The relationship between familiarity, gender, disagreement, and status and bouts of solitary and joint laughter

Abstract

AbstractThe current research treated laughter as an indexical with two closely allied properties: to designate talk as non-serious and to serve as a mode of address signalling a preference for solidarity. These properties gave rise to four discrete forms of laughter bout, solitary speaker, solitary listener, speaker-initiated joint, and listener-initiated joint laughter, which were examined using 55 same-gender pairs discussing three choice dilemma items. By exploring the associations between the wider contextual factors of familiarity, gender, disagreement and status, and the frequencies of each form of bout within the dyad, it was hoped to establish whether laughter was related to how participants modulated their social relationships. Neither familiarity nor disagreement had any effect on any of the forms of laughter bout, while females were found to demonstrate higher frequencies of joint speaker laughter than males. In unequal status pairs, high status female staff joined in the laughter of their low status female student interlocutors less often than the reverse, a finding comparable with the exchange of other terms of address, such as second person pronouns in European languages. It was concluded that joint laughter was a signal of solidarity and solitary speaker laughter was a declared preference for solidarity, but the significance of solitary listener laughter, beyond an acknowledgement of the speaker’s non-serious talk, remained less clear. It was also noted that norms associated with the setting and topic of interaction were influential in determining the extent to which laughter would be used to modulate the relationships between interlocutors.