ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2022
Laughter, play faces and mimicry in animals: evolution and social functions.
Review 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 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 68 citations in OpenAlex.
- 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
- Rhythm and timing in laughter reveal that human vocal plasticity falls on a hominid continuum.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Towards the complexity of laugh communication in great apes: exact facial replications in laugh faces of orangutans and chimpanzees.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Detecting social cues conveyed by laughter and associations with callous-unemotional traits in early childhood.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2026Article
- Individual variation in animal communication: from species averages to unique voices.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Laughter as a Subject and a Tool for Interdisciplinary Investigations in Philosophy and Neuroscience.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Functional and Morphological Differences in the Play Face and Full Play Face in Lowland Gorillas, a Hominid Species: Implications for the Evolutionary Roots of Smile and Laugh Face.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- Examining Mammalian facial behavior using Facial Action Coding Systems (FACS) and combinatorics.PloS one · 2025Article
- Computational investigation of the social function of domestic cat facial signals.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Orangutans and chimpanzees produce morphologically varied laugh facesin response to the age and sex of their social partners.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Smiling underwater: Exploring playful signals and rapid mimicry in bottlenose dolphins.iScience · 2024Article
- Young sanctuary-living chimpanzees produce more communicative expressions with artificial objects than with natural objects.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Nuancing 'Emotional' Social Play: Does Play Behaviour Always Underlie a Positive Emotional State?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
- Facial expressivity in dominant macaques is linked to group cohesion.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Evolution of laughter from play.Communicative & integrative biology · 2024Article
- 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
- The naturalistic approach to laughter in humans and other animals: towards a unified theory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human laughter and laugh faces show similarities in morphology and function with animal playful expressions. To better understand primordial uses and effects of human laughter and laugh faces, it is important to examine these positive expressions in animals from both homologous and analogous systems. Phylogenetic research on hominids provided empirical evidence on shared ancestry across these emotional expressions, including human laughter and laugh faces. In addition, playful expressions of animals, in general, arguably have a key role in the development of social cognitive skills, a role that may help explain their polyphyletic history. The present work examines the evolution and function of playful expressions in primates and other animals. As part of this effort, we also coded for muscle activations of six carnivore taxa with regard to their open-mouth faces of play; our findings provide evidence that these carnivore expressions are homologues of primate open-mouth faces of play. Furthermore, our work discusses how the expressions of animal play may communicate positive emotions to conspecifics and how the motor resonance of these expressions increases affiliation and bonding between the subjects, resembling in a number of ways the important social-emotional effects that laughter and laugh faces have in humans. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience'.
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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.