Effects of perceived gender on the perceived social function of laughter

Previously, the sex of the speaker has been found to play an important role in how we perceive human and artificial voices. It was found, for example, that sex mediates in how we perceive the social function of laughter. We, however, are interested in how socially-formed concepts of gender influence how laughter is perceived. To investigate this, we carried out a within-subjects study of listeners who judged social functions of the same laugh stimulus twice, which was framed as produced by either a man or woman. Mixed-effects ordinal regression modelling showed no statistically significant relations between the perceived gender of a laugh and its perceived social functions.