The Role of Contextual Information in Classifying Spontaneous Social Laughter

Abstract Laughter is a ubiquitous and important social signal, but its nature yet to be fully explored. One of the open empirical questions about role context in interpretation laughter. Can laughs presented on their own convey specific feelings motives? How influential when person tries understand meaning laugh? Here we test extent which classification produced different situations guided by knowing within these were produced. In current study, stimuli spontaneous recorded engineered elicit amusement, embarrassment, schadenfreude. between-subjects design, participants classified being assigned one four experimental conditions: audio only, audio-visual, side-by-side videos two interactants, accompanied brief vignette. Participants’ task was label each laugh as an instance or schadenfreude laugh, “other.” Laughs inducing embarrassment more accurately than other situations. Most importantly, eliminating information settings decreased participants’ accuracy such that no better chance conditions providing minimal contextual information. Our findings demonstrate importance laughter highlight complexity investigations displays.