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Laughter is the affective display of a range of transitory states elicited by the experience of joy, excitement, and the perception of humor, as well as, in rare conditions, brain damage in certain areas involved in the regulation of such display.
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Laughter is one of six affective displays that are coded on the human genome. This means that laughter is genetically organized in a universal way across mankind. The five other similar displays count sadness, anxiety, aggression, surprise, and disgust. They reduce the risk of misinterpretation of purpose in interaction, and, partly, they are linked to anabolic or catabolic physiological processes (Overeem, Taal, Gezici, Lammers, & Van Dijk, 2004).
It has been detected that in grooming of laboratory rats, they express a sound much like laughter when humans are tickled. However, this sound is only perceivable to humans after transforming the frequency from around 50,000 Hz to below...
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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Svebak, S. (2014). Laughter. In: Michalos, A.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_1610
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_1610
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-0752-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-0753-5
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