Contagious Laughter as an Unconditioned Stimulus in Classical Conditioning of Attitudes Towards Commercial Brands

The literature on classical conditioning of attitudes (CCA) does not report the use of human vocalizations to create or intensify attitudes. This study aimed to test the ability of contagious laughter acoustic stimuli to elicit positive attitudes towards neutral commercial brands when used as unconditioned stimuli in CCA. 60 university students of both genders, aged between 18 and 30 years, participated. Based on an intra-subject experimental design the CCA was applied, which involved the simultaneous pairing of neutral commercial brands with more and less contagious laugher. Five hypotheses were tested comparing explicit (measured with semantic differential) and implicit attitudes (measured by evaluative priming and electromyographic amplitude -EMG- of the zygomatic muscle) between preand postconditioning and between commercial brands conditioned with more vs less contagious laugher. Concerning the baseline, there were greater explicit postconditioning attitudes towards commercial brands paired with more contagious laughter; no explicit attitudinal differences were found between brands conditioned with more vs. less contagious laughter. Only implicit attitudinal differences were evidenced between preand postconditioning for the commercial brand paired with the most contagious male laughter. No differences in the zygomatic EMG amplitude were observed between preand postconditioning or between commercial brands paired with more vs. less contagious laughter. We conclude that contagious laughter has the capacity to transfer affective valence to neutral stimuli and that concordance is not always observed between explicit and implicit postconditioning attitudes.