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Welcome
We now have doctors telling us that we need at least 15 minutes of laughter every day!
A genuine smile is an index of your happiness
BOUNDARIES OF GENDER-BASED HUMOUR IN THE CLASSROOM
Cartoons act like cocaine
Different Types of Laughter
Doctors fail to see the joke
Effect of laughter on salivary endocrinological stress marker chromogranin A.
GENDER DIFFERENCES ARE A LAUGHING MATTER
Happiness Protects your Heart
Hong Kong seeks to make laughter the best medicine
Humor Can Increase Hope, Research Shows
Laughter may be a better antibiotic: recent research proves that humor can help you fight germs
Laughter Can be Genuine, Strategic
Laughing Changes Blood Chemistry
Laughter Clubs Connect People PDF
Laughing Is Contagious
Laughter May Be the Best Medicine
Laughter really is the best therapy for stroke patients
People in 'Laughter Groups' Giggle and Guffaw for Better Health
Positive Emotions Slash Bias, Help People See Big Picture Details
Smile from ear to floppy ear : Is your dog laughing at you?
Sound of Dog's 'Laugh' Calms Other Pooches
Start having fun if you want to boost your brain power and live longer
Tears and Laughter
THE ACOUSTICS OF LAUGHTER: NEW INSIGHTS INTO THIS MYSTERIOUS FORM OF EXPRESSION
The Effects of Laughter on the ImmuneFunction
The effect of mirthful laughter on stress and natural killer cell activity.
The elevation of natural killer cell activity induced by laughter in a crossover designed study.
The 43 Facial Muscles That Reveal
Thoughts of laughter may boost feel-good hormones
True Laughter is Nothing But Heartfelt Prayer
Why We Laugh
A genuine smile is an index of your happiness
For the rest of the article by Vijai P. Sharma, Ph.D
go to Mind Publications
According to Dr. Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness, there are two kinds of smiles, the "Duchenne smile" and the "Pan American" smile. Here is how Seligman describes the two smiles, "The first called Duchenne smile (after its discoverer Guillaume Duchenne) is genuine. The corners of the mouth turn up and the skin around the corners of your eyes crinkles (the crow's feet). The other smile, called the Pan American smile (after the flight attendants in television ads for now-defunct airline), is inauthentic."
In Duchenne smile, the facial muscles involved in are difficult to control voluntarily. Therefore, it's difficult to fake a Duchenne smile unless you smile from within.
The Pan American smile is a perfunctory smile. It is nothing but a courtesy smile as in the case of a flight attendant responding to a patron. It's an expression of courtesy and politeness rather than inner joy. Alas, the Pan Am airline is dead but the smile will live forever.
So how genuinely do you smile when the occasion demands it? Do you habitually put more oomph and joy in your smile? Such a habit might positively influence your health and happiness. There is a study that backs up just such claim.
BOUNDARIES OF GENDER-BASED HUMOUR IN THE CLASSROOM
by Aysan Sev'er Professor of Sociology
University of Toronto at Scarborough
As personified in jokers, fools and clowns, humour is an integral part of human history. Humour can lighten what might otherwise be dull, tense or tedious situations. Common definitions of humour emphasize "amusement" and "laughter," implying some form of benign diversion. But recent research suggests that jokes are not "events" that are funny--or harmful--as such. Rather, joking entails a dynamic process where the characteristics of the joke teller and the audience interact with the embedded meaning of the joke. It is the interactions among these factors which determine whether efforts to be funny are acceptable or not. The present study employs a power-based approach to examine how situational factors affect the degree of acceptability of gender-based humour in classroom settings.
Cartoons act like cocaine By Roger Highfield in London, December 5, 2003
Sydney Morning News
A search for the mind's "funny bone" has shed new light on the mysteries of merriment, revealing that the reason humour is addictive is that it activates "reward centres" in the brain. This work, and further studies to come, would clarify why men and women had different styles of humour and shed light on why some people were giggly and others grumpy, said Allan Reiss of Stanford University. Sophisticated brain imaging techniques were used to look at activity in specific brain regions when Dr Reiss and colleagues presented people with cartoons considered funny or unfunny. The results, published in the journal Neuron, show that, in addition to activating areas associated with the perception and production of language, humour activates a network of brain structures associated with known reward systems. Amusing cartoons activated a region of the brain, called the nucleus accumbens, that has previously been linked with happiness and with cocaine- and amphetamine-induced euphoria. The reward network is "a very powerful brain subsystem, if you will, underlying motivated behaviour. It will be fascinating to see if persons whom others might consider 'humourless' lack this component of their humour appreciation network," Dr Reiss said. This new information will shed light on social behaviour. "One's sense of humour often dictates if, how, and with whom we establish friendships and even long-lasting romantic relationships. Humour also is a universal coping mechanism when faced with all varieties of stress," Dr Reiss said.
