Why laughing is instinctive but we have to learn how to cry

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By FIONA MACRAE


Babies are instinctively able to laugh but other sounds have to be learned


We are born to laugh - but learn to cry, research suggests.

Research suggests that giggling when tickled or chuckling at a joke is instinctive but most other 'emotional vocalisations' are picked up through experience.

Dutch researchers asked 16 volunteers, half of whom were deaf, to make the sounds behind a range of emotions without using words.

The interpretations of sadness, terror, relief, anger, hilarity and other emotions were then played back to 25 people with normal hearing, who were asked to name the emotion.

Only laughter and sighs of relief were easily identifiable on the tapes of the deaf volunteers, this week's New Scientist reports.

All the other sounds, including cries of terror and sobs of sadness, were much easier to guess when made by volunteers without hearing problems.

As the deaf volunteers would never have had the chance to hear other people laugh, it suggests that it is something that we are born knowing how to do.

But learning how to convey other emotions, such as sadness, comes with experience, an Acoustical Society of America conference will hear next week.

Researcher Disa Sauter, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, says that laughter and smiling likely evolved as ways of diffusing confrontation.

She said: 'Even other primates laugh, if you ticked a gorilla or orangutan.'
Professor Sophie Scott, an expert in the biology of speech from London's Institute of Neuroscience, said: 'The laughter finding makes a great deal of sense and laughter has been described as being more like a different way of breathing than a way of speaking.'

But Professor David Ostry, of the University of Montreal, cautioned that deaf people may learn to laugh simply by watching how hearing people do it.

Learning more about which sounds are instinctive and which are picked up through experience could make it easier to work out when deaf babies are in distress.






source: dailymail [endtext]