When your date tells a bad joke, how many of you'll have given out your 'fake laugh' just so that he/she doesn't feel offended? Well, today we have got you a reason to stop doing it. Researchers at the University of California studied the nature of laughter for almost a decade and they have said that they can actually tell when someone is 'fake laughing'.
To test whether fake laughs are distinguishable from real laughs, the researchers recorded spontaneous laughs between friends as well as fake laughs and discovered that you're really only fooling people around one-third of the time. Beware! When people let out a fake chuckle, differences in speed and breathing are noticeable, the researchers stated. The faster the laugh, the more subjects believed them to be real.
“Quite a few fake laughs sound pretty good, but listeners seem to pay attention to certain acoustic features that are really hard to fake,” study author Greg Bryant, an associate professor of communication studies at UCLA, said. So basically, a fake laugh is an imitation of a real laugh but produced with a slightly different set of vocal muscles controlled by a different part of our brain. The result is that there are subtle features of the laughs that sound like speech, and recent evidence suggests people are unconsciously quite sensitive to them.
The next time you fake laugh at you boss' joke, think twice!
