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THE MEANING OF LAUGHTER
Laughter is a series of vowel-like notes, repeated every one-fifth of a second, 15 facial muscles. People make a ‘huh-huh-huh' noise rather than ‘ho-ho-ho’ or ‘ha-ha-ha'. Young children laugh about 300 times a day, an adult only 17.
Your laugh says a lot about you. According to a study, cacklers rejoice in others' misfortunes, howlers are attention-seekers, snorters are to feelings of superiority, sniggerers are immature and insensitive, belly-laughers are trustworthy and friendly, and chucklers are kind but introspective.
Laughter really is contagious. In January 1962, an outbreak of giggling at a Tanzanian girls’ school to local villages and 14 other schools, forcing several to close. The epidemic finally ended two years later. It is believed that the brain may be programmed to respond when it hears other people’s laughter. That’s how canned laughter on TV comedy programmes .
Most laughter has nothing to with humour. One researcher examined what people said or heard before they laughed and found it was usually things like ‘Are you sure?’ or “See you later’. We laugh at the end of a sentence as a subconscious signal that we’ve finished speaking or, if someone else is speaking, that we have understood.
Some experts believe that laughter is an unconscious recognition of status - which is why people laugh at their boss’s terrible jokes. One study in a hospital found that senior staff average made 7.5 witty remarks per staff meeting, junior staff 5.5 and lowly paramedics only 0.2. The study also found that women laugh almost twice as much listening to a man as men do listening to a woman.
Men and women laugh at different things. During an online study, a researcher asked 100.000 people to various jokes on a scale of 1 to 10, according to how funny they found them. Males preferred aggressive, nasty jokes. Women, who tend to be more linguistically skilled than men, preferred wordplay.