The Science of Laughter!

Whether overheard on a crowded bus, punctuating the enthusiastic chatter of friends, or as the noisy guffaws on a TV laugh track, laughter is a fundamental part of everyday life. So common, indeed, that we forget how strange and important it is. Laughter is a regular series of short vowel-like syllables usually transcribed as “ha-ha,” “ho-ho” or “hee-hee.” These syllables are part of the universal human vocabulary, produced and recognized by people of all cultures.

Most people think of laughter as a simple response to comedy, or a cathartic mood-lifter. After ten years of research on this little-studied topic, some have concluded that laughter is primarily a social vocalization that binds people together. It is a hidden language that we all speak, and it is behavior programmed by our genes.

An experiment was done on 1,200 people laughing spontaneously in their natural environments; whenever the researchers heard laughter, they noted the gender of the speaker (the person talking immediately before the laughter), the audience (those listening to the speaker), whether the speaker or the audience laughed, and what the speaker said immediately before the laughter.

While most people may think that laughter comes from an audience after a joke, the researchers found that ordinary comments like, “Where have you been?” or  “It was nice meeting you, too” are far more likely to precede laughter than jokes. Only 10% to 20% of the laughter episodes that were witnessed followed anything joke-like. This suggests that the critical stimulus for laughter is another person, not a joke.

Also follow the research, they found that laughter was 30 times more frequent in social situations rather than solitary ones. However happy we may feel, laughter is a signal we send to others and it virtually disappears when we lack an audience. Laughter is also extremely difficult to control consciously. When asking a friend to laugh on command, they will more than likely declare that they can’t, for their efforts to laugh on command will be forced or futile. This suggests that we cannot deliberately activate the brain’s mechanisms for affective expression.

               

The researchers also found that while both sexes laugh a lot, females laugh more. In cross-gender conversations, females laughed 126% more than their male counterparts, meaning that women tend to do the most laughing while males tend to do the most laugh-getting. Given the differences in male and female laugh patterns, is laughter a factor in meeting, matching and mating? In 3,745 ads placed on April 28, 1996 in eight papers from the Baltimore Sun to the San Diego Union-Tribune, females were 62% more likely to mention laughter in their ads, and women were more likely to seek out a “sense of humor” while men  were more likely to offer it. The researchers observed that the laughter of the female, not the male, is the critical index of a healthy relationship.

However, gender patterns of laughter are fluid and shift subconsciously with social circumstance. For example, the workplace giggles of a young female executive will probably diminish as she ascends the corporate ladder. Someone who laughs a lot, and unconditionally, may be a good team player, but they’ll seldom be a president.

Laughter is contagious. Contagious laughter is a compelling display of Homo sapiens, a social mammal. In 1962, outbreak of contagious laughter in a girls’ boarding school in Tanzania forced the school to close for a day. This can explain the laugh tracks used by television. Canned laughter may sound artificial, but it makes TV viewers laugh as if they were part of a live theater audience. The fact that laughter is contagious raises the intriguing possibility that humans have an auditory laugh detector – a neural circuit in the brain that responds exclusively to laughter.

Observed, laughter is not randomly scattered through speech. This pattern requires that speech has priority over laughter. The occurrence of speaker laughter at the end of phrases suggests that a neurologically based process governs the placement of laughter in speech, and that different brain regions are involved in the expression of cognitively oriented speech and the more emotion-laden vocalization of laughter.

It has been shown in studies that laughter improves the mental and physical health of people. Laughter reduces catecholamines (a measure of activation and stress) and other hormonal measures of sympathetic activation. This reduction in stress and associated hormones is the mechanism through which laughter is presumed to enhance immune function.

Whether scientifically proven or not, laughter makes everyone feel better. Everyone that I know enjoys laughing. I do agree that females have a tendency to laugh more than males, as a way to attract or flirt with males, and males enjoy having females laugh at their jokes. Also, it is much more common to laugh when with a group of people, so I believe that it is a very common social skill, and we use it to communicate our feelings and socialize.

The fact that laughter does improve the mental and physical health of people is a nice bonus! Also, no one has to consciously to themselves to laugh, because it almost always happens subconsciously. Applying it do your day-to-day life, is as easy as breathing.