Gelastic seizures (GS) are rare, short, unprovoked, and uncontrollable bouts of laughter (1,2). These attacks are often associated with other signs compatible with seizures and ictal and/or interictal abnormalities on electroencephalography (EEG) (1). GS may originate from the temporal, parietal or frontal lobes, but they predominantly originate from the hypothalamus (3). In the present study, ...

In personal accounts, humiliation is often reported as a very intense, painful, negative emotion. We report two scenario studies in which we explored two factors that may contribute to the intense character of humiliation: (1) unwanted, negative public exposure, and (2) a threat to central aspects of one's identity. Study 1 (N = 115) assessed emotional reactions to a public insult when an audie...

Gelastic (laughing) seizures are an uncommon seizure type which in most cases has an organic cerebral pathology and specifically a hypothalamic hamartoma. The interictal EEG frequently shows focal activity. This report describes a 3 1/2-year-old boy who presented with episodes of unmotivated laughter associated with other epileptic symptomatology before the age of 3 years. Prolonged ambulatory ...

It is well established that categorizing the emotional content of facial expressions may differ depending on contextual information. Whether this malleability is observed in the auditory domain and in genuine emotion expressions is poorly explored. We examined the perception of authentic laughter and crying in the context of happy, neutral and sad facial expressions. Participants rated the voca...

The insular cortex is fundamentally involved in the processing of interoceptive information. It has been postulated that the integrative monitoring of the bodily responses to environmental stimuli is crucial for the recognition and experience of emotions. Because emotional arousal is known to be closely coupled to functions of the anterior insula, we suspected laughter to be associated primaril...

Figure 1. Example of clowning. Extreme facial expression (imitation of great grandmother’s face while snoring) repeated following others’ laughter. Our revised understanding of the organization of the avian brain also provides us with an opportunity to investigate the neural basis of emotion in birds. We could also apply physiological techniques used with mammals to record autonomic responses t...

Laughter as an every-day, human-specific, affective, nonverbal vocalisation has attracted researchers from many disciplines. One consequence of the multi-disciplinarity is that the way of segmenting the acoustic signal of laughter as well as the terminology are used in a heterogeneous and partially contradictory way. This study tries to analyse the terminological variety from a phonetic perspec...

There is increasing recognition of the stress and burnout suffered by critical care workers. Physicians have a responsibility to teach learners the skills required not only to treat patients, but to cope with the demands of a stressful profession. Humor has been neglected as a strategy to help learners develop into virtuous and resilient physicians. Humor can be used to reduce stress, address f...