Angus McLachlan

In reviewing the considerable amount of empirical research devoted to the factors influencing the frequency and acoustic properties of laughter, it is suggested that traditional accounts of laughter are not easily extended to explain a person laughing when not otherwise evincing a positive emotional state. An alternative account, grounded in conversational and discourse analyses of everyday interaction, will be offered in which laughter is taken as a part of speech, specifically, an expletive, akin to swearing. Participants in interaction, by interpolating laughter within or adding laughter to the end of utterances, are able to perform laughter imbued speech acts that lack practical consequences. Interlocutors use these acts to index non‐serious speech events that can be examined in terms of Austin's analytical scheme of speech acts, as well as Harré’s ideas on positioning and social selves. Positions and selves are themselves grounded in the narrative content and illocutionary acts evident in any speech event and can be exploited to explain the modulation of solidarity during non‐serious talk. Support for this form of account will be identified in research on laughter in early infancy and from an examination of three types of non‐serious speech event involving adults: two forms of playful events and an example of a semi‐serious event. It will be concluded that by concentrating on laughter, speech acts, non‐serious speech events and selves, it is possible to explain the vast array of apparent uses of laughter without relying on the concepts of humour or emotional states more broadly.

Article Delia Casadei: Risible: Laughter Without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound was published on August 1, 2025 in the journal HUMOR (volume 38, issue 3).

The 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.

Drawing on a range of American, Australian, British and Scandinavian research into laughter, the current paper will use the form of pragmatic analysis typically found in qualitative research and apply it to data produced by the quantitative methodology common in the author’s own discipline of psychology. Laughter will be examined as an indexical that serves both a discourse deictic function, designating the utterance in which it occurs as non-serious, and a social deictic function, marking the laughing person’s preference for social proximity with fellow interlocutors. The paper will then analyse examples and data pertaining to three types of laughter bout derived from taking laughter as an indexical. First, solitary listener laughter will be argued to signify a deferential acknowledgement of continued solidarity with the speaker. Second, solitary speaker laughter will be suggested to mark a simple preference for solidarity. Third, joint laughter will be accepted as a signifier of actual solidarity that may also be used to mark status depending on which party typically initiates the joint laughter. Joint laughter thus acts in a manner closely analogous to the exchange of another set of indexicals, the T and V versions of second person pronouns in European languages. Finally, the paper will conclude by examining the problematic case of laughing at another interlocutor, before briefly considering the implications of this pragmatic perspective for traditional accounts of laughter as well as for future research.

Within a theoretical framework of cognitive dissonance, this phenomenological study explored Australian intellectually gifted pre-adolescent/early adolescents’ experiences of asynchrony. The study focuses on mothers and sons. Eleven boys aged 10 to 14 years, and nine of their mothers, participated in semi-structured interviews. Seven boys reported feelings of difference, but these were generally vague. One reported strongly upsetting feelings of difference, while several evaluated difference as positive. All mothers believed their sons had experienced strong feelings of difference, emphasizing friendship rather than academic matters, though children raised both. Despite most reporting only mild feelings of difference, boys, as well as mothers, articulated efforts to minimize these feelings. Although this sometimes caused a sense of inauthenticity, the data suggest that parents’ and boys’ own efforts to accommodate their needs had largely succeeded and left most boys well-adjusted.

Asynchrony is a theoretical construct that views the intellectually gifted child as inherently vulnerable because of disparities arising from the mismatch between his or her chronological age and mental age. Such disparities, for example, between wanting to belong but being intellectually out of step with peers, are said to give rise to a psychological experience of discomfort or tension and to impact upon developing self-concept. Though the theory has been little subjected to empirical research, it does bear strong similarities to the well-established, but broader-based, psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. This article develops a model of asynchrony as a particular case of cognitive dissonance. As such, it may assist understanding of some children’s experiences of giftedness, though more research is needed to examine this theory.