The Neuroscience of Contagious Laughter
This post has been viewed 4,502 times.
Long before modern brain imaging technologies illuminated the neurophysiological mechanisms that make laughter contagious, William James (1842-1910) observed, “We don’t laugh because we’re happy, we’re happy because we laugh.” Although philosophers and psychologists have speculated about the role that laughter plays in social bonding for eons, until recently, there was relatively little empirical evidence that explained why laughter is contagious for most of us. Or, the neural reasons some people are immune to the laughter contagion. That said, in the past few months, researchers have finally pinpointed some neuroscience-based answers to the million-dollar question: “Why is laughter contagious?”
Recently, two separate clinical studies investigated the brain mechanisms of genuine, contagious social laughter from different angles. The first study, “Social Laughter Triggers Endogenous Opioid Release in Humans,” was published May 28, 2017, in the Journal of Neuroscience. The second study, “Reduced Laughter Contagion in Boys at Risk for Psychopathy,” was published online September 28, 2017, in the journal Current Biology.
Tags:
