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The two types of human laughter

The two types of human laughter

Anglophone novel authors who describe pleasure laugh to the bank. Depending on the context, characters, giggles, giggles, giggles, giggles, giggles, giggling, howling or laughter can giggle. This wealth of language could be a phenomenon of the infinite variety that is suitable for an endless subcategorization. The joke would be on them.

New work under the direction of Roza Kamiloglu, a psychologist at Free University of Amsterdam, provides evidence that there are only two main types of laughter: one creates something funny and one that is only induced by physical tickling can.

The work started with the serious business of the salmon collection. Dr. Kamiloglu instructed the research assistant, YouTube, a video platform to search film material with spontaneous laugh. They collected a total of 887 videos, which were then categorized based on the stimulating comic incident, from tickling attacks to malicious joy and verbal jokes.

About 70% of these videos were then used to train a laughing -categorizing machine learning algorithm to combine different forms of laughter with the activities that caused them. The algorithm was then asked to submit its judgment about the remaining 30%. After a short hearing, Dr. Kamiloglu and her colleagues believe that the different laughs would be too different to make connections. The algorithm disagreed.

Based on acoustic characteristics such as volume, rhythm and frequency changes caused by vowel cord vibrations, the algorithm was able to correctly identify the laugh, which was generated by tickling in 62.5% of the cases. All other forms of laughter, regardless of whether they come from looking at stand-up comedies or watch someone who pours salt in their tea instead of sugar, were far from being so easy to distinguish. This indicated that laughter had something unique after ticking. As Dr. Kamiloglu carried out the experiment again and the human observers, this time, asked to categorize laughter, presented a similar phenomenon: the observers identified the tickling laugh correctly in 61.2% of cases.

The results published in Biology are more than easy entertainment. Instead, they were able to point out the evolutionary roots of laughter. After all, many mammals, including dogs, squirrel monkeys, Barbary Macaques and chimpanzees, produce vocalizations during the game that sound remarkable like laughter. One of the first things that infants do early in life is laughing. Even babies who were born spontaneously produce a laugh. People are also not the only animals that tickle. Macaques and chimpanzees also activity.

All of this indicates that the laugh of the tickling developed over 10 m years ago with the common ancestor that people shared with these other primates. Dr. Kamiloglu suspects that this early kind of laugh has probably developed to help primates build friendly relationships, especially during the game. With this in mind, she now wants to investigate how contagious different types of laughter are. If the tickling laugh is one that has really developed to bring primates together, it should be particularly contagious – but nobody has tested yet when it is.

With all the other forms of laughter that only produce people, they probably developed millions of years after tickling when the human brain became complex enough to understand irony, slapstick and word games. But whoever laughs last seems to laugh at the longest.