From hearty belly laughs to polite chuckles, laughter underpins our more enjoyable social interactions. And just like body language and facial expressions, laughter, too, is a physical reaction that’s loaded with subtext.
There are many ways to laugh out loud — some giggles are more heartfelt than others — and discerning the difference is a key social skill. For example, the way we laugh sounds very different when we are at a bar with friends versus a meeting at work. And, a new study shows, the different shades of laughter often hold enough information by themselves for us to discern key facts about the people yukking it up.
Researchers from the University of California-Los Angeles recorded 24 pairs of people interacting with each other — half of the pairs were friends, and half had just met. They took small snippets of laughter from these conversations and played them to 966 ...