The Telegraph, London
Different Types of Laughter
article by R. Morgan Griffin WEBMD
Clearly, there are many different types of laughter. The explosion of laughter after being tickled is obviously different from the tight-lipped chuckle you force out of yourself when your boss tells a bad joke. To account for the differences, some researchers divide laughter into two groups. The first includes spontaneous laughter. The other group includes laughter that is less spontaneous: it includes fake laughter, nervous laughter, and other social laughter that is unconnected to humor. According to some researchers, these two types of laughter -- spontaneous and nonspontaneous -- actually have different origins in the brain. The spontaneous laughter originates in part from the brainstem, an ancient part of the brain. So it might be a more original form of laughter. The other type of laughter comes from parts of the brain that developed more recently, in evolutionary terms.
Doctors Fail to See the Joke
article by Roger Dobson (for more info bmj)
A patient laughs four times during an average consultation with a doctor, according to new research. But doctors rarely reciprocate, say the researchers, who videotaped 250 consultations in order to count the number of instances of laughter, smiles, and "smiling voices" involving the doctor or the patient or both.
"The patients laugh more than the doctors. We see that the occurrence of laughter seldom leads to its reciprocationlaughing together. It is the patients who do most of the laughing in medical encounters," says the report. It says that laughter is seen as an invitation to "come closer" and that there can be problems where it is not returned: "Not laughing with someone could indicate such negative features as mal-alignment and social distance."
Effect of laughter on salivary endocrinological stress marker chromogranin A.
Toda M, Kusakabe S, Nagasawa S, Kitamura K, Morimoto K.
Department of Social and Environmental Medicine, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka, Japan.
We investigated the effect of laughter on salivary endocrinological stress marker chromogranin A (CgA). In saliva samples collected from 11 healthy males before and after watching a comic film or a non-humorous control film, salivary CgA levels were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Samples taken after watching the comic film showed increased levels of CgA. This tendency was more pronounced in individuals with lower initial levels of stress. The control samples showed no significant change in CgA levels. Stress score, subjectively evaluated using a visual analog scale, decreased significantly after watching the comic film. These findings suggest that, in addition to a stress relief effect, laughter can bring about feeling uplifted or fulfilled.
Gender
GENDER DIFFERENCES ARE A LAUGHING MATTER,
STANFORD BRAIN STUDY SHOWS
STANFORD, Calif. Need more evidence that men and women are different? Look no further than the Sunday funnies. According to a new Stanford University School of Medicine study, gender affects the way a person's brain responds to humor. The first-of-its-kind imaging study showed that women activate the parts of the brain involved in language processing and working memory more than men when viewing funny cartoons. Women were also more likely to activate with greater intensitythe part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings in response to new experiences.
"The results help explain previous findings suggesting women and men differ in how humor is used and appreciated," said Allan Reiss, MD, the Howard C. Robbins Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. He added that the results, which appear in the Nov. 7 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to a better understanding of medical conditions such as depression and cataplexy.
Researchers know that a number of brain structures, including the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in language processing and memory, are involved in humor appreciation. In 2003, Reiss and colleagues showed for the first time that the brain's mesolimbic reward center, which is responsible for the rewarding feelings that follow such events as monetary gain or cocaine use, is also activated by humor. Past studies have shown gender differences in the use and appreciation of humor and the meaning and function of laughter, but no previous research has examined sex-specific differences in the brain's response to humor.
During this study, 20 healthy adults (10 men and 10 women) viewed 70 black-and-white cartoons and then rated the cartoons on a one-to-10 "funniness scale." During the screenings, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor participants' brain function. They then analyzed blood oxygenation-level-dependent signal activation, a measure of neural activity, in various parts of the brain. After analyzing the data, the researchers found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system; both useto a similar degree the part of the brain responsible for semantic knowledge and juxtaposition and the part involved in language processing. But they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens, or NAcc, which is part of the mesolimbic reward center.
Reiss said he was taken off guard by the NAcc finding. After puzzling over it, he and his colleagues theorized that because the women in this study used more analytical machinery when deciphering humorous material, it signaled that they weren't necessarily expecting the cartoons to be as rewarding as did the men. When a woman's brain encountered the punch line, her reward center lit up. According to Reiss, the activation of this center not only signals the presence of something pleasant, but that the pleasure was unexpected. "Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon," said Reiss. "So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it."
The researchers also found that the funnier the cartoon, the more the reward center was activated in women. That was not the case in men who seemed to "expect" the cartoons to be funny from the start. If subsequent studies show that women's reward center and other regions of the brain are more sensitive to emotional stimuli, including negative stimuli, that could help explain why depression strikes twice as many women as men, potentially leading to new therapies, Reiss said.
The results of the study also have potential implications for individuals who suffer from cataplexy, in which a sudden loss of motor control is precipitated by strong emotions, most notably humor. In other findings, men and women showed no significant difference in the number of stimuli they rated as funny, nor how funny they found the humorous stimuli. Response time for both funny and unfunny cartoons was also similar, although women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny.
In a related study that also appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Reiss and his colleagues, including Dean Mobbs, now a PhD student at University College London, found that personality traits, such as extroversion and introversion, affect how humor is processed. "The combined results of these two studies suggest that humor taps into several neural systems associated with gender or personality and helps to explain individual differences in humor appreciation," said Reiss.
