Laughter releases brain chemicals

The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humour, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect.

His results build on a long history of scientific attempts to understand a deceptively simple and universal behaviour. “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually. That’s why we got interested in it,” Dunbar said. And the findings fit well with a growing sense that laughter contributes to group bonding and may have been important in the evolution of highly social humans.

Social laughter, he suggests, relaxed and contagious, is ‘grooming at a distance,’ an activity that fosters closeness in a group the way one-on-one grooming, patting and delousing promote and maintain bonds between individual primates of all sorts. In five sets of studies in the laboratory and one field study at comedy performances, Dunbar and colleagues tested resistance to pain both before and after bouts of social laughter.

The pain came from a freezing wine sleeve slipped over a forearm, an ever tightening blood pressure cuff or an excruciating ski exercise.

Endorphin activation
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, eliminated the possibility that the pain resistance measured was the result of a general sense of well being rather than actual laughter. And, he said, they also provided a partial answer to the ageless conundrum of whether we laugh because we feel giddy, or feel giddy because we laugh. “The causal sequence is laughter triggers endorphin activation,” he said. What triggers laughter is a question that leads into a different labyrinth.

Robert R Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of ‘Laughter: A Scientific Investigation,’ said he thought the study was “a significant contribution” to a field of study that dates back 2,000 years or so. It has not always focused on the benefits of laughter.

Both Plato and Aristotle, Provine said, were concerned with the power of laughter to undermine authority. And he noted that the ancients were very aware that laughter could accompany raping and pillaging as well as a comic tale told by the hearth. Dunbar, however, was concerned with relaxed, contagious social laughter, not the tyrant’s cackle or the ‘polite titter’ of awkward conversation.

He said a classic example would be the dinner at which everyone else speaks a different language, and someone makes an apparently hilarious, but incomprehensible, comment. “Everybody falls about laughing, and you look a little puzzled for about three seconds, but really you just can’t help falling about laughing yourself.”

To test the relationship of laughter of this sort to pain resistance, he did a series of six experiments. In five, participants watched excerpts of comedy videos, neutral videos or videos meant to promote good feeling, but not laughter. Among the comedy videos were excerpts from ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘Friends’ and ‘South Park,’ as well as from performances by standup comedians like Eddie Izzard.

In the lab experiments the participants were tested before and after seeing different combinations of videos. They suffered the frozen wine sleeve or blood pressure cuff in different experiments, and were asked to say when the pain reached a point they couldn’t stand. They wore recorders during the videos so the time they spent laughing could be established. In the one real world experiment similar tests were conducted at performances of an improvisational comedy group, the Oxford Imps.

The results, when analysed, showed that laughing increased pain resistance, whereas simple good feeling, or positive affect, in a group setting, did not. Dunbar thinks that laughter may have been favoured by evolution because it helped bring human groups together, the way other activities like dancing and singing do. Those activities also produce endorphins, he said, and physical activity is important in them as well. “Laughter is an early mechanism to bond social groups,” he said. “Primates use it.”

Indeed apes are known to laugh, although in a different way than humans. They pant. “Panting is the sound of rough and tumble play,” Provine said. It becomes a “ritualisation” of the sound of play. And, in the course of the evolution of human beings, he suggests, “Pant, pant becomes ha, ha.”