New Scientist - Born to laugh, we learn to cry

Ever wondered how many of our everyday laughs, groans and sighs are instinctive rather than learned from our peers? It now seems that only expressions of laughter and relief are instinctive, whereas other emotional outbursts need to be learned from other people.

To find out which sounds are instinctive, a team led by Disa Sauter of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, asked eight deaf and eight hearing individuals to vocalise nine different emotions, but without words. These included fear, relief, anger, hilarity, triumph, disgust and sadness…

David Ostry, who studies vocalisation in deaf people at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, says that deaf people may learn to laugh by watching how hearing people do it. Sauter agrees this is possible and has set up an experiment to investigate this.