Social Facilitation of Laughter and Smiles in Preschool Children

Laughter, play faces and mimicry in animals: evolution and social functions

Human laughter and laugh faces show similarities in morphology and function with animal playful expressions. To better understand primordial uses and effects of human laughter and laugh faces, it is important to examine these positive expressions in animals from both homologous and analogous systems. Phylogenetic research on hominids provided empirical evidence on shared ancestry across these emotional expressions, including human laughter and laugh faces. In addition, playful expressions of animals, in general, arguably have a key role in the development of social cognitive skills, a role that may help explain their polyphyletic history. The present work examines the evolution and function of playful expressions in primates and other animals. As part of this effort, we also coded for muscle activations of six carnivore taxa with regard to their open-mouth faces of play; our findings provide evidence that these carnivore expressions are homologues of primate open-mouth faces of play. Furthermore, our work discusses how the expressions of animal play may communicate positive emotions to conspecifics and how the motor resonance of these expressions increases affiliation and bonding between the subjects, resembling in a number of ways the important social-emotional effects that laughter and laugh faces have in humans. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience'.

Robert Provine: the critical human importance of laughter, connections and contagion

Robert Provine made several critically important contributions to science, and in this paper, we will elaborate some of his research into laughter and behavioural contagion. To do this, we will employ Provine's observational methods and use a recorded example of naturalistic laughter to frame our discussion of Provine's work. The laughter is from a cricket commentary broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1991, in which Jonathan Agnew and Brian Johnston attempted to summarize that day's play, at one point becoming overwhelmed by laughter. We will use this laughter to demonstrate some of Provine's key points about laughter and contagious behaviour, and we will finish with some observations about the importance and implications of the differences between humans and other mammals in their use of contagious laughter.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience’.

Tendency to laugh is a stable trait: findings from a round-robin conversation study

People often laugh during conversation. Who is more responsible for the laughter, the person laughing or their partner for eliciting it? We used a round-robin design where participants (N = 66) engaged in 10 different conversations with 10 same-gender strangers and counted the instances of laughter for each person in each conversation. After each conversation, participants rated their perceived similarity with their partner and how much they enjoyed the conversation. More than half the variability in the amount a person laughed was attributable to the person laughing-some people tend to laugh more than others. By contrast, less than 5% of the variability was attributable to the laugher's partner. We also found that the more a person laughed, the more their partners felt similar to them. Counterintuitively, laughter negatively predicted conversation enjoyment. These findings suggest that, in conversations between strangers, laughter may not be a straightforward signal of amusement, but rather a social tool. We did not find any personality predictors of how much a person laughs or elicits laughter. In summary, how much a person laughs in conversation appears to be a stable trait associated with being relatable, and is not necessarily reflective of enjoyment. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience'.

The Relative Importance of Joke and Audience Characteristics in Eliciting Amusement

The current work estimated the relative importance of joke and audience characteristics for the occurrence of amusement. Much psychological research has focused on stimulus characteristics when searching for sources of funniness. Some researchers have instead highlighted the importance of perceiver characteristics, such as dispositional cheerfulness. Across five preregistered studies (Ns = 118-54,905) with varied stimuli and perceiver samples (website visitors, students, Mechanical Turk and Prolific users), variance-decomposition analyses found that perceiver characteristics account for more variance in funniness ratings than stimulus characteristics. Thus, psychological theories focusing on between-persons differences have a relatively high potential for explaining and predicting humor appreciation (here, funniness ratings). Crucially, perceiver-by-stimulus interactions explained the largest amount of variance, highlighting the importance of fit between joke and audience characteristics when predicting amusement. Implications for humor-appreciation theories and applications are discussed.

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.

