Your brain can tell the difference between deliberate and helpless laughter
Ask adults what makes them laugh, and most will tell you it's jokes and humour. But they would be wrong.
Robert Provine, a psychologist from the University of Maryland found that we actually laugh most when talking to our friends.
In fact we're 30 times more likely to laugh at something when we are with other people.
Intriguingly,
within these conversations, we are still not laughing at jokes: we
laugh at statements and comments that do not seem on the face of them to
be remotely funny.
It's a form of communication, not a reaction.
The
science of laughter is telling us that laughter is less to do with
jokes and more a social behaviour which we use to show people that we
like them and that we understand them.
Your brain can tell the difference between deliberate and helpless laughter
In my lab we see the importance of laughter in our brain imaging studies. We compared staged laughter with the real thing.
Not only does your brain automatically tell the difference,
but listening to staged laughter produces greater activity in an area
called the anterior medial prefrontal cortex.
It's known to be involved in understanding other people's emotions.
It shows that we automatically try to comprehend someone's deliberate laughs, even when not instructed to do so.
Laughter is catching
Our
brain scans also reveal that laughter is contagious. Even when someone
is having their brain scanned, which is not really very funny, you can
see their brain responding to the laughter by preparing their facial
muscles to join in.
And the more that someone shows a contagious
response to laughter, the better they are at telling whether a laugh is
real or forced.
This seems to suggest that joining in when you
hear laughter is more than just contagion - it may be helping you to
understand what that laughter means.
. People you know are funnier
The
fact that laughter encourages laughter is why an MC at a comedy club
will spend a lot of time warming up the audience and keeping the energy
high between acts.
But familiarity and our own expectations are still often at the heart of laughter.
People find jokes funnier if they think they were told by a famous comedian.
"Two
snowmen are standing in a field. One says to the other: 'Funny, I can
smell carrots too'." - even on paper it's funnier when you think it's
coming from Jimmy Carr rather than Jamie Oliver.
Laughter doesn't make you fitter
The internet is full of claims that laughter is great for your health.
It's sadly not true however that laughter burns more calories than going for a run.
Although
laughing does raise energy expenditure and heart rate by about 10-20%,
this is on the order of burning an extra 10-40 calories for every 10-15
minutes laughing.
You would have to laugh solidly for up to three hours to burn off a packet of ready salted crisps.
Berkeley
psychologist Prof Bob Levenson asked couples to discuss something about
their partner that annoyed them - a touchy subject.
The couples
that used laughter and smiling not only felt better immediately but also
reported higher levels of satisfaction in their relationship, and
stayed together for longer.
This shows us that laughter is an
emotion that we can use with those with whom we are emotionally close,
to make ourselves feel better.
This is critical to our enjoying a happy mood - but maybe even more important when circumstances are making us feel bad.
Just
before my father's funeral service started, I can remember saying
something solely to try and make my mother laugh, to get us on track
before everything kicked off. And it worked.
Laughter may help us
measure the health of not just people, but the relationships between
people - a way of looking at our social interactions and the effects
they have on us.
