Today, research was published on how people react to different types of laughter. In animals, laughter is just the response to tickling. In humans, however, laughter has much more complex meanings socially. The study analyzed tickling laughter, mocking laughter, and joyous laughter. They found that the brain reacted in ways to analyze the more complex social meanings of the mocking and joyous laughter than it did to the tickling laughter. Because that laughter is more complex acoustically, a different part of the brain analyzed the sound of the laughter acoustically much more thoroughly than it did with the other two.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130508172133.htm
I think this is so cool! To think that we have the technology to actually see how our brain responds to different things like this just amazes me. One theme that I found was the theme of curiosity. How does someone come up with the idea to study this? Someone must be really curious about laughter and the social effects of different types.
I’ve never really put much thought into laughter and how it has different meanings, but I definitely know what it’s talking about. Most of the time I just analyze it without much thought. Now I just associate different laughs with different things. It makes a lot of sense that more depth would go into the understanding of social laughter than the laugh of someone being tickled.
ReplyDeleteI have an NOS theme which is role of skepticism because in an article I read the researchers still were not completely sure how their subjects would react to genuine laughter. They questioned this because they recorded actors laughing who were instructed to laugh a certain way. So what they were playing for their subjects may not have been completely genuine.
ReplyDeletehere is the article http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112842007/brain-networks-perceive-different-laughter-050913/
ReplyDelete