Much has been made of the toxic effects on marriages of negative emotions: For a summary of Gottman and Levenson’s research, see Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
Here Gottman and colleagues are starting to show: Gottman and R. W. Levenson, “Rebound from Marital Conflict and Divorce Prediction,” Family Processes 38 (1999): 287–92, and “The Timing of Divorce: Predicting When a Couple Will Divorce over a Fourteen-Year Period,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (2001): 737–45; Gottman et al., “Predicting Marital Happiness and Stability from Newlywed Interactions,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 60, no. 1 (1998): 5–22.
Physical attractiveness has been shown to have a host of benefits: K. K. Dion, E. Berscheid, and E. Walster, “What Is a Beautiful Good,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24 (1972): 285–90.
For example, Silvan Tomkins: Tomkins, “Affect Theory.”
For Freud, many pleasurable experiences: Sigmund. Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 5, trans. J. Strachey et al., (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975); Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (London: Hogarth Press, 1937).
Terror management theory, a widely influential theory in social psychology: J. Greenberg et al., “Evidence for Terror Management Theory II: The Effects of Mortality Salience on Reactions to Those Who Threaten or Bolster the Cultural Worldview,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58 (1990): 308–18.
It is assumed in the study of parent-child attachment: M. Mikulincer and P. R. Shaver, “The Attachment Behavioral System in Adulthood: Activation, Psychodynamics, and Interpersonal Processes,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 35, ed. Mark P. Zanna (New York: Academic Press, 2003), 53–152.
The Woody Allen hypothesis has deep roots in Judeo-Christian thought about original sin and the fall from grace: One of the best books I’ve read on happiness is historian Darrin McMahin’s broad survey of how the concept and practice of happiness have changed over 2,500 years of Western culture. McMahin, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2006).
This is a standard evolutionary principle: R. J. Andrew, “The Origin and Evolution of the Calls and Facial Expressions of the Primates,” Behavior 20 (1963): 1–109. P. Rozin, “Towards a Psychology of Food and Eating: From Motivation to Module to Model to Marker, Morality, Meaning, and Metaphor,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 5 (1996): 18–24.
downplay any sudden abundance in resources through modesty and generosity: Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest.
LAUGHTER
Jared Diamond argues: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steeclass="underline" The Fate of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
It is a point that evolutionists Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson: Gervais and Wilson, “The Evolution and Functions of Laughter: A Synthetic Approach,” Review of Quarterly Biology 80 (2006): 395–430.
What separates mammals from reptiles are the raw materials of laughter: MacLean was one of the first to make this point in explaining how mammals’ brains differ from those of reptiles. Paul D. MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution (New York: Plenum, 1990).
Yet the laughter of chimps and apes is more tightly linked to inhalation and exhalation patterns: Robert Provine has written a wonderful book on laughter. Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Viking, 2000).
Boyle’s descriptions: T. C. Boyle, Drop City (New York: Penguin, 2003), various pages.
Estimates indicate that: Provine, Laughter.
Laughter is contagious: Robert Provine, “Contagious Laughter: Laughter Is a Sufficient Stimulus for Laughs and Smiles,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 30 (1992): 1–4. Provine also details some wonderful episodes of contagious laughter in Laughter.
laughter is intertwined with our breathing: Provine was the first to make this point, in Laughter.
Measures include speech rate, pitch, loudness: Klaus Scherer is to the voice in emotion what Ekman is to the face. He was the first to chart systematically how the different emotions will be expressed in difficult acoustic qualities like pitch, amplitude, and variation. K. R. Scherer, “Vocal Affect Expression: A Review and a Model for Future Research,” Psychological Bulletin 99 (1986): 143–65.
Bachorowski was the first to put laughs through this complex form of acoustic analysis: Jo-Anne Bachorowski has done for the laugh what Ekman did for the smile—provide an objective, anatomically based rationale for explaining some of the varieties of the laugh. Bachorowski and M. J. Owren, “Not All Laughs Are Alike: Voiced by Not Voiced Laughter Readily Elicits Positive Affect,” Psychological Science 12 (2001): 252–57.
In his remarkable meditation on laughter: Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Penguin, 1981).
The laughs of friends, as opposed to those of strangers: Smoski and Bachorowski, “Antiphonal Laughter between Friends and Strangers,” Cognition and Emotion 17 (2003): 327–40.
Here a remarkable discovery: Bachorowski, Smoski, and Owren, “The Acoustic Features of Human Laughter,” Journal of Acoustic Society of America 110 (2001): 1581–97.
laughter preceded language in human evolution: For analyses of the evolution of laughter, see Provine, Laughter; Gervais and Wilson, “The Evolution and Functions of Laughter.”
Recent neuroscientific data on laughter: B. Wild, F. A. Rodden, W. Grodd, and W. Ruch, “Neural Correlates of Laughter and Humor,” Brain 126, no. 10 (2002): 2121–38.
tension and ambiguity: for an excellent treatment of humor and laughter, see Michael L. Apte, Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Provine turned his astute ear to the laughter that occurs in the real world: Robert Provine, “Laughter Punctuates Speech: Linguistic, Social, and Gender Contexts of Laughter,” Ethology 95 (1993): 291–98.
the answer is cooperation: Owren and Bachorowski, “The Evolution of Emotional Expression: A ‘Selfish-Gene’ Account of Smiling and Laughter in Early Hominids and Humans, in Emotions: Current Issues and Future Directions, ed. Tracy J. Mayne and George A. Bonanno (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 151–91.
The first is contagion: Robert Provine details one of my favorite examples of contagious laughter. In a grammar school, girls in one class started laughing, and this outbreak spread throughout the school. Girls laughed for days until the school had to be closed. Notwithstanding the difficulties this contagious laughter produced for the conduct of class, these girls, Bachorowski and Owren argue, are bonding through the contagious delights of laughter.
when we hear others laugh, mirror neurons represent that expressive behavior: N. Osaka et al., “An Emotion-Based Facial Expression Word Activates Laughter Module in the Human Brain: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study,” Neuroscience Letters 340, no. 2 (2003): 127–30.
In my own research with executives: For the past fifteen years, I have videotaped executives from around the world conducting negotiations with other executives, and then coded those videotapes for different emotional displays. As reliable as the handshake to begin the negotiation and dramatic displays of anger and contempt when the tension mounts is the occurrence of laughter in the initial stages. This laughter paves the way for increased trust and more integrative bargaining, where the two parties more effectively understand and act upon their respective interests. M. W. Morris and D. Keltner “How Emotions Work: An Analysis of the Social Functions of Emotional Expression in Negotiations,” Review of Organizational Behavior 22 (2000): 1–50.