The gender study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and a Howard Hughes Summer Fellowship from the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford. Undergraduate student Eiman Azim, now a graduate student at Harvard University, was a key collaborator and the first author.
Happiness Protects your Heart
UAB Health System
A new study proves for the first time that happiness protects your heart. Public health scientists at UCL have found that a happy state of mind can lead to a healthier heart and lower levels of stress-inducing chemicals. The research says that people who have more moments of happiness over a day produce less harmful chemicals such as cortisol and so are likely to be healthier long-term and less likely to suffer from heart disease.
The research, part of the Whitehall II study, shows the health effects of happiness by testing middle-aged Londoners - 116 men and 100 women - in a number of different situations including at work, leisure and in a laboratory. The tests at work and during leisure periods were performed regularly during the day and the subjects were asked whether or not they were happy at these moments. Over a full day, an average of happy moments was taken. The subjects ranged from those who never felt happy to those who felt occasional happiness and finally, those who felt happy most of the time.
Most people felt happiest during their leisure hours than at work. However, those who were happiest overall experienced lower levels of the stress hormone, salivary cortisol, during a working day than those were rated themselves as happy less frequently. The results were adjusted for gender, age, employment status, body mass index (BMI), smoking, and psychological distress. Interestingly, in men, happiness also had an impact on heart-rate - men who were happiest had a lower heart rate (between 68 and 70 bpm) than those who had a low rate of happiness (these men clocked in at over 76 bpm). The same was not true for women.
The main chemical difference in both men and women who were generally unhappy and those who were more often happy was the amount of the chemical plasma fibrinogen found in the blood stream - a major predictor of cardiovascular disease risk. One of the lead researchers, Professor Steptoe said that although it has been thought that happier people may be healthier both mentally and physically than less happy people, this study shows there are plausible biological pathways linking happiness with health.
"Cortisol has effects on a number of bodily systems related to health, so the lower levels that we have recorded during people's everyday lives are potentially important," he said. "Fibrinogen is a substance that is directly related to risk of coronary heart disease, and the finding that happier individuals have lower fibrinogen responses to stress suggest that this could be a mediating mechanism."
"What we find particularly interesting is that the associations between happiness and biological responses were independent of psychological distress. We already know that depression and anxiety are related to increased physical health risk. This study raises the intriguing possibility that the effect of happiness may be somewhat separate."
The study is part of the major Whitehall II psychobiology study which involves 10,308, London-based civil servants recruited between 1985 and 1988 when 35-55 years old to investigate the risk factors for coronary heart disease. It has been funded by the Medical Research Council and the British Heart Foundation.
Hong Kong seeks to make laughter the best medicine
Yahoo! News
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong, a city best known for its serious pursuit of money, will hold a laughing contest in July as health experts worry over rising incidence of mental depression and urge people to lighten up. Organized by the Joyful Mental Health Foundation, the event will be the highlight of a July 15-17 fair aimed at educating the public about depression and how laughter is the best medicine. "Lots of people in Hong Kong have depression and very few seek help. It was only in the past few years that people have come to know of this sickness," said Parry Poon, one of the organizers of the event. An estimated 70,000 of Hong Kong's seven million people sufffer from depression. Contestants will be judged on how long they can laugh and the quality of their laughter. Teams of up six people will be allowed. "Judges will also be looking for the quality of their laughter, whether it is infectious, genuine," Poon said.
Humor Can Increase Hope, Research Shows
Science Daily Source: Texas A&M University
Feb. 10, 2005 - Laughter might be the best medicine for transforming the faintest of glimmers of hope into an eternal spring, reveals research at Texas A&M University that shows humor may significantly increase a person's level of hope.
The experience of humor can positively influence a person's state of hopefulness, says Texas A&M psychologist David H. Rosen who, along with colleagues Alexander P. Vilaythong, Randolph C. Arnau and Nathan Mascaro, studied nearly 200 subjects ranging in age from 18-42.
As part of the study, which appeared in the International Journal of Humor Research, select participants viewed a 15-minute comedy video. Those that viewed the video had statistically significant increases in their scores for hopefulness after watching it as compared with those that did not view the video, Rosen notes.
The finding, he says, is important because it underscores how humor can be a legitimate strategy for relieving stress and maintaining a general sense of well-being while increasing a person's hope. Previous studies have found that as high as 94 percent of people deem lightheartedness as a necessary factor in dealing with difficulties associated with stressful life events, he says.
Rosen says humor may competitively inhibit negative thoughts with positive ones, and in so doing, foster hope in people. Positive emotions, such as those arising from experiencing humor, can stimulate thought and prompt people to discard automatic behavioral responses and pursue more creative paths of thought and action, he explains.
Such a process, Rosen says, could lead to a person experiencing a greater sense of self-worth when dealing with specific problems or stressful events. He says these positive emotions could, in turn, lead to an increase in a person's ability to develop a "plan of attack" for a specific problem as well as increase a person's perceived ability to overcome obstacles in dealing with that problem - two aspects that psychologists believe comprise hope.
