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Open-mouthed laughter appreciated most

Woman laughing in front of yellow background

Laughter is a critical part of human communication and people learn to appreciate some forms more than others (Source: Jordan Chez/iStockphoto)

Human behaviour When you laugh, the whole world laughs with you - as long as your sentiment is genuine, your vocal cords are engaged, and your mouth is open.




"I think of laughter sounds as a kind of fundamental mechanism for building up and maintaining positive social relationships," says Associate Professor Michael Owren, an experimental psychologist at Georgia State University in Atlanta.


To learn more, Owren and colleagues began by recording people as they laughed while either socialising in a happy way or watching funny videos. The team kept only examples of laughter that was associated with positive feelings, and they separated the clips into short bursts of sound that featured either open-mouthed or closed-mouthed laughing.

Learning associations


In the new experiment, all of the clips included only voiced laughter.


The findings suggest that, beginning in childhood, we learn to associate the wide-open guffaw with life's most positive experiences, says Owren. Eventually, all it takes is to hear that happy sound to feel happier.

"We suspect that we all as listeners have learned emotional responses to laughter sounds that have different kinds of acoustic cues," he says. "It's a kind of unconscious [response] that we build up throughout life that significantly influences the way we interpret laughter events in everyday social situations."

From a practical view, he says, scientists will need to understand how different laughter sounds elicit different emotions in order to ever have hope of programming computers that can respond appropriately in social settings.

Laughter is universal

The study also fleshes out our understanding of laughter as a staple of human behaviour, with roots that precede humanity, says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.


Today, laughter is ubiquitous in human societies and there is laughter in most social interactions. Whether forced or real, laughter clearly serves a social purpose, says Provine, occurring 30 times less often when we're alone than when we're with others.



"We're dealing here with something at the bedrock of human nature that all people have in common," he says "While there are thousands of languages and hundreds of dialects, everyone speaks laughter in much the same way."

Tags: people, anthropology-and-sociology, emotions, happiness