Why do we laugh? When you consider the many different varieties of laughter we encounter every day, not just in response to an episode of The Daily Show, but in humor-free situations as well (like nervous or contemptuous laughter, etc), it becomes clear that there is no simple answer to this question.
Theories abound on the subject. Robert Provine claims that laughter merely a conversational attention grabber used to make sure that others know we're paying attention. Charles Darwin thought that laughter was an extension of smiling, and therefore simply associated with pleasure. He also called attention to the as-yet-unexplained phenomenon of excessive laughter impairing muscle coordination (have you ever fallen off a chair from laughing too hard?). Maybe instead laughter is a standard exhalation pattern signifying relief. Still others class laughter as a cooperative signal. JoAnne Bachorowski, a professor at Vanderbilt University, has studied a particular kind of voice-laughter which she considers to be a cooperative signal. Voice laughter is characterized by a melodious and gentle quality and occurs most frequently between good friends or romantic couples.
My own theory is that laughter and gesture may have similar functions in conversation and social interaction (especially when considering interactions that aren't face-to-face). Both gesture and laughter are used to provide emphasis or clarify an implicit point in conversation; you point to clarify where 'there' is, you laugh to let your listener know that you are joking (or uncomfortable, or contemptuous, or playful, etc. depending on the nature of the laughter and context).
Much of this post is based off of a lecture given by Dacher Keltner, PhD. in his class on the Psychology of Emotion at the University of California at Berkeley.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacher_Keltner
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3 comments:
Cog Sci! A most fascinating topic for a blog. Yay, I'm excited. OK, I don't know if you take requests, but I request a post on prosopagnosia (face blindness), of which I am a mild sufferer. So is my older brother and one of my aunts. It is not handy for the work that I do. (I think it falls under cognitive science, yeah?) There are some cool web sites about it. Here is one: http://www.prosopagnosia.com/
main/stones/index.asp
It hadn't occured to me that I would be taking requests for postings, but I like the idea and, more specifically, I like your idea. You'll probably see a post on prosopagnosia within the next couple of weeks. Cheers!
I think the laughter that is to show people your listening or is part of polite conversation isn't the real issue. I think this type of laughter is mimicking the real uncontrollable belly laughter for social purposes. Physical laughter I believe has to do with a sense of relief and maybe sudden understanding. We laugh when we are tickled in certain areas, certain vulnerable areas. I think this can be parallel to laughing at a great joke or seeing somebody get hit in the balls with a baseball bat. We as humans try to guard ourselves from surprises and we want to anticipate everything. We have a framework of understanding that we've built in our head to do logical things and to anticipate things, and when we see something that surprises us in a certain way or looks at the world in a different way, sometimes the thought gets through that spider web that we have created and it tickles our brain. That's my take.
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