Laughter is brilliant – it boosts your mood, makes you happy, works your abs and is the only cause of wrinkles we actually want. In the wise words of Charlie Chaplin, a day without laughter is a day wasted.

And now, a new study has revealed the science behind our chuckles, giggles and full-blown belly laughs - it appears that our laughter says a lot about our personalities.

The National Academy of Sciences suggests that the laugh we let out when we are with our friends is different to the one we let out around strangers. This difference is crucial in exploring the relationships.

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Dr Greg Bryant, lead author of the study, found that laughter between friends is often louder, faster, longer and has more fluctuations in pitch and loudness.

The study involved 966 volunteers, from 24 cultural backgrounds, listening to 48 short audio clips of two people laughing. Some of the reccordings were of two friends laughing and some were of two acquainted strangers laughing. They were also a mix of men and women.

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The volunteers were asked to identify the friends from the strangers, and the results were very interesting.

What the researchers did expect was for most cultures to be able to identify the natural laughter between friends and the more awkward, reserved laughter between strangers. But what they did not expect was the difference between men and women.

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The success rate of correctly identifying two friends rose to 83% when the laughing couples were two female friends, but dropped to 44% when they were two female strangers.

‘We did not expect specifically that women friends would be reliably judged best in every society, or that people would have a bias to think two women laughing were friends, even when they were not,’ Dr Bryant told the Huffington Post.

In conclusion, the study found that the laughter between two female friends is a sound of a tight bond and connection that is recognised all over the world and across different cultures.

It's also interesting to think about why people found it harder to tell when two women laughing together were strangers. Could it be that females are better at getting along with strangers or hiding how uncomfortable they are? We’ll leave you to think about that one...

For now…

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