There ’s an evolutionary explanation for why we’re surprisingly bad at recognising each other’s laughter

By Alex Fradera
We have a mostly impressive ability to identify people we know based on the sound of their voice, but prior research has uncovered an intriguing exception – we’re not very good at discerning identity from laughter. Now Nadine Lavan and her colleagues have published research in Evolution and Human Behavior that looks into why this might be and what it says about our evolutionary past.

There are two main reasons why laughter may be hard to read. It might be because when you laugh for real, your vocal apparatus and lungs act in an involuntary way, unlike in many other vocalisations, and this difference in production might block the identity cues normally found in the voice. Alternatively, listeners of genuine laughter might get distracted by it’s contagious emotional content, meaning they don’t pick up on the identity cues.
To test these possibilities, Lavan’s team recruited helpers to produce fake laughs (while trying to sound natural) and genuine laughs, provoked by playing them amusing sound and video clips. A team of judges then listened back and rated all the laughs as highly authentic sounding genuine laughs, unauthentic sounding fake ones, and also genuine and fake laughs that sounded somewhat authentic.
The researchers categorised the laughs this way is because genuine laughs can sometimes sound flat, whereas a forced laugh can sound remarkably authentic (as you’d know if you’ve ever been around laughter yoga – or participated, as I di...

Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - January 24, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: evolutionary psych Laughter Perception Source Type: blogs