A good laugh herself and having others rolling around the floor talking to neuroscientist professor of cognitive psychology and stand up comic saucy scott. Scott welcome to the show its really great to have you with us so let me start of by asking why is laughter important to psychology i mean laughter hasnt been studied for a long time why are scientists getting into it now. I think theres probably 2 on sista that i think 11 on sirius that psychologists neuroscientists have got a lot more interested in positive emotions in general most of the research in psychology into emotions has focused on negative emotions and theres been a general recognition of the last 15 or so years that we need to pay more attention supposed to be emotions and i think secondly loft when you start to Pay Attention to it i see a very interesting emotion in terms of how interesting me its used by humans but also how extremely widespread he says so what we actually tried to deconstruct in detail wise laughter so peculiar and interesting lets start with gestures like gestures like nodding or finger wagging are different have different meaning for a region to region but laughter and smiles theres sort of universal arent they exactly so as far as we can see there are a subset of emotions with the express or the face of the voice which you can find anywhere in the world many things that emotions are very different from place to place but these emotions fear im going to surprise and laughter they are recognized everywhere and they seem to be used in that cool in very similar way so cultures can still be very different in how they used to their core youll find it has its very Important Role in social interactions and and of course were not the only animals that love so these same basic emotions including laughter or with emotions that we find versions of in other mammals well talk about that in a bit later but as for that in a tad talk you have pointed out lack of laughter recognition among boys with traits does that mean that people who never alas are somewhat mentally disturbed more or less. No i think its probably not that simple so i think that theres an interesting distinction to draw between. Learning to love and learning to love with other people and the things that could affect you in that so all of us all of us will have sort of been able to learn from we were by a vis but so its a behavior that appears even in deaf and blind babies even if youve never heard of seen laughter you will laugh if youre tickled by a parents. And then we learn how to use us in a more complex way and one of the things that we learn is to have to join in with love to contagiously to love when somebody else laughs even if you dont know why theyre laughing now that was what seemed to be destructed in the boys with who are at risk of psych psychopathy so the boys with conduct disorders and the boys who have the high in callous and unemotional traits they behave badly and they dont care if they hurt you and that of course we dont know what the the cause is that we dont know if. They have had different experiences that mean they have never learnt to love contagiously we also dont know if theres Something Different about those boys that mean even if there were those opportunities they did not laugh they didnt learn how to do that something is stopping them from learning so obviously we need to know more about this i have and also i know that youve used other peoples laughter to illustrate a point in one of your lectures and i mean i couldnt help but notice how strangely different peoples laughter is can get from you know your regular ha ha to just really weird noises i mean hilariously weird what do those differences depend on and why do i laugh in the way that i do. I think the 1st answer is that its actually quite complicated i think the 1st answer is that it can just be a to do with your physiology and your anatomy because when you laugh in a really helpless way if you laugh in a way thats absolutely uncontrolled you are not really shaping the sound you make that just kind of being produced by your body and in a bit like a sneeze and it makes noises when you sneeze that you perhaps wouldnt want to make the same can happen when youre laughing and so just individual idiosyncrasies of of how your articulate is work you know i mean you have one kind of laugh or another so i think that some of the some not all of whats going on that means that laughter can be very strange and very variable across people i think theres also quite good evidence of such a possibility that when you love communicative les thats actually something that is more under your control but like the speech that youre using and like the speech that youre using that can be influenced socially so i think one of the other means reasons that we can laugh differently is that we we learn to use laugh in certain communicative settings and actually that means it can be shaped like the rest of our communication sounds can be so theres more possibility i think to say the cultural variation the human sort of like practice laughter and use that as a tool like oh oh. Well i think so yes some of the sound it wasnt really bad when you put it like that but actually most of the laughs you encounter in people forget helplessly its people laughing for social you know communicative purposes but actually most of the time that the intent is good and the intent is to show someone that you you know you you know choosing you seeking to have the appearance of someone who is you know using this joyful vocalization so i think one of the things is one of these inmates love to quite complicated is a lot of laughter is very communicative and actually a lot of that laughter has got really much to do with jokes and comedy its being used to show that you agree with someone you understand someone your pub the same group as someone you like someone or some other kind of stuff that were doing we have a conversation with with people we can kind of use love to sit and yeah so can you. Persons laughter tell what kind of person she or he is in terms of psychic type for instance ive been told many times to have a either hysterical laughter or a contagious laughter oh i dont know that im hysterical in real life or maybe i am and laughter really gives it away. I think probably the what people