Have you ever heard the quote “laugh and the world laughs with you?” I remember always hearing this quote and now with being in social cognition I want to see if this is really true. Can you actually laugh and the people around you will laugh with you? When looking into an article titled Contagious laughter: Laughter is a sufficient stimulus for laughs and smiles it went into a study that took 128 subjects in their undergraduate psychology classes and got them to participate in a laugh stimulus which was produced by a laugh box. These laugh boxes or laugh recorders would have different laugh provoking properties that would make the students laugh. In this study they would participate in ten consecutive times in 1 minute trials, each of these consisting of 18 second samples of laughter followed by 42 seconds of silence. In the 42 seconds of silence after the laughing was heard the students were asked to write down if they did in fact laugh and/or smile. After the tenth trial the students were then asked if the laughing then just became obnoxious. When looking at the results two of the three groups did in fact laugh in the response to the laughing stimulus produced by the laugh boxes, but over time the laughter declined. The study stated that by the end of the 10th trial only 3 out of the 128 students laughed. Some of the interesting properties of this study that I found interesting were when they tested the laugh box on the first trial with the participates most of them laughed. It was only over time that the laughing became less contagious to them. When we interact with people in every day society, we are not sitting there listening to them laugh 10 times in a row. It can be a brief conversation, hearing someone laugh in the distance, watching a TV show and there is laughter on there. When we hear someone laugh we can immediately smile or laugh because it is human nature to do so. For myself, when thinking of walking down the street or ever around campus, if I hear someone have a funny contagious laugh or are genuinely laughing at something I always find myself smiling or even laughing to myself. It is a very contagious act that we sometimes don’t even realize is contagious.
When relating laughing to social cognition, I thought this weeks article was great as we are constantly interacting with people around us. In society, if we are walking down the street and someone smiles, you instantly smile back. To some people having them smile back may brighten their day and make them feel good about themselves. Its small acts like that that do in fact make people feel better and brighten their mood. So when the saying says “laugh and the world laughs with you” remember that this is a positive message and we do need to laugh and smile a little more.
Provine, R. R. (1992). Contagious laughter: Laughter is a sufficient stimulus for laughs and smiles. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 30(1), 1-4.
Social Cognition 2018 