Paris - Santa Claus does not go "ho ho ho," nor do his little elvish helpers go "tee hee" when someone cracks a joke on the Christmas-present production line.
In fact, says acoustical scientist Jo-Anne Bachorowski, real laughter is unlike either of those supposed sounds, and depends on what sex you are.
She asked 97 volunteers to watch various film extracts and secretly taped their laughter.
The clips included the fake orgasm scene from the movie When Harry met Sally and the "bring out your dead" scene from the film Monty Python's Holy Grail.
The subjects produced a thousand bursts of laughter, of a wide range of types.
Women were likelier to produce "voiced," or song-like, sounds such as giggles and chuckles, while men were likelier to grunt or snort.
All the volunteers were Americans, but Bacharowski, a researcher at Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee, suggests the findings may apply to other cultures.
"I suspect that culture shapes the circumstances in which we use laughter rather than its features," she says.
Bachorowski's study is reported in next Saturday's issue of the British weekly New Scientist. It is published in full in a specialist organ, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. - Sapa-AFP
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