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Essay On Laughter

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Introduction
The aim of this introduction is to describe in general what laughter is, to define the different types of laughter, to summarize the acoustic, perceptual, and neural differences that have been found between different types of laughter in adults, and adults’ ability to recognize these different types of laughter. To date, no research has yet been conducted on laughter perception in children. The present study will therefore investigate children’s ability to recognize different types of laughter.

Laughter
Laughter is created by the vocal organs: the lungs, larynx, tongue, lips and occasionally the nose (Chafe, 2007). Air passes from the lungs through the larynx, out through the mouth (or sometimes the nose), creating a sound. This …show more content…
An analysis of different dictionaries, historic literature and online corpora has shown that more than 200 different types of laughter can be differentiated on a linguistic basis (Drack, Huber & Ruch, 2009). Some of those categories are purely evaluative or descriptive (e.g., roaring laughter, or wild laughter). Others contain affective information by referring to the emotion and motivation of the laughing person (Drack et al., 2009).
Different categorizations of laughter have also been described in the research literature (Mora-Ripoll, 2011). For example, a distinction has been made between humorous and non-humorous laughter (Chafe, 2007; Chapman, 1983). Laughter can occur in response to something funny. However, often things said just prior to laughter are not humorous (Chapman, 1983; Provine, 2000). The kinds of non-humorous situations that people react to with laughter can vary considerably. Laughter is often triggered by situations in which laughter mitigates unpleasantness (Chafe, 2007), for example in case of embarrassment, criticism of the self or others, or depressing topics (laughter is even witnessed in cases of bereavement; Keltner & Bananno, 1997). Non-humorous laughter can also express negative feelings and attitudes such as contempt, sadness and anger (Devillers & Vidrascu,

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