Social Engineering Blogs

By Jennifer Viegas for Discovery News

Laughs and smiles in chimps turn out to be far more human-like than previously thought and they date to at least 5 million years ago, suggests a new study on chimpanzee facial expressions and vocalizations.

Laughter is not 100 percent identical between the two primates, but people who hear a chuckling chimp usually have little trouble figuring out what the sound generally means.

Chimps go “h-h-h,” while humans sound more like “ha-ha-ha” or “he-he-he,” said Marina Davila Ross, a senior lecturer in the University of Portsmouth’s Department of Psychology and lead author of the study in PLOS ONE.

Then there is the flexibility of the sounds and related expressions.

“Chimpanzees, like humans, can produce their facial expressions free from their vocalizations,” Ross explained. “This ability is important for humans. For instance, it allows us to add a smile while talking or laughing, and we can also produce smiles silently. Until now, we did not know that non-human primates also have this ability.”

It’s even possible that the skills first emerged in the common ancestor of chimps and humans.

Read more on this fascinating topics and see more pictures here!

A recent LiveScience article highlighted research that suggests that giving strangers a slight smile can make people feel more connected to one another.

At the annual meeting of Society for the Study of Motivation, researchers from Purdue University in Indiana suggested that people who have been acknowledged by a stranger feel more connected to others immediately after the experience than people who have been deliberately ignored.

Eric Wesselmann and his colleagues conducted a study where 239 pedestrians on a busy campus area didn’t even know they were part of a study. They simply passed by someone who acknowledged them politely, acknowledged them with a smile or stared straight through them as if they weren’t even there.

Immediately after this encounter, the unknowing participants were approached by another person who asked them to fill out a survey on social connectedness. The participants had no idea that the stranger who had just passed them was part of this study. A fourth group of participants filled out the survey without ever encountering the stranger at all.

The survey results showed that being pointedly ignored by a stranger had an immediate effect.

Participants who’d gotten the cold shoulder reported feeling more socially disconnected than people who’d gotten acknowledged, whether that acknowledgement came with a smile or not.

People who hadn’t encountered the stranger fell somewhere in the middle.

Researchers suspect that this response is evolutionary. Humans are social animals, adapted for group living, Wesselmann said.

He and his colleagues detailed their results in February in the journal Psychological Science. The abstract to their study entitled To be Looked at as though Air can be found here

Do you smile at strangers on the street? Maybe you should!