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Towards a social functional account of laughter: Acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance
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...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5574543/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28850589 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183811 |
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author | Wood, Adrienne Martin, Jared Niedenthal, Paula |
author_facet | Wood, Adrienne Martin, Jared Niedenthal, Paula |
author_sort | Wood, Adrienne |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5574543 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-55745432017-09-15 Towards a social functional account of laughter: Acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance Wood, Adrienne Martin, Jared Niedenthal, Paula PLoS One Research Article 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. Public Library of Science 2017-08-29 /pmc/articles/PMC5574543/ /pubmed/28850589 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183811 Text en © 2017 Wood et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Article Wood, Adrienne Martin, Jared Niedenthal, Paula Towards a social functional account of laughter: Acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance |
title | Towards a social functional account of laughter: Acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance |
title_full | Towards a social functional account of laughter: Acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance |
title_fullStr | Towards a social functional account of laughter: Acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance |
title_full_unstemmed | Towards a social functional account of laughter: Acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance |
title_short | Towards a social functional account of laughter: Acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance |
title_sort | towards a social functional account of laughter: acoustic features convey reward, affiliation, and dominance |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5574543/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28850589 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183811 |
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