Analysis of Laughter in Cohesive Groups

Abstract

Group cohesion describes the tendency of the group members’ shared commitment to group tasks and the interpersonal attraction among them. This paper presents a preliminary analysis of occurrence of laughter with respect to group cohesion using a corpus of multi-party interactions. Results indicate that the occurrence of laughter is higher in cohesive segments and a strong positive correlation exists between the perceived level of cohesion and laughter.