Are you laughing with me? Not all laughter is warm and fuzzy.

September 5, 2022

Some laughs warm the cockles of one’s heart, while others scare or embarrass with their more sinister or snarky tones—but overall, more than 95% of our conversations contain laughter, reports Psychology Today.

People laugh for various reasons: to express amusement, agreement, or congeniality. Laughter also can signal intention.

Although classifications vary, there are three general types of laughter derived from theories in the literature, according to a study published in Joseph Wharton Scholars:

Affiliative laughter expresses mirth, social bonding, and cooperation. Such laughter represents a sign of social acceptance.
De-escalative laughter relieves discomfort and dissipates the stress in the room. For instance, laughing at an inappropriate joke signifies that no offense was taken and is meant to assuage social interactions. It also signifies to others that it is okay to laugh, and that the environment is non-threatening.
Power laughter is an expression of superiority. It reinforces the power dynamics of social interactions and conveys mockery. Bosses often use this type of laughter with employees who are less powerful.

There is much variation in the vocalization of laughter, with sounds made being highly heterogeneous. Laughter changes—based on pitch, production methods, and articulation effects.

Research examining acoustic differences is limited. One framework considers laughter as either vowel-oriented or fricative:

Vowel-oriented laughter is usually of longer duration and employs song-like properties. This laughter typically begins with a “ha/he/ho”
Fricative laughterinvolves friction from the throat, with strong consonant sounds and grunts or pants.

Some experts hypothesize that the acoustics of laughter elicit emotional responses and direct the behaviors of others. Vowel-based laughs are seen as more positive than are fricative ones. Vowel cues can help the listener interpret pleased/relieved (i.e., positive) emotions versus anxious/embarrassed (i.e., negative) ones.

Positive laughter tends to be longer in duration and higher in energy. In particular, affiliative laughter is louder and uses less voicing.

In a study published in PLOS ONE, University of Wisconsin researchers in part examined the sex differences of laughter. They noted that the sound of laughter was not only influenced by sexual dimorphism (traits that differ consistently between men and women), but also by societal expectations.

Spontaneity and reward, which are exhibited via affiliative laughter, were of higher pitch and decreased voicing in both women and men, with male-specific semitones.

Female laughter was perceived as being more spontaneous when it had a higher pitch, less voicing, and was of longer duration. This finding could support observations that women are expected to be more restrained in their social interactions and speech, thus they laugh longer only after losing control, according to the authors. Meanwhile, men are free to laugh as long as they want sans assumption by others.

In other differences, louder affiliative laughs were associated with appeasement and non-threatening intentions in men but not women. Again, this could be because women are expected to be restrained, whereas men are rewarded for lack of inhibition. Women could be perceived as friendlier when their laughs are quieter.

Laughs perceived as highly dominant (i.e., power laughs) versus those viewed as spontaneous/rewarding were only similar in one aspect: the longer duration of the laughter. More dominant laughs have greater ranges in pitch in both men and women.

Their research involved fraternity pledges (i.e., “low status”) and fraternity members who had been active for two or more years (“high status”). In the study, low-status participants who laughed in a dominant manner were perceived as being of higher social status. Moreover, low-status participants were more flexible to assume the role of aggressor and utilize a dominant laugh.

Research contact: @PsychToday

March 24, 2023

The world’s top alien hunter is about to embark on his most ambitious—and potentially, historical—mission yet, reports The Daily Beast.

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is organizing a $1.5-million expedition to Papua New Guinea to search for fragments of a very strange meteorite that impacted just off the coast of the Pacific nation in 2014.

There is compelling evidence that the half-meter-wide meteorite, called CNEOS1 2014-01-08, traveled from outside our solar system. And that it’s made of extremely hard rock or metal—a material that’s hard and tough enough to prove the meteorite isn’t a meteorite at all. Maybe it’s an alien probe.

It’s a long-shot effort. After years of work, Loeb and his team have, with a big assist from the U.S. military, narrowed down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s likely impact zone to a square kilometer of the ocean floor, nearly two kilometers underwater. But the fragments themselves are probably just a few millimeters in size. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. Loeb is basically preparing to look for big sand in a square-kilometer patch of small sand.

