People across cultures and continents are largely able to tell the difference between a fake laugh and a real one, according to a new study by UCLA communication researcher Greg Bryant.
People across cultures and continents are largely able to tell the difference between a fake laugh and a real one, according to a new study by UCLA communication researcher Greg Bryant.
For almost a decade, Bryant, a professor of communication in the UCLA College, has studied the nature of laughter — and what it reveals about the evolution of human communication and cooperation. His latest study, published in Psychological Science, builds on a 2014 study he led indicating that people can discern when a laugh is genuine.
Working with the knowledge that laughter is a powerful and universal human “play signal” that allows people to predict behavior and affinity, Bryant and his co-authors expanded their previous research to include 884 study participants from the U.S. and 20 other countries, representing six continents.
For real laughter, researchers extracted laughs from recorded conversations between pairs of English-speaking, female friends. For the fake laughs, they took laughter produced by women who were asked to laugh on command. The recordings were edited for length and volume and played in random order to the study participants.
Read more at University of California - Los Angeles
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