Tickling induces a unique type of spontaneous laughter.

Laughing is ubiquitous in human life, yet what causes it and how it sounds is highly variable. Considering this diversity, we sought to test whether there are fundamentally different kinds of laughter. Here, we sampled spontaneous laughs ( = 887) from a wide range of everyday situations (e.

What makes us feel good? A data-driven investigation of positive emotion experience.

What does it mean to feel good? Is our experience of gazing in awe at a majestic mountain fundamentally different than erupting with triumph when our favorite team wins the championship? Here, we use a semantic space approach to test which positive emotional experiences are distinct from each other based on in-depth personal narratives of experiences involving 22 positive emotions ( = 165; 3,592 emotional events). A bottom-up computational analysis was applied to the transcribed text, with unsupervised clustering employed to maximize internal granular consistency (i.e.

Sounds like a fight: listeners can infer behavioural contexts from spontaneous nonverbal vocalisations.

When we hear another person laugh or scream, can we tell the kind of situation they are in - for example, whether they are playing or fighting? Nonverbal expressions are theorised to vary systematically across behavioural contexts. Perceivers might be sensitive to these putative systematic mappings and thereby correctly infer contexts from others' vocalisations. Here, in two pre-registered experiments, we test the prediction that listeners can accurately deduce production contexts (e.

Emotional experiences and psychological well-being in 51 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic presents challenges to psychological well-being, but how can we predict when people suffer or cope during sustained stress? Here, we test the prediction that specific types of momentary emotional experiences are differently linked to psychological well-being during the pandemic. Study 1 used survey data collected from 24,221 participants in 51 countries during the COVID-19 outbreak. We show that, across countries, well-being is linked to individuals' recent emotional experiences, including calm, hope, anxiety, loneliness, and sadness.

Perception of group membership from spontaneous and volitional laughter.

Laughter is a ubiquitous social signal. Recent work has highlighted distinctions between spontaneous and volitional laughter, which differ in terms of both production mechanisms and perceptual features. Here, we test listeners' ability to infer group identity from volitional and spontaneous laughter, as well as the perceived positivity of these laughs across cultures.

Superior Communication of Positive Emotions Through Nonverbal Vocalisations Compared to Speech Prosody.

Unlabelled: The human voice communicates emotion through two different types of vocalizations: nonverbal vocalizations (brief non-linguistic sounds like laughs) and speech prosody (tone of voice). Research examining recognizability of emotions from the voice has mostly focused on either nonverbal vocalizations or speech prosody, and included few categories of positive emotions. In two preregistered experiments, we compare human listeners' (total  = 400) recognition performance for 22 positive emotions from nonverbal vocalizations ( = 880) to that from speech prosody ( = 880).

Human listeners' perception of behavioural context and core affect dimensions in chimpanzee vocalizations.

Vocalizations linked to emotional states are partly conserved among phylogenetically related species. This continuity may allow humans to accurately infer affective information from vocalizations produced by chimpanzees. In two pre-registered experiments, we examine human listeners' ability to infer behavioural contexts (e.

Good vibrations: A review of vocal expressions of positive emotions.

Researchers examining nonverbal communication of emotions are becoming increasingly interested in differentiations between different positive emotional states like interest, relief, and pride. But despite the importance of the voice in communicating emotion in general and positive emotion in particular, there is to date no systematic review of what characterizes vocal expressions of different positive emotions. Furthermore, integration and synthesis of current findings are lacking.

Human emotional vocalizations can develop in the absence of auditory learning.

Are emotional expressions shaped by specialized innate mechanisms that guide learning, or do they develop exclusively from learning without innate preparedness? Here we test whether nonverbal affective vocalisations produced by bilaterally congenitally deaf adults contain emotional information that is recognisable to naive listeners. Because these deaf individuals have had no opportunity for auditory learning, the presence of such an association would imply that mappings between emotions and vocalizations are buffered against the absence of input that is typically important for their development and thus at least partly innate. We recorded nonverbal vocalizations expressing 9 emotions from 8 deaf individuals (435 tokens) and 8 matched hearing individuals (536 tokens).

Fear Odor Facilitates the Detection of Fear Expressions Over Other Negative Expressions.

In a double-blind experiment, participants were exposed to facial images of anger, disgust, fear, and neutral expressions under 2 body odor conditions: fear and neutral sweat. They had to indicate the valence of the gradually emerging facial image. Two alternative hypotheses were tested, namely a "general negative evaluative state" hypothesis and a "discrete emotion" hypothesis.