{"id":6996,"date":"2016-04-21T08:15:47","date_gmt":"2016-04-21T06:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.embl.de\/?p=6996"},"modified":"2024-03-25T10:28:53","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T09:28:53","slug":"1604-sophie-scott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/events\/1604-sophie-scott\/","title":{"rendered":"Branches: Laughing matter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">By Laura Howes, Editor, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scienceinschool.org\/\">Science in School<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>How do you get an auditorium full of scientists to laugh? For Sophie Scott, the answer is simple: you play audio clips of people laughing uncontrollably and the reaction is infectious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But for Scott, this is more that just a useful way to break the ice with her audience. She works on the neuroscience of laughter at University College London (UCL) in the UK. Her research looks at the physical process of laughing and also its social role and how we use laughter to mediate relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Laughter isn\u2019t just funny, she says, it\u2019s also incredibly useful. Imagine you have travelled to a foreign country where you don\u2019t know the language or the culture; how do you communicate? It turns out that there are very few universal expressions and exclamations. Most people will recognise an expression of fear or distaste, but joy? Pleasure? One positive emotion that Scott has&nbsp;shown to be universal is laughter. On the savannah of Africa, during Scott\u2019s research, when a hunter feels silly or embarrassed he begins to laugh and soon he and Scott\u2019s research team are laughing together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Infectious interactions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Back in the auditorium, Scott uses audio clips to get us laughing. It is not just the audio track that\u2019s making us laugh, she says, but also the reactions of our neighbours and colleagues sitting next to us. We might think that we laugh at jokes, but we laugh mainly to interact with other people \u2013 a trait that extends across mammalian species, from primates to rats, for whom laughter is associated with play and tickling, just like with us. \u201cIt\u2019s a very social behaviour,\u201d Scott explains. We interact with people by talking, which is a solely human skill, but then we use a very old mammalian behaviour, laughter, to show people that we like them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"vf-blockquote\"><p>Brain activation still responds to \u2018fake\u2019 laughter<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>If you ever hear someone laugh, says Scott, your brain activates neurons and gets ready to laugh as well, because we are primed to join in. There are two types of laughter \u2013 the truly involuntary laughter during which you can hardly breathe, and a \u2018fake\u2019 kind used as a social lubricant \u2013 and Scott has shown that the brain activation still responds to \u2018fake\u2019 laughter. This is true even though the two types have different physical and neurological signals and we can tell the difference between the two. Scott\u2019s research has shown not only that both types of laughter trigger neurons prompting us to join in, but also that \u2018fake\u2019 laughter prompts our brains to try and understand why the person is laughing and how we should respond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So laughter is a social tool that we use to convey different emotions, to bond with people and to signify that we are not a threat. And, says Scott, although we can tell the difference between \u2018fake\u2019 and \u2018real\u2019 laughter, the \u2018fake\u2019 laughter is still useful for these social roles. Scott recalls an incident she recently saw on the train to illustrate her point. Two men sat down at a table on the train, joining a woman who was working. The woman got up to move away, but as she was explaining why (she said she didn\u2019t like the smell of the men\u2019s coffee), she laughed and so made them laugh as well. This, says Scott, was the perfect way to defuse the situation and make sure that she didn\u2019t offend the two men. Yet, says Scott, she is sure that if she had asked any of the people involved, they wouldn\u2019t have remembered the laughter at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Learning from laughter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>According to Scott, we all underestimate how much we laugh even though we use laughter every day to promote bonding and de-escalate confrontations and negative emotions. For those of us who talk about liking people who make us laugh, Scott has a revealing takeaway message. Rather than liking people because they make us laugh, perhaps we laugh with them because we already like them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Understanding the behavioural and neurobiological bases of laughter, says Scott, means more than thinking about jokes. It could provide a vital link between human language, relationships and emotional states. So don\u2019t just ask for someone with a good sense of humour when writing your dating profile; pay attention to see if you and your date enjoy laughing together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Neuroscientist and comedian Sophie Scott explains the complexity and social importance of laughter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":6997,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17593],"tags":[67,60],"embl_taxonomy":[],"class_list":["post-6996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","category-people-perspectives","tag-neurobiology","tag-science-and-society"],"acf":{"article_intro":"<p>Following her EMBL Science and Society Forum lecture, neuroscientist and stand-up comic Sophie Scott explains the complexity and social importance of laughter<\/p>\n","related_links":[{"link_description":"EMBL Forum on Science and Society","link_url":"http:\/\/www.embl.de\/aboutus\/science_society\/forum\/index.html"}],"article_sources":[{"source_description":"<p>This article first appeared in issue 34 of <em>Science in School<\/em>, the European journal for science teachers<\/p>\n","source_link_url":"http:\/\/www.scienceinschool.org\/content\/learning-laughter"}],"vf_locked":false,"featured":false,"color":"#007B53"},"embl_taxonomy_terms":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Branches: Laughing matter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Neuroscientist and stand-up comic Sophie Scott explains the complexity and social importance of laughter to Laura Howes (Editor, Science in School)\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/events\/1604-sophie-scott\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Branches: Laughing matter\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Neuroscientist and stand-up comic Sophie Scott explains the complexity and social importance of laughter to Laura Howes (Editor, Science in School)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/events\/1604-sophie-scott\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"EMBL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/embl.org\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-04-21T06:15:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-03-25T09:28:53+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/1604-sophie_scott-ib.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"620\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"425\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Guest author(s)\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@embl\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@embl\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Guest author(s)\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"NewsArticle\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/events\/1604-sophie-scott\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/events\/1604-sophie-scott\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Guest author(s)\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/#\/schema\/person\/b4d9366b2ebe691c4015c64c3619205b\"},\"headline\":\"Branches: Laughing matter\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-04-21T06:15:47+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-03-25T09:28:53+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/events\/1604-sophie-scott\/\"},\"wordCount\":741,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/events\/1604-sophie-scott\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.embl.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/1604-sophie_scott-ib.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"neurobiology\",\"science and society\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Events\",\"People &amp; 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