Abstract
Laughter and smiles co-occur and accomplish similar communicative tasks. Certain smiles and laughter elicit positive affect in the sender and the recipient, serving as social rewards. Other smiles and laughter lack this positivity but retain a message of harmlessness and affiliation that lubricates the interaction. And finally, some smiles and laughter convey disapproval or dominance in a less serious way than more overt displays (e.g., frowns). But work on the social functions of smiles and laughter has progressed independently. We ask whether smiles and laughter are judged as more alike if they are high on the same social functional dimensions. First, online participants’ (N = 244) judged the similarity of a set of validated reward, affiliation, and dominance smiles to each other, resulting in a 2-dimensional semantic smile space. Then we inserted laughter clips (rated on the social functional dimensions in prior work) into the semantic smile space using new participants’ (N = 1089) responses on a smile-laughter similarity task. The laugh samples grouped in the smile space according to their previously determined social function, suggesting participants’ judgments about smile-laughter similarity were partly guided by the reward, affiliation, and dominance values of the displays. Trial-level analyses indicate reward and affiliation smiles were most likely to be matched to reward and affiliation laughs, respectively, but dominance displays were more complicated. This suggests perceivers judge the meaning of smiles and laughs along reward, affiliation, and dominance dimensions even without verbal prompts. It also deepens our understanding of the functional overlap of smiles and laughter.
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Data Availability
All data, analysis scripts, and smile and laughter samples are available here: https://osf.io/6qvhy/.
Code Availability
The NEXT platform used for stimulus presentation is here: http://nextml.org/.
Notes
Speculatively, intense zygomatic activation may co-activate nearby suprahyoid muscles, which elevate the larynx and are partly innervated by the facial nerve, which also innervates the zygomaticus major.
Silent ritualizing of the facial movements involved in a vocalization occurs in other species; for instance, chimpanzees produce silent “laughter” faces (Davila-Ross et al., 2015).
What about the teeth, the eye-catching centerpiece of a large smile? Although we associate smiles with teeth exposure, this was unlikely the primary communicative purpose of zygomatic activation (smiling) in our snout-faced mammalian ancestors. When these ancestors activated their zygomaticus major muscles, it pulled the corners of their lips pulled back toward their molars, creating a markedly shorter oral cavity without exposing much of their teeth—much like a panting dog (Shepherd et al., 2012). It is only when our homonin ancestors evolved flatter faces that the zygomatic muscle became more upright so that its activation pulls the lips up (exposing the teeth) as well as back (shortening the oral cavity; cf., Van Hooff, 1972).
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Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number T32MH018931. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
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Wood, A., Sievert, S. & Martin, J. Semantic Similarity of Social Functional Smiles and Laughter. J Nonverbal Behav 46, 399–420 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-022-00405-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-022-00405-6