Vocal Expression of Affective States in Spontaneous Laughter Reveals the Bright and the Dark Side of Laughter

It has been shown that the acoustical signal of posed laughter can convey affective information to the listener. However, because posed and spontaneous laughter differ in a number of significant aspects, it is unclear whether affective communication generalises to spontaneous laughter. To answer this question, we created a stimulus set of 381 spontaneous laughter audio recordings, produced by 51 different speakers, resembling different types of laughter. In Experiment 1, 159 participants were presented with these audio recordings without any further information about the situational context of the speakers and asked to classify the laughter sounds. Results showed that joyful, tickling, and schadenfreude laughter could be classified significantly above chance level. In Experiment 2, 209 participants were presented with a subset of 121 laughter recordings correctly classified in Experiment 1 and asked to rate the laughter according to four emotional dimensions, i.e., arousal, dominance, sender's valence, and receiver-directed valence. Results showed that laughter types differed significantly in their ratings on all dimensions. Joyful laughter and tickling laughter both showed a positive sender's valence and receiver-directed valence, whereby tickling laughter had a particularly high arousal. Schadenfreude had a negative receiver-directed valence and a high dominance, thus providing empirical evidence for the existence of a dark side in spontaneous laughter. The present results suggest that with the evolution of human social communication laughter diversified from the former play signal of non-human primates to a much more fine-grained signal that can serve a multitude of social functions in order to regulate group structure and hierarchy.