mean when they say that often is that you have a love that they like and they want to laugh along when they hear it. So people i mean some laughter is more contagious than others and some people do love more easily than others so it works quite a lot with a chap from the us whos quite famous in the us for having a very very contagious laugh he does this kind of. Funny laugh and its a really beautiful laugh but also he laughs really easily hes a very kind of easygoing gentleman and he has a sort of joyful love this seems to reflect that personality so i think you probably cant read everybodys personality by how they love but i think sometimes when you do encounter a lot of the same succumb its true joyful way without it doesnt like someones faking it so pushing it so that its been really you know a stimulus easily without being forced to then maybe there is something you know kind of nice about whats going on there so laughter in general is easier to catch from someone you trust or that you like how come we still laugh with strangers i mean ive seen this video from berlin subway our whole car just breaks out into uncontrollable laughter session basically and it says it was just one girl cracking up or something on ourselves. Just the nominal but obviously nobody on that train knew each other and there were just laughing nonstop all them i i could keep suspicions about these videos of people laughing on trains because why would someone filming in the 1st place you know i think thats the Something Else is more stage than wed like it to be so i think that being said we do love quite a lot with strength just because were adults will do. Is used. Even very transients interactions with people sort of smooth over lumps and bumps to to make an interaction go more smoothly and its a very socially acceptable way of doing that so i remember once being on a train and a woman and 2 men came and thats another side of a woman who kind of got 4 seats all to herself and what she said was im going to move because i dont like the smell of coffee and youve got coffee which is just offensive isnt it im going to move because you guys are sat next to me and you smell and what she did was she used love really cleverly and probably even without thinking about it to go im sorry this is me im being an idiot but im a funny one coffee so very sorry about the last story about that and she laughed a lot and the men laughed a lot and what could have been just a very awkward interaction was immediately you know it was fine it was absolutely fun and i dont think anybody would necessarily realize how much said or used to make that go thats measly and they never met before theyll let me take on you know they can have this incredible transience appearance because we use it for the social Community Purposes and sometimes i think not always but sometimes a lot of what we mean by social skills kind of can incorporate doesnt have to it can incorporate using laughter that way to just see things over to just make things go slightly more comfortably so does the fact that you are more likely to live with others explain all the really irritating canned laughter in sitcoms like even if it isnt funny cant hear the laughing sound and just uncontrollably join in i think thats almost certainly whats going on so we ran a study earlier this year where we just added love to the end of jokes in the jokes the terrible jokes were deliberately quite bad jokes and they were read by a comedian who really went for a season or whats our engine sounds like a carrot a parrot and its the wrong way round was oranges sounds like a parrot a carrot sorry thats all that really bad. And what we found is you could write how funny those jokes were and people did no finding very funny and then we just added laughter into. And i want people to write jokes again and different people and they couldnt ignore the left us if any laughter into a joke it made the joke seem funny and the most fun tiniest the lowest of the funnier it made the joke so what you call ignore left its kind of sticky and its making the joke at least someone somewhere thought it was funny and it influences what you saying but well take a short break right now and when were back well continue talking to. God youre a scientist professor of psychology and stand up comic the role of. Join me every thursday on the alex im im sure ill be speaking to the world of politics or im sure. Ill see you. Well it finally happened donald trump has been impeached by the house of representatives in complete opposition to what the founders of the articles voted on along party lines it is highly unlikely the senate will vote to remove the president from office so what is the point of this entire exercise. And were back with a scot near a scientists professor of cognitive psychology and stand up comedy discussing laughter. Humor and why theyre important for human interactions and for human beings right so youre also saying that couples whole laugh together tend to last longer and have a healthy relationship i mean i agree with that the 1st thing i look in a partner is sense of humor. Do you think its because of the primal strengths of laughter as a communication tool or just because people with sense of humor like others will sense of humor. I think its because the love is a sign of the strength of that relationship because the really interesting thing about this literature is rowe is what about Robert Levinson in the us and what he does as he puts couples married couples in stressful situations and you see physiologically people get stressed out by this and what he finds is the couples who do with it with laughter exactly like you say they get less stressed immediately and they are happier in their relationship and they Stay Together flowing a bit critically it only works if they both love and i think the very interesting thing there is its a sign that if your relationship is Strong Enough and intimate enough that you can if you want to actually use love to see gether to feel Better Together that is telling you something about the relationship and he 1st find that the opposite is true so if one member of the couple doesnt join in with the other one offs thats a really bad sign and its not necessarily anything to do with humor its more that if they wanted to they would join in but they