Ever meet someone new whom you find attractive? After a few drinks, and some engaging conversation, he or she tries to crack a joke, which results in a courtesy chuckle and a fake smile from you. You probably instantly realize that things aren't going to work out.
Well, the bad jokes might seem cute at first, but this wears off with lust and gets very annoying very fast. Though it might feel easy and come naturally, laughter is a very intricate process that has shown some very good health benefits. We go through physiological changes when we laugh; our blood pressure goes up, we breathe faster and our facial muscles stretch. These simple changes help our immune system, blood flow, blood sugar levels and relaxation; regulate sleep and even burn calories.
Why do you think royalty had jesters and comedians that were paid to hang around? Laughter is food for the soul, even medieval doctors believed that the jester could actually heal the imbalance of "humors" emotional states of sanguine, melancholic, choleric and phlegmatic. Please note that while we value your input, we cannot respond to every message. Also, if you have a comment about a particular piece of work on this website, please go to the page where that work is displayed and post a comment on it.
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Previous Next. Gil Greengross, an anthropologist then at the University of New Mexico, noted that humor and laughter occur in every society, as well as in apes and even rats. This universality suggests an evolutionary role, although humor and laughter could conceivably be a byproduct of some other process important to survival.
Wilson is a major proponent of group selection, an evolutionary theory based on the idea that in social species like ours, natural selection favors characteristics that foster the survival of the group, not just of individuals.
Wilson and Gervais applied the concept of group selection to two different types of human laughter. Spontaneous, emotional, impulsive and involuntary laughter is a genuine expression of amusement and joy and is a reaction to playing and joking around; it shows up in the smiles of a child or during roughhousing or tickling.
This display of amusement is called Duchenne laughter, after scholar Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne, who first described it in the midth century.
Conversely, non-Duchenne laughter is a studied and not very emotional imitation of spontaneous laughter. People employ it as a voluntary social strategy—for example, when their smiles and laughter punctuate ordinary conversations, even when those chats are not particularly funny. Facial expressions and the neural pathways that control them differ between the two kinds of laughter, the authors say.
Duchenne laughter arises in the brain stem and the limbic system responsible for emotions , whereas non-Duchenne laughter is controlled by the voluntary premotor areas thought to participate in planning movements of the frontal cortex. The neural mechanisms are so distinct that just one pathway or the other is affected in some forms of facial paralysis. According to Wilson and Gervais, the two forms of laughter, and the neural mechanisms behind them, evolved at different times.
Spontaneous laughter has its roots in the games of early primates and in fact has features in common with animal vocalizations. Controlled laughter may have evolved later, with the development of casual conversation, denigration and derision in social interactions.
Ultimately, the authors suggest, primate laughter was gradually co-opted and elaborated through human biological and cultural evolution in several stages. Between four and two million years ago Duchenne laughter became a medium of emotional contagion, a social glue, in long-extinct human ancestors; it promoted interactions among members of a group in periods of safety and satiation.
Laughter by group members in response to what Wilson and Gervais call protohumor—nonserious violations of social norms—was a reliable indicator of such relaxed, safe times and paved the way to playful emotions. When later ancestors acquired more sophisticated cognitive and social skills, Duchenne laughter and protohumor became the basis for humor in all its most complex facets and for new functions.
Now non-Duchenne laughter, along with its dark side, appeared: strategic, calculated, and even derisory and aggressive. The book grew out of ideas proposed by Hurley. Hurley was interested, he wrote on his website, in a contradiction.
The idea is that humor evolved from this constant process of confirmation: people derive amusement from finding discrepancies between expectations and reality when the discrepancies are harmless, and this pleasure keeps us looking for such discrepancies.
It is a sign that elevates our social status and allows us to attract reproductive partners. In other words, a joke is to the sense of humor what a cannoli loaded with fat and sugar is to the sense of taste. And because grasping the incongruities requires a store of knowledge and beliefs, shared laughter signals a commonality of worldviews, preferences and convictions, which reinforces social ties and the sense of belonging to the same group.
As Hurly told psychologist Jarrett in , the theory goes beyond predicting what makes people laugh. And yet, as Greengross noted in a review of Inside Jokes, even this theory is incomplete. Other questions remain. For instance, how can the sometimes opposite functions of humor, such as promoting social bonding and excluding others with derision, be reconciled? And when laughter enhances feelings of social connectedness, is that effect a fundamental function of the laughter or a mere by-product of some other primary role much as eating with people has undeniable social value even though eating is primarily motivated by the need for nourishment?
There is much evidence for a fundamental function. Robert Provine of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, showed in Current Directions in Psychological Science, for example, that individuals laugh 30 times more in the company of others than they do alone. In his research, he and his students surreptitiously observed spontaneous laughter as people went about their business in settings ranging from the student union to shopping malls.
Moreover, humor does not always make us laugh. In one view, knowing how to be funny is a sign of a healthy brain and of good genes, and consequently it attracts partners.
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