During the course of the study, Rosen found that there was little or no relationship between hope and the number of stressors experienced throughout the past month, but did find a relationship between severity of the stressors and a decrease in hope. This suggests that the accumulated severity of recent stressors seem to have more of am impact on hope than the actual number of stressors, he says.
In the study, sense of humor was not only represented as the tendency to display laughter, smiles and other similar responses, but was measured across four factors - humor production, humor as a coping strategy, attitudes toward humorous people and attitudes about humor.
Laughing Is Contagious
article by R. Morgan Griffin WEBMD
In some cases, laughter can in fact become literally contagious. History is dotted with accounts of laughter epidemics. In 1962, in the African country that is now Tanzania, three school girls began to laugh uncontrollably. Within a few months, about 2/3 of the school's students had the symptoms, and the school closed. The contagion spread, and eventually affected about a thousand people in Tanzania and neighboring Uganda. There were no long-lasting effects, but it shows how responsive people can be to seeing another person laugh.
Laughter Can be Genuine, Strategic
To read the rest of the article by Jennifer Viegas,
go to Discovery Communications Inc.
Laughter is either genuine or consciously feigned, according to a new analysis that details how laughter has evolved over the past seven million years. The study, published in the current Quarterly Review of Biology, is the first to emphasize that two types of laughter exist. The first type is spontaneous and stimulus-driven, while the second, with the rather sinister nickname "the dark side of laughter," is strategic and, at times, downright cruel. Matthew Gervais, lead author of the study, described the two types to Discovery News. "One type of laughter arises spontaneously from the perception of a certain class of events, while the other is used strategically in interaction to influence others or modulate one's own physiology," said Gervais, who is a researcher in the Evolutionary Studies Program at Binghamton University in New York. Analyzing past studies that contained data on ape features, such as oral-facial muscle control, as well as using theory and data on brain neurons, evolutionary psychology and other disciplines, Gervais and colleague David Sloan Wilson determined that genuine laughter is innate and mirrors ape play-panting, which arose around seven million years ago.
Laughing Changes Blood Chemistry
more info World Laughter Tour
"Laughter May Indeed Be the Best Medicine" Study Shows Laughing Changes Blood Chemistry, Helps Protect Against Disease, Depression. May 10, 2006 -- Let that belly laugh out. New research shows that it can literally change your blood chemistry and help protect you from disease and depression. Now, researchers at Loma Linda University in Southern California say they have found a physiological change that occurs when people laugh, and it lasts long after the laughter subsides. It's a small study, and not likely to be embraced by everyone, but lead researcher Lee Berk says it's very convincing, and the changes take place "at the chemical level."
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Laughter may be a better antibiotic: recent research proves that humor can help you fight germs -
Natural Health, August, 2001 by Julia Tolliver Maranan Find Articles
TWO SMALL TRIALS PUBLISHED earlier this year show that a good laugh can strengthen your immune system. In one, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, scientists exposed 26 men and women to common allergens, which produced allergy symptoms, and then showed them a 90-minute Charlie Chaplin film. Symptoms were reduced in all 26 subjects for four hours after the video.
The other, published in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, looked for an increase in immune function. Fifty-two healthy men watched an hour-long comedy video, before, during, and after which immunity markers like their T cell counts were measured. It turns out that just one hour of laughter boosted their immune function for up to 12 hours.
Stress reduction seems to be the key, say experts. Even a few hearty chuckles a day can do the trick.
Laughter May Be the Best Medicine
For more information go to Discovery Communications Inc.
It's been said that laughter is the best medicine, but no one has yet to prove it. Now a Japanese scientist is unlocking the secrets of the funny bone, which he believes can cheer up people's genes. Geneticist Kazuo Murakami has teamed up on the study with an unlikely research partner: stand-up comedians, who he hopes can turn their one-liners into efficient, low-cost medical treatment. Genes are usually regarded as immutable, but in reality more than 90 percent of them are dormant or less active in producing protein, so some types of stimulation can wake them up. Murakami's tentative theory is that laughter is one such stimulant, which can trigger energy inside a person's DNA potentially helping cure disease. "If we prove people can switch genes on and off by an emotion like laughter, it may be the finding of the century which should be worth the Nobel Prize or even go beyond that," said Murakami, 70, director of Japan's Foundation for Advancement of International Science.
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Laughter really is the best therapy for stroke patients, according to scientists.
Euro MedNews
The research, conducted at Graz University in Austria, showed that laughter therapy helped people recovering from strokes lower their blood pressure. Thirty patients in the study were split up into two groups. One group took part in regular "Laughter Yoga" sessions over a six-week period, while the other practiced movement exercises only.
This laughter therapy combines laughing techniques with breathing exercises and patients involved in the test took part in three half-hour weekly sessions. Psychologist Ilona Papousek, who headed the research, said, "This is the first study that shows that laughter has an effect on blood pressure. "Blood pressure levels remained roughly the same in the movement group but dropped significantly in the laughter group.
"Physical exercises were similar in both groups, meaning we can ascribe the positive effects to the laughter training. The mood improved in both groups but more noticeably so in the laughter group." Participants also said they felt "more awake" and "less stressed". Papousek added: "The feeling of happiness caused by the laughing, the distraction and improvements to the person's mood in the long run can help improve the quality of life for patients as well as healthy individuals."
