We study voiced laughter in executive communication and its effect on social approval. Integrating research on laughter, affect-as-information, and infomediaries' social evaluations of firms, we hypothesize that voiced laughter in executive communication positively affects social approval, defined as audience perceptions of affinity towards an organization. We surmise that the effect of laughter is especially strong for joint laughter, i.e., the number of instances in a given communication venue for which the focal executive and the audience laugh simultaneously. Finally, combining the notions of affect-as-information and negativity bias in human cognition, we hypothesize that the positive effect of laughter on social approval increases with bad organizational performance. We find partial support for our ideas when testing them on panel data comprising 902 German Bundesliga soccer press conferences and media tenor, applying state-of-the-art machine learning approaches for laughter detection as well as sentiment analysis. Our findings contribute to research at the nexus of executive communication, strategic leadership, and social evaluations, especially by introducing laughter as a highly consequential potential, but understudied social lubricant at the executive-infomediary interface. Our research is unique by focusing on reflexive microprocesses of social evaluations, rather than the infomediary-routines perspectives in infomediaries' evaluations. We also make methodological contributions.

翻译：我们研究管理层沟通中的发声笑声及其对社会认可的影响。整合关于笑声、情感信息理论以及信息中介对企业社会评价的研究，我们假设管理层沟通中的发声笑声会正向影响社会认可（即受众对组织亲和力的感知）。我们推测笑声效应在联合笑声中尤为显著——即特定沟通场景中焦点管理层与受众同时发笑的频次。最后，结合情感信息理论与人类认知中的负向偏差，我们提出笑声对社会认可的正向效应会随组织绩效恶化而增强。通过运用最先进的机器学习方法进行笑声检测与情感分析，我们对包含902场德国足球甲级联赛新闻发布会及媒体语料的面板数据进行检验，部分支持了我们的假设。本研究为管理层沟通、战略领导力与社会评价的交叉领域做出贡献，尤其首次将发声笑声引入作为管理层-信息中介互动中具有重大潜在影响却未被充分研究的社会润滑剂。本研究独特性在于聚焦社会评价的反身性微观过程，而非信息中介评价的传统惯例视角。此外，我们还在方法论层面做出贡献。