Laughter – what the studies say
Laughter doesn’t sound like a subject for serious scientific study. In fact, you could say that studying laughter is a bit of a joke. It is funny, then, that laughter is fast becoming a hot topic for research.
The phrase “laughter is the best medicine” is well-known, with its origin often attributed to the Bible from the Book of Proverbs: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones”. Intuitively we know that laughter is good for us and that it makes us feel better, filling us up and lifting our spirits. But is there research evidence backing this hunch?
It was 50 years ago that an American journalist, Norman Cousins first put laughter on the public radar as a potential way of dealing with debilitating disease. He was diagnosed with a devastating connective tissue disease and given a poor prognosis. He took things into his own hands and worked closely with his doctor, believing that taking large doses of vitamin C and undertaking regular hearty laughter would be good medicine for him. Cousins wrote a book about his experience (Cousins, 1979), reporting that he experienced pain relief after laughter and was able to get comfortable rest after he had been exposed to the positive emotions produced by laughing.
Studies have since backed Cousins’ claim, with laughter elevating the pain threshold (Dunbar et al., 2012) through its effect of releasing endorphins, similar to producing a ‘runners’ high’. Endorphins are chemicals occurring naturally in the brain which work like morphine, acting as natural painkillers.
Natural or spontaneous laughter is not easy to study as it is difficult to produce on demand. Laughter which is generated on command is easier to investigate. Recently researchers have devised a ‘Laughie’ (Gonot-Schoupinsky & Garip, 2019) which is a one-minute recording on a smart phone of a person laughing for no reason. This recording is then used as a prompt for regular laughing and has been shown, over the period of one week (Sharma et al., 2022) to boost the well-being of university students. Most people taking part in this study said that they felt better or more cheerful after laughing. Laughies are a readily available and affordable way to help us laugh for longer. Once a laughie has been recorded it can be a great tool to generate a good belly-laugh whenever you feel like one.
The preliminary evidence shows that laughter has beneficial effects on physical health, mental health, and social health. It’s fun to laugh together and connections help us cope with the ups and downs of life. Since laughter produces a beneficial effect on our bodies, why not give it a go. It’s easy, it’s cheap and it’s cheerful.
Anna
References
Cousins, N. 1979 Anatomy of an illness. W.H. Norton.
Dunbar et al. 2012 Social laughter is correlated to an elevated pain threshold. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3267132/
Gonot-Schoupinsky & Garip 2019 Prescribing laughter to increase well-being in healthy adults: An exploratory mixed methods feasibility study of the Laughie. https://repository.derby.ac.uk/download/1a976f86be70627340821cbc79fe50c7537e827c77dbb464a31ec8e9e3993d8a/359012/LaughieManuscript.pdf
Sharma et al. 2022 The impact of a laughter prescription on creativity, well-being, affect, and academic efficacy in university students.