People in 'Laughter Groups' Giggle and Guffaw for Better Health
ABC News original report
Some people roar, some cackle, some giggle.
Whatever their style, more people are learning that laughing it up is a great way to wind down. And now they're doing it in groups, at so-called "laughter clubs," hundreds of which have sprung up around the country.
Dr. Sushil Bhatia , a full-time businessman and part-time master of laughter, meets once a week with his employees at his small manufacturing company in Framingham, Mass., and tries to get them to laugh. "The whole idea is to help people relax and let their things go," Bhatia said. "And their minds can open up to things. And that's what laughter does."
Laughing Like Meditating
Bhatia first heard about laughter clubs in his native India. He started his own club four years ago. The 40-minute sessions combine laughter with elements of yoga and meditation. "Laughter is the shortest form of meditation, because while you're laughing you cannot think of anything else," Bhatia said.
The club's members swear by it. "Phsyically, it's just very relaxing," said member Mishi Debgan. "I tend to get very tense. I tense up a lot, so for me, it just makes me feel kind of loose and carefree."
In another laughing class in Arlington, Mass., psychologist Lynn Caesar leads a number of exercises to elicit laughter, even encouraging people to fake their laughter until it leads to the real thing.
Andy O'Fleish, a participant in Caesar's class, swears by it. He lost his job a year ago and has been down ever since. "It's almost like a high, really," O'Fleish said. "It just picks me up. I feel like I have a lot of energy for the rest of the day."
Positive Emotions Slash Bias, Help People See Big Picture Details
Science Daily Source: University Of Michigan
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Positive emotions like joy and humor help people "get the big picture," virtually eliminating the own-race bias that makes many people think members of other races "all look alike," according to new University of Michigan research.
"Negative emotions create a tunnel vision," said U-M psychology researcher Kareem Johnson. "Negative emotions like fear or anger are useful for short-term survival when there's an immediate danger like being chased by a dangerous animal. Positive emotions like joy and happiness are for long-term survival and promote big picture thinking, make you more inclusive and notice more details, make you think in terms of 'us' instead of 'them.'"
To simulate getting a quick glance of a stranger, scientists flashed photos of individuals for about a half second, finding subjects recognized members of their own race 75 percent of the time but only recognized members of another race 65 percent of the time, Johnson said. However, researchers found positive emotions boosted that recognition of cross-race faces about 10 to 20 percent, eliminating the gap.
The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.
Johnson, who is completing his PhD work in psychology, and Barbara Fredrickson, a U-M psychology professor and director of the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory, specialize in the power of positive emotions.
Researchers asked a group of 89 students to watch a video either of a comic to induce joy and laughter, a horror video to induce anxiety, or a "neutral" video that would not effect emotions. They then looked at 28 yearbook style photos of college-aged people in random order for 500 milliseconds.
Subjects who watched the comedy tested for having much higher positive emotions, while those who saw the horror video had far more "negative" emotions. In a testing phase, more images flashed by and they were asked to push buttons to indicate whether they'd seen the pictures earlier. Those in a positive mood had a far greater ability to recognize members of another race, while their ability to recognize members of their own race stayed the same.
The researchers conclude that positive emotions bring with them a "broadening effect" that helps people see a bigger, broader picture of the world around them
Smile from ear to floppy ear : Is your dog laughing at you?
By Catherine Marquis-Homeyer
May 16, 2005 The University of Missouri - St. Louis Student Newspaper
In honor of the recent April Fools Day, let us look at a humorous subject: the laughing dog.. Many a dog owner has sworn that their dog is smiling at them or laughing along with them. Certainly, the opened-mouthed expression on the face of a panting, playing dog looks like a smile. But zoologists warn us about anthropomorphizing animals, reading human meanings into their actions or expressions. Often people will see what they want to see, regardless of the real meaning of the animals' actions.
Yet intriguingly there is a new report in the journal Science that speculates that "play sounds" in animals, like panting sounds in dogs and chimps that resemble human laughs, do indeed represent an animal equivalent of laughter. Chimps display the laughter-like panting noises when they chase or tickle each other. Anyone who has roughhoused with a dog has heard their "play pants" as they chase and tumble.
The author of the report is Dr. Jaak Panksepp, of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who studies the neuroanatomical and neurochemical mechanisms of emotional behaviors in the emerging field of affective neuroscience. Dr. Panksepp's work seeks to understand a variety of emotional responses including social bonding and social play, and how these affective responses are organized in the brain. In a recent issue of the journal Science, Dr. Panksepp cited the long observed panting "play noises" of chimpanzees, which sound like human laughter, and panting sounds of dogs at play.
In a 1998 study, Panksepp and another researcher reported that rats produced a high-pitched chirping sound during play, and that the sounds were associated with a pleasurable response to tickling or play. When rats are tickled in a playful way, they become socially bonded to humans and even would seek out tickles. The rats' chirps do not sound like human laughter and are even beyond our hearing range, yet are associated with play.
