Understanding spontaneous human laughter: The role of voicing in inducing positive emotion

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Abstract Available evidence indicates that human laughter can trigger emotion in listeners, particularly including positive affect. However, while listeners rate vowel-like, ‘voiced’ laughter as a positive event, noise-based, ‘unvoiced’ laughter recorded in the same, positive circumstances is not. Three experiments further examined listener reactions to laughter, including explicit rating of voiced versus unvoiced sounds, testing for unconscious, automatic evaluation, and recording responses in facial musculature, respectively. As before, only voiced laughter was rated positively. This outcome was furthermore mirrored both in automatic evaluations and in smiling-related, facial responses. The experiments thus show that positive, voiced laughter triggers true, corresponding emotion in listeners, but that positive, unvoiced laughter does not. The findings argue against viewing laughter as encoding laugher emotion, suggesting instead that listeners acquire emotional responses to these sounds through associative learning. Laughter may thus be understood as an evolved mechanism for influencing emotion and behavior in others.

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