Hearing Someone Laugh and Seeing Someone Yawn: Modality-Specific Contagion of Laughter and Yawning in the Absence of Others

Laughter and yawning can both occur spontaneously and are highly contagious forms of social behavior. When occurring contagiously, laughter and yawning are usually confounded with a social situation and it is difficult to determine to which degree the social situation or stimulus itself contribute to its contagion. While contagious yawning can be reliably elicited in lab when no other individuals are present, such studies are more sparse for laughter. Moreover, laughter and yawning are multimodal stimuli with both an auditory and a visual component: laughter is primarily characterized as a stereotyped vocalization whereas yawning is a predominantly visual signal and it is not known to which degree the visual and auditory modalities affect the contagion of laughter and yawning. We investigated how these two sensory modalities contribute to the contagion of laughter and yawning under controlled laboratory conditions in the absence of a social situation that might confound their contagion. Subjects were presented with naturally produced laughter and yawning in three sensory modalities (audio, visual, audio-visual), and we recorded their reaction to these stimuli. Contagious responses differed for laughter and yawning: overall, laughter elicited more contagious responses than yawning, albeit mostly smiling rather than overt laughter. While the audio-visual condition elicited most contagious responses overall, laughter was more contagious in the auditory modality, and yawning was more contagious in the visual modality. Furthermore, laughter became decreasingly contagious over time, while yawning remained steadily contagious. We discuss these results based on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic trajectories of laughter and yawning.

Peer Presence Effect on Numerosity and Phonological Comparisons in 4th Graders: When Working with a SchoolMate Makes Children More Adult-like

Simple Summary

The presence of others helps us when we are good or an expert at something and hinders us when we are bad or novice. Such social facilitation or inhibition is well-documented in adults, but much less in children despite the omnipresence of peers throughout education. To explore potential peer presence effects on children’s academic performance, fourth-graders performed basic numerical and language skills (typically mastered at their age) either alone or with a schoolmate. For comparison, the same was performed in adults. We found that a schoolmate’s presence enabled children to perform more like adults, with a better response strategy and faster and less variable response times than children tested alone. This provides research-based evidence supporting pedagogical methods promoting collective practice of individually acquired knowledge. Future studies pursuing this hitherto neglected developmental exploration of peer presence effects on academic achievements might have the potential to help educators tailor their pedagogical choices to maximize peer presence when beneficial and minimize it when harmful. The present study also paves the way towards a neuroimaging investigation of how peer presence changes the way the child brain processes cognitive tasks relevant to education.

Abstract

Little is known about how peers’ mere presence may, in itself, affect academic learning and achievement. The present study addresses this issue by exploring whether and how the presence of a familiar peer affects performance in a task assessing basic numeracy and literacy skills: numerosity and phonological comparisons. We tested 99 fourth-graders either alone or with a classmate. Ninety-seven college-aged young adults were also tested on the same task, either alone or with a familiar peer. Peer presence yielded a reaction time (RT) speedup in children, and this social facilitation was at least as important as that seen in adults. RT distribution analyses indicated that the presence of a familiar peer promotes the emergence of adult-like features in children. This included shorter and less variable reaction times (confirmed by an ex-Gaussian analysis), increased use of an optimal response strategy, and, based on Ratcliff’s diffusion model, speeded up nondecision (memory and/or motor) processes. Peer presence thus allowed children to at least narrow (for demanding phonological comparisons), and at best, virtually fill in (for unchallenging numerosity comparisons) the developmental gap separating them from adult levels of performance. These findings confirm the influence of peer presence on skills relevant to education and lay the groundwork for exploring how the brain mechanisms mediating this fundamental social influence evolve during development.

The Complexity and Phylogenetic Continuity of Laughter and Smiles in Hominids

Laughter and smiles are often, but not always, associated with positive affect. These expressions of humans help to promote social relationships as well as the development of cognitive and socio-emotional skills and they may have a positive impact on health and well-being, hereby covering a selection of fitness-relevant benefits. Both laughter and smiles of positive affect also occur early in human development and across cultures, suggesting deep roots in human biology. The present work provides an evolutionary reconstruction of the evolution of human laughter and smiles of positive affect in form and function, based on the principle of maximum parsimony. According to the Complexity and Continuity Hypothesis, human laughter and smiles of positive affect must have evolved within the context of play from ancestral species. Furthermore, ancestral ape laughter and their open-mouth faces must already have been complex in form and function and changed over time via categorically different phylogenetic pathways to become characteristic, effective, and pervasive behaviors of everyday social interactions in humans.