Neural circuits in the brain that release the neurotransmitter dopamine light up in the human brain when people laugh. A similar response is thought to occur in rat brains during the chirping response.
Research shows that our laughter circuits are found in the more primitive parts of our brain, in structures that we share with many animals. This suggests that the capacity for human laughter preceded the capacity for speech, according to Panksepp. Laughter is a universal human expression that needs no translation across cultures, although jokes provoking laughter might. Babies learn to laugh spontaneously at about three months, long before they learn to talk.
Human laughter is an emotional response that is not entirely in our control. It is surprisingly hard to fake a laugh and easy to detect a fake one. Yet they erupt spontaneously in the right circumstances. Although we often think of laughter in response to humor, research shows that it is a social response that is more likely linked to social bonding than to what is funny. People rarely laugh alone, and the laughter of others is likely to provoke us to laugh, suggesting a connection to another universal human social behavior, smiling.
Studies in humans indicate that laughter may have more to do with social bonding, or with communicating to others that one is only playing, than with amusement. This social communication aspect may be the common link with animal play sounds, as they may communicate that no harm is intended.
However, making jokes might still be a purely human trait.
While many scientists are skeptical of the concept of animal laughter, the link between play sounds and ancient parts of the brain that we share with many animals raise an intriguing, even amusing, thought. If animals engage in play, why can't they laugh too?
Sound of Dog's 'Laugh' Calms Other Pooches
ABC News
Dec. 4, 2005 Researchers at the Spokane County Regional Animal Protection Service in Washington state say sometimes a bark is just a bark but a long, loud panting sound has real meaning. They say the long, loud pant is the sound of a dog laughing, and it has a direct impact on the behavior of other dogs.
"What we found is that it had a calming or soothing effect on the dogs," said Patricia Simonet, an animal behaviorist in Spokane who has studied everything from hamster culture to elephant self-recognition. "Now, we actually really weren't expecting that." Nancy Hill, director of Spokane County Animal Protection, admits she was skeptical at first that this noise would affect the other dogs. "I thought: Laughing dogs?" Hill said. "A sound that we're gonna isolate and play in the shelter? I was a real skeptic … until we played the recording here at the shelter."
When they played the sound of a dog panting over the loudspeaker, the gaggle of dogs at the shelter kept right on barking. But when they played the dog version of laughing, all 15 barking dogs went quiet within about a minute. "It was a night-and-day difference," Hill said. "It was absolutely phenomenal." Officials say it works every time, and researchers across the country are taking note. "The laughing sound that they make is something that was not even considered a vocalization until this study was done," Simonet said. Those who study dog behavior have varying opinions about exactly what Patricia Simonet's "dog laughing" sound really is. What they do agree on, however, is that to other dogs, it is at least a sound worth keeping quiet to listen to.
Start having fun if you want to boost your brain power and live longer
by Pat Kane Times on Line
More play in your life can help you to live longer and think sharper, broaden your occupational and spiritual horizons, and generally fine-tune the complex organism that is you.
Play? In the work-driven 21st century? It sounds frivolous, but some of the most serious corporate contenders are learning how playfulness can equal competitive success. It can work at basic building-blocks level. Lego offers a consulting business, called Serious Play, that uses those knobbly bricks to spark ideas in staff. And a recent book from Harvard Business School, Got Game, claims that computer gamers will reshape future businesses, creating workers/players who love to take risks, who cope with failure as a learning opportunity and juggle multiple scenarios with ease.
Tears and Laughter
by Christopher Turner Cabinet Magazine
"Between the expressions of laughter and weeping there is no difference in the motion of the features," Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his posthumously published Treatise on Painting, "either in the eyes, mouth or cheeks." With the difference between the physical expression of emotions so subtle, artists had a challenge on their hands: How to differentially depict, in the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the "frantic joy of a Bacchante and the grief of a Mary Magdalen"?
THE ACOUSTICS OF LAUGHTER: NEW INSIGHTS INTO THIS MYSTERIOUS FORM OF EXPRESSION
Science Daily Source: American Institute Of Physics Date: 2001-10-04
College Park, MD (October 3, 2001) -- Humans have many ways to express themselves, but one of the most enjoyable-and mysterious-is laughter. More than a frivolous emotional outburst, laughter has many important functions in human communication, playing major roles in social situations ranging from dates to diplomatic negotiations.
While scientists have thoroughly researched many other human sounds, such as singing and talking, remarkably little is known about the acoustics of laughter. Seeking to rectify this, Vanderbilt psychologist Jo-Anne Bachorowski and Cornell psychologist Michael Owren studied 1024 laughter episodes from 97 young adults as they watched funny video clips from films such as "When Harry Met Sally" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." The surprising results were published in the September issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
"We tend to think of laughter as being tee-hee or ho-ho, sorts of sounds," said Bachorowski. But their results showed otherwise.
First of all, laughers produce many different kinds of sounds, including grunts and snorts. The investigators found interesting sex differences in the use of these sounds, with males tending to grunt and snort more often than females.
The sex differences don't end there. Women produced more song-like laughter than men. These song-like laughs are "voiced," meaning that they involve the vocal folds, the tissues in the larynx involved in producing vowels and related sounds.
