virtual reality.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Facial mimicry predicts preference.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Task-irrelevant emotional expressions are not mimicked, but may modulate the mimicry of task-relevant emotional expressions.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- The other person's smiling amount affects one's smiling response during face-to-face conversations.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Electromyographic Validation of Spontaneous Facial Mimicry Detection Using Automated Facial Action Coding.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Laughter is an ambiguous phenomenon in response to both positive and negative events and a social signal that coordinates social interactions. We assessed (i) who laughs and why, and (ii) if the type of laughter and whether the observer approves of it impact on facial mimicry as a proxy for shared laughter. For this, 329 participants watched funny, schadenfreude and disgusting scenes and then saw individuals who purportedly reacted to each scene while participants' facial expressions were recorded and analysed. Participants laughed more in response to funny than in response to schadenfreude scenes and least in response to disgust scenes, and laughter within each scene could be explained both by situational perceptions of the scenes as well as by individual differences. Furthermore, others' laughter in response to funny scenes was perceived as more appropriate, elicited more closeness and more laughter mimicry than others' laughter in response to schadenfreude and especially in response to disgust scenes. Appropriateness and closeness as well as individual differences could explain laughter mimicry within each scene. This is in line with the notion that laughter is not
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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.