Study Finds Laughter Conveys Nuanced Social Messages

Have you ever watched “fail” videos? The ones featuring someone slipping down their ice-covered stairs or walking into a glass door? Or maybe you’ve laughed at a corgi puppy doing her first little howl on Instagram. Or perhaps you, like more than 20 million others, have watched the viral YouTube video of a pack of people sprinting on a track dressed in those inflatable T-Rex costumes.

What you may not have noticed is that those three different scenarios provoke different types of laughter in people. A psychology professor at the University of Virginia is believed to be the first to have documented that, in a study published in the journal Affective Science.

Assistant professor Adrienne Wood runs the Emotion and Behavior Lab in UVA’s Department of Psychology. Launched in 2019, she and her team study how people form social connections. In her study, “Social Context Influences the Acoustic Properties of Laughter,” Wood set out to test her hypothesis that laughter will sound different if people are just slightly amused versus feeling affiliation and warmth, or actually laughing at someone and feeling superior.

Wood invited 82 pairs of undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she conducted her dissertation, to view three different videos.

Assistant professor Adrienne Wood runs the Emotion and Behavior Lab in UVA’s Department of Psychology. (Photo by Dan Addison, University Communications)

One video featured a guy tossing his tie into the air, where it unintentionally landed on his friend’s head. Another showed a dog failing to pass through a sliding glass door carrying a long stick in its mouth. The third showed a woman falling harmlessly as she tried to strike a golf ball.

After viewing the videos, the study participants were asked to discuss them and why they made them laugh.

“While they were having those conversations, they just naturally produced a lot of laughter because people laugh when they’re in a social context,” Wood said. “So, I just pulled out 4,000-some laughs from all of those conversations and then looked at the acoustic properties of them and asked whether they sounded reliably different when people were talking about amusing videos versus videos that made them feel kind of sweet and warm versus videos that made them feel superior, [as] they were laughing at someone else.”

As Wood noted in the abstract of her study, “findings suggest laughter is not a homogenous expression of positive affect; rather, laughter conveys nuanced social messages.”

Wood said for simplicity’s sake, the pairs of students were the same gender “because laughter can get really complicated when you compare across gender and same gender. There’s all these power dynamics that come into play.”

Wood said the theoretical importance is “the fact that laughter can take different physical forms. So, when people are talking about different things and trying to convey different messages to each other, they actually change how their laughter sounds.”