Who would think laughter required serious study! Neuroscientist Sophie Scott says that this is exactly why not much research has been done on laughter though a baffling amount has been done on negative emotions such as fear. “But,” says Scott, “just as we say playing is the default behaviour of a child, laughter is such a commonplace socially existing behaviour that it would be a great index for studying relationships and how people regulate their emotions.”
Scott says that at one level, “Laughter is just a different way of breathing…it involves squeezing air out with these large contractions… it is a very basic sound, a non-verbal expression like animal calls! All animals make some kind of laughing sound…while humans exhale when they laugh chimps exhale and inhale when they laugh and so it makes a kind of wheezing sound. Most surprisingly even rats laugh and make a chirping sound when they are tickled. Laughter begins in infancy and generally while in play with the caregivers. It requires the presence of another. So the first kind of emergence of laughter you see is in interactions and it stays that way for pretty much the rest of your life…although we think it is about human jokes, laughter is about something mostly to do with that which occurs in human settings.”
Scott adds, “There are a number of biochemical changes that happen in the body when you laugh. The first is that you get an increased uptake of endorphins, your body’s painkillers. That does not seem specific to laughter, though. You get that from exercise of any kind…even though you are not doing a huge amount of work when you are laugh you make much bigger movements in the rib cage when you are laughing than normally and that does seem to give you an endorphin buzz….More specifically linked to laughter is that you get a decrease in adrenalin and over a long time a decreasing cortisone level…so you are relaxed…free of stress…another reason that laughter feels pleasurable is the context in which you are doing it, which is largely something that exists in social interactions so you are also getting the buzz from a positive social environment.” Scott says laughter symbolises an invitation to play, be it in human children or animals.
Talking of laughter being contagious, Scott says,”… babies do not laugh contagiously…when babies laugh, parents laugh. Emotional expressions have to be contagious at some level otherwise they are not useful emotional expressions,” says Scott and illustrates it by making a sound of throwing up. “This should evoke a sense of disgust…that is the job of that emotion…it is a contagious signal , but not behaviourally contagious. Yawning and laughing are behaviourally contagious signals …you are more likely to catch a laugh or a yawn from someone you know than from someone you don’t…so it is simply showing affiliation. So at one level laughter is a basic sound, but the way that we seem to process it as a signal is enormously complex way…we use laughter in conversation and it is coordinated immensely carefully.
So people laugh at the ends of sentences, the person who laughs most is the one who is talking so it is a part of the communicative act…so most often you are laughing to show affiliation, to show that you understand somebody , or understand the relationship…it is not just a reaction to humour…in a sense laughter regulates the emotion in the interaction…”
Scott goes on to say that if you show affiliation with laughter, there is also the other side…somebody is being excluded from the group, from the affiliation. So often we are trying to work out if we are included in the laugh or we are being laughed at. Also if we hear artificial laughter we are always trying to mentally work out the reason for it.
So Scott says, “I don’t think laughter is ever neutral…am I in it, am I being laughed at…it is very complex and phenomenally nuanced. We are social animals and the most important thing on the horizon is our interaction with them and laughter is an incredibly subtle index of who chooses to laugh with you and who chooses to laugh at you…”
Perhaps one of her most significant finding is that,” …rats who are tickled more when they are babies laugh more when they are adults. So we know from the rats that it is a behaviour you can potentiate. So it would certainly be interesting to know what that means for babies…and we are starting to ask more questions about this. “
Web link : http://bit.ly/2eLzR4g
