抄録
The social functions of laughter have been often mentioned but rarely studied in the field of psychology. This paper briefly shows the results of two studies in which we addressed the question as to when and why people laugh, and inferred some functions of laughter in conversation. In the first study, using diary method, we investigated some aspects of laughter in daily life. It was found that the diarists laughted most in social interactions, especially in conversation. Furthemore the results showed that although they were not often conscious about the reasons why they laughted, the recorded numbers of laugh episodes were positively correlated to the "other-directedness" and "acting" factors of the subjects. In the second study, we examined the laughter in an interview setting, especially focusing on the phenomenon that people phrase raughingly, i.e., laugh-speak. The conversations of the interviewer and the subjects were videotaped, and they were precisely transcribed using conversation analysis notations. On the basis of these transcripts, laughing events were identified and analyzed. The results indicated that the mean rates of laugh-speak to total laughs in the subjects should reach 50%. Some functions of laugh-speak, such as qualifier, were inferred from the contexts of conversation.