What Makes Things Funny? An Integrative Review of the Antecedents of Laughter and Amusement

Despite the broad importance of humor, psychologists do not agree on the basic elements that cause people to experience laughter, amusement, and the perception that something is funny. There are more than 20 distinct psychological theories that propose appraisals that characterize humor appreciation. Most of these theories leverage a subset of five potential antecedents of humor appreciation: surprise, simultaneity, superiority, a violation appraisal, and conditions that facilitate a benign appraisal. We evaluate each antecedent against the existing empirical evidence and find that simultaneity, violation, and benign appraisals all help distinguish humorous from nonhumorous experiences, but surprise and superiority do not. Our review helps organize a disconnected literature, dispel popular but inaccurate ideas, offers a framework for future research, and helps answer three long-standing questions about humor: what conditions predict laughter and amusement, what are the adaptive benefits of humor, and why do different people think vastly different things are humorous?

Recognizing affiliation in colaughter and cospeech

Theories of vocal signalling in humans typically only consider communication within the interactive group and ignore intergroup dynamics. Recent work has found that colaughter generated between pairs of people in conversation can afford accurate judgements of affiliation across widely disparate cultures, and the acoustic features that listeners use to make these judgements are linked to speaker arousal. But to what extent does colaughter inform third party listeners beyond other dynamic information between interlocutors such as overlapping talk? We presented listeners with short segments (1-3 s) of colaughter and simultaneous speech (i.e. cospeech) taken from natural conversations between established friends and newly acquainted strangers. Participants judged whether the pairs of interactants in the segments were friends or strangers. Colaughter afforded more accurate judgements of affiliation than did cospeech, despite cospeech being over twice in duration relative to colaughter on average. Sped-up versions of colaughter and cospeech (proxies of speaker arousal) did not improve accuracy for either identifying friends or strangers, but faster versions of both modes increased the likelihood of tokens being judged as being between friends. Overall, results are consistent with research showing that laughter is well suited to transmit rich information about social relationships to third party overhearers-a signal that works between, and not just within conversational groups.

Making Sense of Infants' Differential Responses to Incongruity

Infants show strikingly different reactions to incongruity: looking (Baillargeon, 1998) or smiling (Mireault & Reddy, 2016). The former occurs in response to magical events and the latter to humorous events. We argue that these reactions depend largely on the respective experimental methodologies employed, including the popular Violation of Expectation (VOE) paradigm. Although both types of studies involve infants' reactions to incongruity, their literatures have yet to confront each other and researchers in each domain are drawing strikingly different conclusions regarding infants' understanding of the world. Here, we argue that infants are sensitive to and constrained by several contextual differences in the methodologies employed by incongruity researchers that afford one or the other reaction. We apply De Jaegher & Di Paolo's (2007) Participatory Sense Making framework to further understand what infants are sensitive to in these paradigms. Understanding infants' reactions to incongruity (i.e., VOE) is necessary to clear up claims regarding the sophisticatication of their knowledge of physical and social phenomena. Attention to several simple methodological details is recommended.

Aproximaciones a estudios sobre la Burla desde la Perspectiva del Desarrollo

El propósito de este artículo es presentar un balance bibliográfico de estudios que abordan la emergencia de la burla en niños preescolares y escolares a partir de un inventario de artículos de investigación y artículos teóricos que analizan esta problemática. Fichas de reseñas empíricas y de reseñas teóricas son la unidad de trabajo que permite identificar las plataformas conceptuales, metodológicas e instrumentales que subyacen a cada trabajo. La discusión presenta las perspectivas de los estudios a partir de las modalidades de análisis: centradas en el sujeto, investigaciones que describen el desempeño de los niños y las niñas a partir de sus habilidades cognitivas y sociales para comprender la burla. Relacionales, estudios que revelan el vínculo burlón-burlado a partir de la interpretación de las intenciones humorísticas. Socioculturales, trabajos que se centran en el reconocimiento de agentes y contenidos humorísticos de comunidades específicas. Finalmente, el artículo propone una reflexión acerca de las acciones humorísticas que abren el entramado de significados de la experiencia inquietante del encuentro con el otro en la relación dialógica burlón-burlado en el ciclo cultura-individuo-cultura.