How is laughter used to create and reinforce food attitudes in Japanese Dairy Taster Brunch conversations

Abstract This paper investigates how participants use laughter to create and reinforce food attitudes in conversations over a Dairy Taster Brunch. Previous conversation analytic research on Japanese conversations about food has focused on food assessments, identification, and categorization. This research addresses the following questions: 1) How does food trigger humor and laughter in conversations over food? 2) What about the situation elicits laughter? 3) How is humor and laughter used to create and reinforce food attitudes in the conversational interaction? and 4) What kinds of food attitudes are created using humor and laughter in talk about food? Results show that food attitudes are not lodged in the individual but rather are created and reinforced moment-by-moment in temporally unfolding multimodal conversational interaction. This research contributes to the growing body of research on language and food, sheds light on the relation between laughter and food, and has implications for healthy eating, and cross-cultural communication.