Scientists reveal that people all over the world can tell whether other
people are friends or strangers by listening to them laughing together.
Laughing with friends has a special sound, say scientists. This is the same the
world over, irrespective of the culture or language.
Psychologist Gregory Bryant from the Department of Commuication Studies
Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture at the University of California in
Los Angeles, conducted the study.
Bryant recorded pairs of students having a conversation. Some were friends.
Some were not – they hardly knew each other. He used only the part of the
recording when the pairs were laughing. Each ‘laughing episode’ recorded was
about one second long.
Bryant and his colleagues asked volunteers to listen to the recordings of
the laughter and then guess whether the people were friends or strangers. They
repeated the same experiment in 24 societies around the globe (in cooperation
with selected universities from the targeted countries). These included Austria,
Belgium, Brazil, China, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan,
Namibia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Singapore, Slovakia, South
Africa, South Korea, Spain, Tanzania, The Netherlands, Turkey, and the United
States of America.
Laughter is a non-verbal vocal expression that often communicates positive
and cooperative feelings in humans. The researchers wanted to see if colaughter
– laughing together – had a rich potential of affiliation cues or signals for
other people who listened to them.
The study involved 966 participants, placed in pairs. After listening to
the segment of laughter, paricipants were asked two questions: (1) Do you think
these people laughing were friends or strangers? and (2) How much do you think
these people liked each other? The second question was rated on a response
scale of 1-7.
The results showed that people were good at guessing whether women were
friends. But for other pairs – such as two men laughing – it was more difficult
for the listeners to determine whether they were friends or strangers. On
average, listeners guessed correctly 61% of the time. For pairs of women
laughing the listeners guessed correctly 70% of the time, and for pairs of
males laughing the listeners guessed correctly 49% of the time.
The results were consistent across all of the 24 societies across the
world.
A second group of listeners in America evaluated artificial colaughter
pairs. The artificial pairs were judged quite similarly to the original pairs
in the main study.
The study results are published in the Proceeding
of the National Academy of Sciences
(April 2016).
Image is from: pixel2portrait.deviantart.com
MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:-
The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends
(2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan
Curse (2009).
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