dont want to and thats actually telling you something about what the relationship is going. Well is there also any truth to the folk legend that laughter prolongs your life is it good for you biologically. I dont know i think things about love this is really enjoyable it is a treasured thing when youre with someone who really makes you laugh exactly like you say you know you can be delightful thing to be in that Persons Company and if feels wonderful and you do feel better when you. Enough and you feel more relaxed you feel less stressed and you feel you know you get a nice kind of endorphin high from laughing now does that translate into being healthier we dont know we do know that the opposite is true so you can go about Robert Levinsons because couples who are having stressful interactions the couples who deal with all the people who deal with stress by kind of just ignoring it using aggression they are more likely to have Health Problems so people who have it get angry for example or more likely to have hope problems so you know you sort of say the opposite is true not using laughter isnt particularly good for you so thats positive evidence for love or negative evidence for. So laughter it can be impossible to control and incapacitating in a way why does that happen to us i mean do it just sort of let our evolutionary guard down where we laugh because it makes us feel safe and that allows laughter to get us literally rolling on the floor its a very good question and i dont ever give you a completely good answer to it so i think one aspect of that is true we wont laugh randomly we do tend to love more when we feel safe when we feel secure so if youre building a place where you want people to laugh at a comedy club or have a low ceiling and low lying team especially seats in together several is going to squash in together and that makes audiences laugh more they laugh less of that brought a little less of a love less that theres a high ceiling less said than who spread out so feeling safe to seem to lead you to love more. And you do get this tremendous weakness as i said he would love to i dont know there isnt enough science on this so id really like to know more about this we do know that as soon as you start laughing you get the suppression of push your reflexes so the sorts of things that keep you standing up just ending up will keep you in the chair if youre sitting down those get suppressed very quickly when you start laughing see do you get floppy you try and do something with your hands when youre laughing its really hard now we dont know why that happens we dont know the how other animals are it is just us i think its one of the things thats quite nice about laughter is a slightly helpless feeling in these you say in evolutionary terms its very hard to understand how that could come about because then you really that we could hopeless if tiger came and youd be able to run away very quickly for example so it is quite interesting its an interesting you know kind of possibility that maybe the advantages of love and not that outweigh the dangers so well after physically is a series of flunk contractions right that squeezed the air out of the lungs is it yeah its lot of fun yeah but it also sounds like a kind of dangerous i mean after all it is interfering with work gridley throws as right why is laughter stronger than the last supported an active it is of our body. Series i should become one you literally die of laughter then you can have. There was a very famous case when i was a little girl in the 1970 s. Embrace and there was a Television Program called the good days and it was very popular and very funny and the following morning of a very funny episode of bait on i remember funny very funny there was a there was a news headline in all the papers a man watching the goodies had laughed so much he had dropped that and actually loathing and dying little think no that uncommon because exactly what you say put a lot of stress on your rip cage and thats where your heart is in your lungs and if youre caught if i ask you really compromised you were at more risk when you left because you can cause you know you start to cause for example a much greater pressure increase inside the rib cage. And in fact many years later the granddaughter of this man who dropped dead washington on the goodies Television Program in the seventys she collapse of the heart attack at the age of 28 well to just stop eating altogether and she was shown to have an inherited heart problem that she was saved and she got a pacemaker and shes ok but its almost certainly what her grandfather had so youd always had a weak heart and it was the last thing that heart that actually you know stress is not so much that he died he just stopped beating now rather beautifully. Saying that it was horrible that he died but actually you know he died doing something that he truly loved he was really enjoying himself and that her last memory of him was of him laughing so you know im not saying we should drop that given we all have to die one day maybe there are worse ways of going right better laughing than crying thats for sure so probably picture of an old north sail theres always like the scene where theme elite is super nervous and hysterical and then has a fit of laughter so theres all this and man and i had to slap her to bring her back to her senses so sometimes laughter is also a. Sign of. Not of the well being right just the opposite isnt it how does that work like the nervous laugh well i think theres 2 kinds of nervous love i think quite often of his love to people trying to use laughter to deal with a stressful situation and no one else joins in and then he looks old if ever else joined and it would be fine so if someone love him to go ha ha ha im sure this is ok and no one else joins in so thats nervous laughter thats quite common i think there is a 2nd kind of nervous laughter which is associated with more serious situations which is more of a sort of shock response so ive spoken to a couple of people who were in situations where terrible things that happened like Car Accidents bad things that happened and they had become salute lee hysterical with laughter and there was like a ha ha nervous laugh it was screaming with laughter unstoppable laughter and completely inappropriate and they didnt w