In men and women alike, laughs are surprisingly high-pitched. To determine this, the researchers took each voiced laugh and measured its "fundamental frequency," which corresponds to the rate at which the vocal folds vibrate, and is heard by listeners as pitch. They found that women's laughter, on the average, was twice as high-pitched as normal speech (had twice the fundamental frequency). Men's laughter was, on the average, 2.5 times more higher-pitched than their normal speech (had 2.5 times the fundamental frequency).
Even more remarkable were the very high frequencies of some voiced laughs. Male fundamentals were sometimes over 1,000 Hertz (Hz)-about the pitch of a high "C" for a soprano singer. Females were sometimes over 2,000 Hz-one octave higher than a soprano's high C. These high fundamentals were unexpected. "I personally didn't imagine that males and females would produce sounds with fundamentals that high in natural circumstances," Bachorowski said.
Santa Claus may also have to change his tagline, as researchers found that voiced laughter does not consist of articulated vowel-like utterances, like "tee-hee," "ha-ha," or "ho-ho." Instead, laughter is predominantly comprised of neutral, "huh-huh" sounds.
Ever think your laugh sounds funny when you're stressed out? The researchers found lots of evidence that laughter can be associated with out-of-the-ordinary vocal physics, such as whirlpools of air or whistles near the larynx. While the researchers don't know with certainty what the origins of such effects are, they may be associated with a high level of emotional arousal on the part of laughers.
The researchers are in the midst of further studies of laughter. For example, they are studying the impact that these sounds have on emotional responses in listeners. They are also looking to uncover what happens in the human brain when listeners hear laughter. Another piece of their work involves studying whether laughter is speech-like in the sense of providing "meaning" or symbolic value to listeners. The investigators instead think that laughter functions largely to sway a listener's emotional response, with any meaning attributed to the sounds inferred or interpreted from the situation in which the laughter is produced.
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
The Effects of Laughter on the ImmuneFunction
TAKAHASHI and colleagues, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Psychiatry, Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine, D3, Suita City, Osaka 565-0871, Japan, kiyotake@psy.med.osaka-u.ac.jp, investigated the effects of laughter, including the experiential aspects of laughter, on a measure of immune function, natural killer cell activity (NKCA).
Background: Positive emotions are thought to be beneficial to health and immune status. In previous studies, the effects of laughter on NKCA were examined, but results were inconclusive due to methodological limitations of the studies. The researchers therefore designed and carried out a more rigorous study to investigate the relationship between laughter and NKCA.
Methods:In a cross-over design study, NKCA was measured in 21 healthy male subjects before and after they watched a 75-minute comedy film and a non-emotive film (control) on different days. Magnitude of laughter was measured (as an indicator of emotional expression) by electromyographic recordings (recordings of muscle electrical activity) from the left major zygomatic muscle of the face during film-watching. The subjects rated themselves on the pleasantness of the comedy film using a visual analogue scale (VAS). The researchers also rated the subjects' mood state before and after watching the film using the Profile of Mood States (POMS) scale.
Results: Watching the comedy film resulted in significant increases in NKCA (26.5-29.4%). Watching the non-emotive film had no effect on NKCA (27.1-24.8%). Elevated NKCA was associated with lowered scores on the negative mood scales of POMS (suggesting an association with improvement of mood). No associations were found between NKCA elevation and self-rated pleasantness or magnitude of laughter. Further analysis of the subjects and data suggested that subjects with high scores of depression and anger/hostility had a suppressed NKCA response to laughter (i.e. negative mood suppressed the NKCA elevation caused by laughter). Subjects' NKCA levels before and after watching the comic film seemed to be somewhat related to the self-rated pleasantness score they assigned the comedy film. NKCA levels per se were not correlated with magnitude of laughter measures.
Conclusion:The results indicated that elevations of NKCA and NKCA levels before and after watching a comedy film are associated with the experiential aspects of laughter rather than its expressive aspects.
Takahashi K et al. The elevation of natural killer cell activity induced by laughter in a crossover designed study. International Journal of Molecular Medicine 8 (6): 645-50. Dec 2001.
The effect of mirthful laughter on stress and natural killer cell activity.