It’s worth the risk, Loeb told The Daily Beast. Any fragments the team recovers could turn out to be “technological”—that is, clearly manufactured and thus strong evidence of the existence of aliens. Or maybe they’re not artificial, but are made of some super-strong material that we’ve never observed until now. A rare metal forged in the hearts of neutron stars, for example.

In any event, “we will learn something new,” Loeb said.

The expedition is almost ready to depart for Papua New Guinea. “We have a boat,” Loeb wrote in on a post on Medium on January 27. “We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions. We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer.

“And most importantly,” he wrote, “today we received the green light to go ahead,” referring to the approval of Papua New Guinea’s for the mission.

The plan, Loeb said, is to deploy a variety of custom sand-sifters—some with magnets, others like huge sieves—and methodically search the seafloor for two weeks. The main reason it’s taken eight years to organize the mission is that, first, Loeb and his team had to figure out where the meteorite’s fragments came down to Earth.

It was easier said than done, since no single instrument precisely captured CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s journey to the seafloor. But if anyone was motivated to try, it was Loeb. While these days more and more scientists are coming around to the idea that we’re probably not alone in the universe, Loeb was banging that drum even when it was unpopular.

When a very odd, shiny, football-field-size object streaked across then out of the solar system in 2017, Loeb was among the first scientists to say out loud what others may only have been thinking: This object, which scientists later named ’Oumuamua ( Hawaiian for “scout”), might be an alien probe.

And Loeb isn’t afraid to put his money—well, his donors’ money—where his mouth is. In addition to studying strange interstellar objects such as ’Oumuamua, Loeb through his Galileo Project is painstakingly building humanity’s first global network of small telescopes , which will scan the sky for alien craft, or at least the remains of alien craft.

To narrow down CNEOS1 2014-01-08’s impact zone, Loeb needed data from two sets of instruments. The first set was from U.S. military missile-warning satellites that, thanks to their sensitive infrared sensors, tend to also detect meteorites while scanning for missile-launches.

These satellites can not only provide at least a vague indication of where a meteorite is heading; they also capture images of the fireball that results from a meteorite’s fast, hot trip through Earth’s atmosphere. The timing and intensity of a fireball can tell us a lot about a meteorite’s composition. Basically, the longer it takes for the atmosphere to ignite a meteor, the tougher the meteor is.

After much wheedling, Loeb convinced the Pentagon to release the full fireball data for CNEOS1 2014-01-08. They indicated the 2014 meteorite might be the hardest meteorite on record.

The second set of data Loeb needed was much more precise telemetry for the meteorite’s path than the military could provide. So, he checked on nearby earthquake sensors. “We found that the blast wave from the meteor explosion generated a high-quality signal in a seismometer located at Manus Island,” which is part of Papua New Guinea, Loeb wrote at Medium.

Armed with the two data sets, Loeb and his team were able to narrow the likely impact zone from 100 square kilometers to just one square kilometer. “This reduction in the geographic uncertainty of the … fireball improves the search efficiency in the forthcoming ocean expedition to recover its fragments,” Loeb and company wrote in a study, not yet peer-reviewed, that appeared online on March 13.

After having arranged funding and manpower, narrowing the search zone, and getting the Papua New Guinean government’s approval, Loeb and his team are now putting the finishing touches on their special sand-sifting equipment for recovering magnetic meteoritic debris from the seafloor.

Once it’s all ready, hopefully this summer, Loeb and his team will set sail.

Expectations are running high. But Loeb said he’s bracing for disappointment. “There is a chance it will fail,” he said of his expedition. Even success could be something of a letdown, if the team recovers fragments, but those fragments turn out to be natural in origin rather than artificial.

It’s important to frame even that secondary discovery as a major advancement, Ravi Kopparapu, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told The Daily Beast. “This could give us more confidence on the nature of the interstellar meteor—and could point to whether this meteor is unique or a new class of meteorites.”

Maybe Loeb and his team will go to all that trouble to find the remains of CNEOS1 2014-01-08, only to confirm it isn’t an alien probe. But don’t expect a setback like that to cause Loeb to give up his search for evidence of extraterrestrials. He said he understands how convincing the proof needs to be, and how hard it might be to find it. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he said.

Research contact: @thedailybeast