A study concluded that both Japanese and Dutch people are able to recognize their countrymen simply by hearing their laughter.
The University of Amsterdam researchers recorded different kinds of laughter from volunteers in Japan and the Netherlands.
They then played these clips to a total of 404 Dutch and Japanese participants, who were able to tell if the laugher belonged to the same cultural group as them.
Specifically, Dutch listeners identified the laughter correctly in 73–76 per cent of the time (depending on laughter type) and Japanese listeners 77 per cent of the time.
Spontaneous — rather than forced — laughter was rated as most positive by both groups, but Dutch listeners rated Dutch laughter as being the most positive of all.
These findings are consistent with growing evidence that laughter may be a powerful vocal signal that can be used by listeners to infer various things about people.
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A study concluded that both Japanese and Dutch people are able to recognize their countrymen simply by hearing their laughter.
A strong non-verbal vocalisation, laughter can be used as a signal of affiliation, reward, or cooperative intent and it can serve to strengthen social bonds.
Two types of laughter can be distinguished. The first, ‘spontaneous’, is an uncontrolled reaction — such as to a hilarious joke — and manifests with distinctive acoustic features that are difficult to fake.
Voluntary laughter is the result of the intentional modulation of the vocal output and produces the type of sounds you would make to politely respond to a lame joke.
As the latter is produced with greater vocal control, it can encode more information about the person laughing — and, accordingly, previous studies have shown that we can better identify speakers based on voluntary, rather than spontaneous, laughter.
Studies have also shown us that emotional expressions from others from different cultural groups are easier to understand. Each group has its own unique nuances, which listeners may pick up.
In their study, psychologist Roza Kamiloğlu of the University of Amsterdam and her colleagues wanted, building on these past works, to explore whether laughter type influences our ability to identify not individual people, but groups.
The researchers recruited 273 individuals from the Netherlands and 131 from Japan and played them — without context — audio clips of either spontaneous or voluntary laughter produced by fellow Dutch and Japanese individuals.
Each participant was asked to judge whether the laughter was spontaneous or voluntary, whether it was made by someone of the same cultural group and how they would rank its positivity on a seven-point scale.
Contrary to their hypothesis that group identity would be easier to determine based on voluntary laughter, the team found that the subjects were able to determine nationality equally well from both spontaneous and voluntary laughter.
Unsurprisingly, spontaneous laughter in both cultures was considered more encouraging than voluntary laughter.
However, the results indicated that in-group laughter was perceived as being more positive than out-group laughter and the Dutch — but not Japanese — listeners.
‘Our results demonstrate that listeners can detect whether a laughing person is from their own or another cultural group at better-than-chance accuracy levels based on only hearing a brief laughter segment,’ the researchers said.
We found no benefit to the belief that volunteers would identify group members better than participants, contrary to what we had hoped.
Philosophical Transactions B published the full results of this study.