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(Jan. 26) -- "Laughter is the shortest distance between two people," Victor Borge once said. That statement might actually be grounded in good science, according to a new finding that expressions of basic emotions may be similar throughout cultures.
Disa Sauter of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics conducted the study with people from Britain and the hills of northern Namibia, where participants lived without running water, electricity or formal education. They were given a short story meant to evoke a particular emotion -- for example, how somebody's relative died, which made them sad -- and then were asked to match that to either the sound of crying or laughter.
"People from both groups seemed to find the basic emotions -- anger, fear, disgust, amusement, sadness and surprise -- the most easily recognizable," team leader professor Sophie Scott said in a press release. "This suggests that these emotions -- and their vocalizations -- are similar across all human cultures."
This study provides further evidence that certain gestures and signals of emotion are hard-wired into our brains rather than acquired. Previous research studying facial expressions in blind and sighted people suggest that expressions like smiling and frowning may be innate as well. (But not all gestures are universal -- be careful making the peace sign in Italy.)
The researchers also found that tickling was strongly linked to laughter in all people, which has long been noticed as an activity common not just with humans but also apes. Charles Darwin wrote on laughter in "The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals," one of the seminal works in the study of emotion. To him, the need to vocalize positive emotions seemed to be an evolutionary adaptation for the sake of communication:
"We can see in a vague manner how the utterance of sounds of some kind would naturally become associated with a pleasurable state of mind; for throughout a large part of the animal kingdom vocal or instrumental sounds are employed either as a call or as a charm by one sex for the other," he wrote in 1872.
The new study was not all cheery. Participants were better able to identify negative emotions like weeping, which Darwin also noted was "common to all the races of mankind."
Darwin, however, wondered about the phenomenon of somebody swinging wildly between crying and laughing. He saw an evolutionary contradiction in the fact that expressions of extreme joy and pain could bleed into each other.
The answer to that question may lie not in science but in philosophy. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."
Laughing and Crying: The Universal Emotional Language
Jan 26, 2010 – 4:02 PM
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