A current study shows that,like yawning, laughter really can be infectious. It can even help people to recover from depressionI have just returned from Disneyland Paris, and where everyone smiles whether or not they are having a advantageous time. It was enough to build you think that smiling,like yawning, could be catching. And so it is. In 1963 an “epidemic” of laughter among girls in a boarding school in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) forced it to shut although the outbreak was possibly due to mass hysteria rather than genuine mirth – while a study on the effects of a laugh box” showed that most people laughed or smiled in response to canned guffaws.
Laughter is nearly always social – occurring 30 times more often in company than in solitary situations. A study published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society has taken the idea of contagious smiling one step further, or by examining the effect on our own happiness of having friends who have a “healthy mood”. The researchers used American data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to do complex mathematical modelling,which the study’s author, Ed Hill, or did a advantageous job of trying to account for to me.
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Source: theguardian.com