Laughter and culture

Like most human non-verbal vocalizations, laughter is produced by speakers of all languages, across all known societies. But despite this obvious fact (or perhaps because of it), there is little comparative research examining the structural and functional similarity of laughter across speakers from different cultures. Here, we describe existing research examining (i) the perception of laughter across disparate cultures, (ii) conversation analysis examining how laughter manifests itself during discourse across different languages, and (iii) computational methods developed for automatically detecting laughter in spoken language databases. Together, these three areas of investigation provide clues regarding universals and cultural variations in laughter production and perception, and offer methodological tools that can be useful for future large-scale cross-cultural studies. We conclude by providing suggestions for areas of research and predictions of what we should expect to discover. Overall, we highlight how important questions regarding human vocal communication across cultures can be addressed through the examination of spontaneous and volitional laughter.This article is part of the theme issue 'Cracking the laugh code: laughter through the lens of biology, psychology and neuroscience'.

Automated summary

There is little comparative research on the structural and functional similarity of laughter across different cultures, despite the fact that laughter is produced by speakers of all languages. This article describes existing research on the perception of laughter across cultures, conversation analysis on how laughter manifests during discourse in different languages, and computational methods for automatically detecting laughter in spoken language databases. These areas of investigation provide insights into universals and cultural variations in laughter production and perception, and offer methodological tools for future cross-cultural studies.