when I laugh, questions like why do we laugh? and is it good for our health? are always floating around my head. Laughter is considered as a part of the universal human vocabulary. We don’t need to learn how to laugh. All members of the human beings can understand what it is, regardless of where they came from.
According to the Robert Provine from the University of Maryland, laughter occurs unconsciously. So, we don’t have to decide to do it. We can consciously suppress a laugh, but we do not consciously make laughter. That is why it is hard for us to make fake laughter. Even today, there is no clear explanation about why do people laugh. We just know that laughter is caused by thoughts, situations, and words. Also, we know that laughter is a form of a message that we send to other people because we do not laugh much when we are alone.
Robert Provine and his undergraduate research assistants started a research about when and why people laugh. To figure out this, they went to malls and city sidewalks and they recorded what happened just before people started to laugh. They studied this over 10 years and more than 2,000 cases of naturally occurred laughter were included. The finding of the research was pretty interesting because they found that most of laughter does not have any relationship with humor. They found that people tend to laugh when they are normally talking. For example, conversations like Hey John, where ya been?” “Here comes Mary,” “How did you do on the test?” and “Do you have a rubber band? make people laugh, not jokes. Robert Provine said about his research “We don’t decide to laugh at particular moments. Our brain makes the decision for us. These curious “ha ha ha’s” are bits of social glue that bond relationships.” So, it is hard to say that laughter follows after certain situations. Laughter is more like unconscious and automatic behaviors of people.
In an evolutionary perspective, Robert Provine, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County said that we believe laughter evolved from the panting behavior of our ancient primate ancestors, because when we tickle chimpanzees and gorillas, they also make a sound of a laugh (which sounds different from human’s laugh). Those apes laugh in situations like a tickle, play and chasing games, which are almost similar with the human. Also, other animals like rat also make laugh (high-pitch vocalizations) in similar situations. So, those findings may have relationships with why do people laugh.
Still, there is no enough or clear explanation about why do we laugh, but series of findings and researches are getting closer and closer for a clear explanation. I think laughter is part of our life and a form of a positive message that our body can use.
Images : http://m.simon.com/aboutmall.aspx?id=189
http://walkingcatfish.blogspot.com/2011/06/laughing-gorilla.html
It is interesting topic. While I read your blog post, one thing made me surprised which is most of laughter does not have any relationship with humor. The laugh show up naturally and unconsciously. I research more about laugh and I found that how laugh affect to our health. Here is the link about it. As you stated above, fake laugh is hard to make it. However, I should try to do it for health.
http://www.helpguide.org/articles/emotional-health/laughter-is-the-best-medicine.htm
Upon reading your article I began to laugh just by thinking about the article seeing the image of the monkey, reading the line “ha ha ha’s”, and just looking at the word laughter. However, when one of my friends who is a boy read the article he was not as amused. This prompted me to look into the difference between how gender affects your sense of humor or how much you laugh. According to Psychology Today, a linguist, Deborah Tannen described how “in our 1,200 case studies, my fellow researchers and I found that while both sexes laugh a lot, females laugh more”, and further 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” (Psychology Today).
Similarly, in a Tanzanian all girls’ boarding school in 1962, an “outbreak of contagious laughter” (Psychology Today) spread throughout the campus, beginning with just “three girls [who] got the giggles and couldn’t stop laughing”, which then further spread to “95 students, forcing the school to close on March 18″(Psychology Today). These girls then became “vectors” for this so called virus, “afflicting nearly 1,000 people” in two and a half years(Psychology Today). This is a drastic case obviously, but it reiterates how females have a stronger unconscious will to laugh and are more receptive to stimuli causing this result.
Citation:
Provine, Robert. “The Science of Laughter.” Psychology Today. 1 Nov. 2000. Web. 2 Dec. 2015. .
This is such an interesting article because laughter is something we are so used to that we never really think about it or even notice it. It’s such an interesting and mysterious human reaction that elicits positive feelings within us. It’s also very interesting that we can’t really control our laughter and our brain signals us to laugh. I think the concept of laughter is really beautiful in that it is a universal language from human to human. Laughter is a form of communication from one person to the next. I wonder if more research could be done on laughter to discover what it means to laugh. Is it a way for us to psychologically connect with each other? I know there are often times me and my friends will just look at each other and life whether it’s something else we both recognize or for some reason that neither of us understand. Regardless, laughter is a mystery but it seems to be some sort of way to interact and connect with humans in which we don’t really understand but our brain seems to know why!
Great blog, it’s so strange how the everyday conversations make us laugh more then jokes. But I have to admit I normally laugh when I’m around my friends then when I see a comedy movie. I love blog post that never have an exact answer because then you can interpret it how you please. I never heard of someone doing research on this, I’m curious to see the statistics of this. Because I have such an obnoxious laugh I always wondered what caused me to laugh so much at certain things. I looked up more information on what causes people to laugh and found this website that goes more in depth about the topic. (http://www.webmd.com/men/features/why-we-laugh).
As said in your blog laughter is universal and comes about when you are feeling gigglely or find something to be humorous, but what exactly is laughter? After doing some research, I found that the actual definition of laughter is,”a physical reaction in humans…, consisting typically of rhythmical, often audible contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter) But also laughter is a reaction to human behavior processed by our brains. This makes sense because our brain’s process what was said and creates a reaction to it, therefore laughter is a reaction to a stimulus.