National Library of Medicine
Bennett MP, Zeller JM, Rosenberg L, McCann J.Indiana State University School of Nursing, Terre Haute, Ind., USA.CONTEXT: A recent survey of rural Midwestern cancer patients revealed that humor was one of the most frequently used complementary therapies. Psychoneuroimmunology research suggests that, in addition to its established psychological benefits, humor may have physiological effects on immune functioning. OBJECTIVE: To determine the effect of laughter on self-reported stress and natural killer cell activity. DESIGN: Randomized, pre-post test with comparison group. SETTING: Indiana State University Sycamore Nursing Center, which is a nurse-managed community health clinic in a mid-sized, Midwestern city. PARTICIPANTS: 33 healthy adult women. INTERVENTION: Experimental subjects viewed a humorous video while subjects in the distraction control group viewed a tourism video. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Self-reported stress and arousal (Stress Arousal Check List), mirthful laughter (Humor Response Scale), and immune function (chromium release natural killer [NK] cell cytotoxicity assay). RESULTS: Stress decreased for subjects in the humor group, compared with those in the distraction group (U32 = 215.5; P = .004). Amount of mirthful laughter correlated with postintervention stress measures for persons in the humor group (r16 = -.655; P = .004). Subjects who scored greater than 25 on the humor response scale had increased immune function postintervention (t16 = 2.52 P = .037) and compared with the remaining participants (t32 = 32.1; P = .04). Humor response scale scores correlated with changes in NK cell activity (r16 = .744; P = 001). CONCLUSION: Laughter may reduce stress and improve NK cell activity. As low NK cell activity is linked to decreased disease resistance and increased morbidity in persons with cancer and HIV disease, laughter may be a useful cognitive-behavioral intervention.Publication Types: · Clinical Trial· Randomized Controlled TrialPMID: 12652882 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
The 43 Facial Muscles That Reveal
Dr. Paul Ekman, the professor of psychology who has become the world's most famous face reader, is much in demand these days.
The Dalai Lama and Dr. Ekman, who have met twice, found such synergy in their understanding of human emotions that the Dalai Lama gave Dr. Ekman $50,000 in seed money to learn how to improve emotional balance in schoolteachers and other people in high pressure jobs.
Crucial to how we feel is being aware of how we are feeling in the moment. The sine qua non of that is to realize that you are being emotional in the first place. The earlier you recognize an emotion, the more choice you will have in dealing with it.
In Buddhist terms, it's recognizing the spark before the flame. In Western terms, it's trying to increase the gap between impulse and saying or doing something you might regret later.
Q. So how do you tell a fake smile from a real one?
A. In a fake smile, only the zygomatic major muscle, which runs from the cheekbone to the corner of the lips, moves. In a real smile, the eyebrows and the skin between the upper eyelid and the eyebrow come down very slightly. The muscle involved is the orbicularis oculi, pars lateralis.
Thoughts of laughter may boost feel-good hormones
By Judy Skatssoon for ABC Science Online
Just anticipating a good laugh is enough to increase the level of feel-good hormones in your blood, a conference has heard.Previous work has shown that laughter triggers a cascade of beneficial physiological changes.
But researchers presenting a new study at the Experimental Biology 2006 conference in the United States recently say they have now shown that merely anticipating "mirthful laughter" before watching a funny video has significant neuroendocrine effects.
Professor Lee Berk of Loma Linda University in California says people who were just about to watch their favourite funny video had 27 per cent more beta endorphins and 87 per cent more human growth hormone (HGH) than those who were told they would be reading magazines for an hour.
"We believe that results suggest that the anticipation of a ... laughter ... event initiates changes in neuroendocrine response prior to the onset of the event itself," he says.
Beta endorphins provide natural pain relief and low levels are associated with depression. HGH is involved in growth, development and cell maintenance and some research suggests it plays a role in maintaining a healthy immune system. Anticipation can be powerful
Professor Nicholas Keks of Monash University, an Australian researcher whose expertise includes hormones in psychiatry, says anticipation is a powerful emotion in terms of triggering physiological and emotional responses.
"Anticipation is a huge issue in areas that affect our psychology, whether it be anticipation of pleasurable activities or a bit of pain," he said. "You just have to look at the classic example of salivation before food, or expectation of sexual activity ... I think laughter belongs in that group."
True Laughter is Nothing But Heartfelt Prayer
article by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar THE TIMES OF INDIA
In a recent editorial in the Times Of India, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar said, "Laughter comes from the cente of our Being, from the core of our heart. Our belly is so full of laughter that the laughter permeates every cell in our body. True laughter is true prayer. When you laugh, the whole of nature laughs with you. It echoes and resounds and makes life worthwhile. When tings go all right, everybody can laugh, but when everything falls apart, and yet you laugh, that is evolution and growth. Nothing in life is more worthy than your laughter." To see the whole article click THE TIMES OF INDIA
Why We Laugh
article by R. Morgan Griffin WEBMD
"Most laughter is not in response to jokes or humor," says Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Provine did a survey of laughter in the wild -- he and some graduate students listened in on average conversations in public places and made notes. 80%-90% of comments that received a laugh were dull non-witticisms like, "I'll see you guys later" and "It was nice meeting you, too."
So why the laughs? Provine argues it has to do with the evolutionary development of laughter. In humans, laughter predates speech by perhaps millions of years. Before our human ancestors could talk with each other, laughter was a simpler method of communication, he tells WebMD. It's also instinctual. "Infants laugh almost from birth," says Steve Wilson, MA, CSP, a psychologist and laugh therapist. "In fact, people who are born blind and deaf still laugh. So we know it's not a learned behavior. Humans are hardwired for laughter." But perhaps because laughter is so ancient, it's much less precise than language. "Laughter isn't under our conscious control," says Provine. "We don't choose to laugh in the same way that we choose to speak." If you've ever had an inopportune laughing fit -- in a lecture, during a high school play, or at a funeral, for instance -- you know that laughter can't always be tamed.