We have known for a while that rats laugh when the are tickled, and some lovely new research has shown that this is associated with activity in trunk-related somatosensory cortex (the part of the brain that processes the sensation of the body being touched). This response is seen when rats are tickled and then they play. However when the rats are stressed out – just like us – they are less likely to laugh.
This kind of social and emotional modulation of when and why we laugh is very interesting – as comedians well know, humans need to feel relatively safe and unexposed in order to laugh – we laugh when we feel happy and comfortable. There are also interesting individual differences in this – we know from the rat literature that rats who are tickled more when they are babies laugh more when they are tickled as adults. We also know that rats that laugh more, are more optimistic in their outlook (which translates into lever presses, because, rats). We are getting more and more interested in these individual differences in laughter, and we’ve been doing some studies with people who are depressed, people who have autism, and teenagers with conduct disorders to see how they process laughter. This is all still work in progress, but it’s looking very interesting. To help this work, we are also developing a questionnaire about how people feel about laughter, to see if (as with crying) there are interesting and important individual differences. We have been going through the normal process of questionnaire development, which involves trying out a lot of different statements and questions about laughter, and asking people to say whether agree or disagree with these. Along the way we refine and develop the questions to try and get rid of those statements which are uninformative – for examples, everyone agrees or disagrees, or responses are really noisy. As an example, I find I laugh when I am in pain, and I sometimes find other people who mention this. However, when we include ‘I laugh when I am in pain’ as a statement, it is not strongly or clearly associated with the ways people agree/disagree with other statements about laughter, so it looks like ‘laughing in pain’ may not relate to other ways people view laughter (though it’s still an interesting question, and it’s still in at the moment). We seek to include questions to which answers seem to vary in a meaningful way across people – and to identify larger patterns, or factors, of how this variance is structured across the population. We are nearing the end of this process, and thus far three main factors seem to be falling out – I can’t say exactly what they are right now, as I don’t want to bias responses, but they don’t correspond exactly to what we expected, which is very interesting! - Sophie
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