Which quotation from a researcher involved in the study would most di…

Source Texts

Text

Psycholinguists Gregory Bryant, Dorsa Amir, and colleagues investigated cross-cultural perception of spontaneous (real) laughter and volitional (fake or forced) laughter. Study participants in 21 different urban and rural societies, including those in Austria and Turkey, listened to randomized recordings of 18 spontaneous laughs taken from natural conversations between women and 18 volitional laughs produced separately by 18 different women in response to an experimenter's instruction to laugh. Analysis of the participants' evaluations of the laughs prompted the team to conclude that the ability to distinguish between spontaneous and volitional laughter appears to be universal across cultures.

Which quotation from a researcher involved in the study would most directly weaken the team's conclusion?

"Because the women who produced the volitional laughs were instructed to imitate the acoustic qualities, they matched the pitch and fluctuation of the spontaneous laughter."

"When the team considered the average size of communities in each society, it found that this demographic factor had no effect on whether a laugh was evaluated as spontaneous or volitional."

"Spontaneous laughter is often associated with acoustic features such as greater intensity, variability, and higher pitch."

"Some societies in our study had significantly lower accuracy rates in distinguishing the two types of laughter than others did, suggesting that cultural background plays a role."