Laughter and Crying
Introduction
I and a few other Work Experience students were tasked with performing a research task surrounding some sets of data that were gathered in 2015, we really enjoyed doing this and have loved our time at the ICN.
Happiness/Laughter & Sadness/Crying
The experiment from where we gathered our data was taken place in the science museum where various people of a range of ages and backgrounds were asked what made them laugh and/or what made them cry. The information collected told us a variety of very interesting things. Here are some of the various things that we found out:
The Impact of Gender on perception of humor
We noticed than when participants noted a particular member of their family as being able to make them laugh, that there was a generally more male members than female members. In our data at a younger stage in life when gender socialization has potentially taken less effect, the difference is much smaller, but as they grow older the gap widens, with 4.9% of participants mentioning their dad but only 1.7% of participants mentioning their mum. This reflects the results of another group's laboratory experiment on gender and humour, which found a gender bias in perception of comedic abilities.
The impact of people on emotions
From our results we can tell there is a much greater positive emotional response than negative emotional response to direct actions from our friends and family. This may be due to us being ‘social creatures’ which means we benefit from interactions with others and therefore associate positive feelings with the people closest to us. We may not have a tendency to associate negative memories with loved ones due to the frequency at which we see them and therefore selective memory may rule out these negative memories/feelings. However, as this is a self-reported measure, responses may be biased by an unwillingness to share negative personal memories involving other people, which is taboo in British society.
Crying for Communication
The highest percentage category for crying was empathy, this could suggest that participants cry as a way to empathize with the situation, with participants also claiming to cry as a response to events such as pain. From this we can see that crying may be used as a universal, non-verbal form of communication to translate the situation that the person is in, with tears indicating that a person may be in pain or in distress (be it physical or emotional).
(Keep in mind that our data set is limited to 174 responses, this could tell us that people may not be willing to share what makes them cry.)
Physical vs. Emotional Distress
From our results we can see that, in our target group, Emotional pain or distress seems to be a more prevalent cause of tears or upset compared to that of physical pain or distress. This again links to our previous elaboration of crying being a non-verbal form of communication to convey things as crying seems to have more emotional than physical roots. The majority of emotion-founded responses could suggest that crying may be used to express particular emotions due to a lack of being able to display such emotions through non-verbal means. This is likely a social response of the body, in that tears either act as a warning sign or as a literal 'cry’ for help
Our Data & Past WEX students’ data
Much like us the past WEX students wrote a blog post in regards to their data set surrounding what made people laugh, they had a sample size of 3000 compared to our 473 sets of data regarding what makes people laugh, for this reason we initially expected our conclusions to be fairly different to theirs. Despite this we found that we shared many of the same conclusions, one such conclusion was the overwhelming amount of laughter caused by the participants friends. However the past work experience students saw a much larger amount of mentions of celebrities and comedians causing their laughter whereas we did not see this as often. Another similar thing that we noticed was the utter ridiculousness of certain answers where we got the likes of “accusations of freezing parrots and other various nonsense. If you want to check out their blog post here’s the link: https://sites.google.com/site/speechskscott/SpeakingOut/whatmakesyoulaugh
Conclusion
In all we our evidence acted as a means to support the nature of crying and laughing in that they are forms of social communication. Yet we also were able to find that the social conditions of a situation may also affect a person’s mood in varying ways, with many laughing at one stimulus and many crying at the same, this tells us that crying and laughing is not completely binary and widely varies among different people. However many people also share the same stimulus for the sources of their laughter or upset. So to conclude, while we can presume the nature of laughter and crying to be for that of social communication, we can also see crossovers between the two, showing something of a similarity between the two forms of emotional communication and that, despite both crying and laughing conveying vastly different emotions the two expressions of ones emotions may be more alike than you might think.
I and a few other Work Experience students were tasked with performing a research task surrounding some sets of data that were gathered in 2015, we really enjoyed doing this and have loved our time at the ICN.
Happiness/Laughter & Sadness/Crying
The experiment from where we gathered our data was taken place in the science museum where various people of a range of ages and backgrounds were asked what made them laugh and/or what made them cry. The information collected told us a variety of very interesting things. Here are some of the various things that we found out:
The Impact of Gender on perception of humor
We noticed than when participants noted a particular member of their family as being able to make them laugh, that there was a generally more male members than female members. In our data at a younger stage in life when gender socialization has potentially taken less effect, the difference is much smaller, but as they grow older the gap widens, with 4.9% of participants mentioning their dad but only 1.7% of participants mentioning their mum. This reflects the results of another group's laboratory experiment on gender and humour, which found a gender bias in perception of comedic abilities.
The impact of people on emotions
From our results we can tell there is a much greater positive emotional response than negative emotional response to direct actions from our friends and family. This may be due to us being ‘social creatures’ which means we benefit from interactions with others and therefore associate positive feelings with the people closest to us. We may not have a tendency to associate negative memories with loved ones due to the frequency at which we see them and therefore selective memory may rule out these negative memories/feelings. However, as this is a self-reported measure, responses may be biased by an unwillingness to share negative personal memories involving other people, which is taboo in British society.
Crying for Communication
The highest percentage category for crying was empathy, this could suggest that participants cry as a way to empathize with the situation, with participants also claiming to cry as a response to events such as pain. From this we can see that crying may be used as a universal, non-verbal form of communication to translate the situation that the person is in, with tears indicating that a person may be in pain or in distress (be it physical or emotional).
(Keep in mind that our data set is limited to 174 responses, this could tell us that people may not be willing to share what makes them cry.)
Physical vs. Emotional Distress
From our results we can see that, in our target group, Emotional pain or distress seems to be a more prevalent cause of tears or upset compared to that of physical pain or distress. This again links to our previous elaboration of crying being a non-verbal form of communication to convey things as crying seems to have more emotional than physical roots. The majority of emotion-founded responses could suggest that crying may be used to express particular emotions due to a lack of being able to display such emotions through non-verbal means. This is likely a social response of the body, in that tears either act as a warning sign or as a literal 'cry’ for help
Our Data & Past WEX students’ data
Much like us the past WEX students wrote a blog post in regards to their data set surrounding what made people laugh, they had a sample size of 3000 compared to our 473 sets of data regarding what makes people laugh, for this reason we initially expected our conclusions to be fairly different to theirs. Despite this we found that we shared many of the same conclusions, one such conclusion was the overwhelming amount of laughter caused by the participants friends. However the past work experience students saw a much larger amount of mentions of celebrities and comedians causing their laughter whereas we did not see this as often. Another similar thing that we noticed was the utter ridiculousness of certain answers where we got the likes of “accusations of freezing parrots and other various nonsense. If you want to check out their blog post here’s the link: https://sites.google.com/site/speechskscott/SpeakingOut/whatmakesyoulaugh
Conclusion
In all we our evidence acted as a means to support the nature of crying and laughing in that they are forms of social communication. Yet we also were able to find that the social conditions of a situation may also affect a person’s mood in varying ways, with many laughing at one stimulus and many crying at the same, this tells us that crying and laughing is not completely binary and widely varies among different people. However many people also share the same stimulus for the sources of their laughter or upset. So to conclude, while we can presume the nature of laughter and crying to be for that of social communication, we can also see crossovers between the two, showing something of a similarity between the two forms of emotional communication and that, despite both crying and laughing conveying vastly different emotions the two expressions of ones emotions may be more alike than you might think.
Visualization of what makes people upset/cry
(this was gathered from our data set, the larger the word the more frequent it was in our data set)
Visualization of what made people happy/laugh
(this was gathered from our data set, the larger the word the more frequent it was in our data set)