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- Three human behavior patterns, laughter,
weeping and yawning, are discussed. Despite
differing with respect to evolutionary age,
emotional loading, and semantics, all the three
can be regarded as displacement activities and
social releasers. All the three are inhibited
under normal conditions. When disinhibited, they
disrupt speech and inhibit action. It is
suggested that their primary common function in
early humans was temporary inhibition of speech
and action. This was necessary, firstly, because
of the informational shock resulting from the
emergence of language, and secondly, because
language automatically generated culture as a
system of norms and taboos. Laughter, weeping
and yawning, then, might have evolved primarily
as physiological and psychological means of
preventing stress caused by language and
culture.
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- Introduction
- This article focuses on the evolutionary and
cultural aspects of three stereotypic human
displays: laughter, weeping, and yawning. They
have received strikingly different amounts of
attention. While laughter has always been in the
foreground, weeping was far behind, and yawning
was almost completely neglected. Although all
the three are quite mysterious, they seem to
have little in common. Their evolutionary age is
widely different, yawning being the most ancient
and the other two patterns much younger. Their
emotional component ranges from very high in
weeping to zero in yawning. Their semantics
appears to be very dissimilar since laughter and
weeping are regarded as opposites and yawning as
neutral. Finally, their functions in modern
society are different: laughter is extremely
social, weeping mostly individual, and yawning
plainly anti-social. However, as we will try to
demonstrate, they may prove by far more similar
than is traditionally believed.
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- Laughter: biological and cultural
origins
- We will begin with laughter and its origins.
It has been claimed that before apes have been
taught to use sign language they are merely
playful but humorless (McGhee
1979). As our observations on chimpanzees
seem to demonstrate, captivity per se may give
rise to rudimentary practical humor since
playful violation of a prohibition in a way
strikingly similar to certain archaic forms of
festive reverse behavior in humans, known as
"symbolic inversion" (Babcock 1978), is
accompanied by facial expression obviously
suggestive of pleasure (Butovskaya and Kozintsev
1996). We have described these forms of ape
behavior as "presymbolic inversion" (Kozintsev
and Butovskaya 1994).
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- It is beyond doubt, however, that the
ability to sign automatically generates
full-fledged humor based on the production of
incongruities (McGhee 1979). The question is,
why? One explanation is that playing with
incongruity is only possible after symbolic
communication has been mastered (McGhee 1979).
But possible does not mean necessary. Why should
intellectual play be necessary for anyone except
intellectuals?
- Although dozens of theorists have tried to
explain the meaning of laughter and humor, these
phenomena remain enigmatic (see Keith-Spiegel
1972, McGhee 1979, Raskin 1985, and Morreall
1987, for reviews). We can probably trace their
history back to the archaic festive rites where
cultural norms were reversed. However little we
know about early forms of symbolic inversion, it
is quite evident that their meaning extended far
beyond the notion of intellectual play. H.
Schurtz described these rites as safety valves
(Ventilsitten), outlets for the release of
subconscious collective discontent resulting
from the assimilation of cultural norms and
taboos. Sometimes they are seen as an antidote
to tedium. Perhaps one of their objectives was
to demonstrate the way things should not be and
thus to uphold social order by contrasting it
with symbolic mythological chaos (Stanner 1960,
Leach 1961, Turner 1974, 1978, Babcock 1978,
Abramyan 1983).
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- At the individual level, reverse behavior
was practiced by ritual clowns or similarly
marginal persons whose social role in archaic
societies was highly contradictory since they
were both contemptible fun-makers and awesome
spiritual beings surrounded by taboos (Willeford
1969, Makarius 1970). Reverse behavior was
modeled by the trickster myths which, like the
reversal rites, were powerful laughter-provoking
stimuli and may be viewed as the deepest
cultural roots of humor (Radin et al. 1956;
Belmonte 1989).
- Laughter as a displacement activity
- Of all the numerous theories of laughter,
one that is especially relevant for us at
present links laughter with so-called derived,
or displacement, activities of animals. The term
refers to inadequate behavioral responses which
appear in situations of ambivalence wherever the
adequate (autochtonous) drives are in conflict
or the requisite releasing stimuli are absent.
This usually happens either during fighting or
during sexual activity (Tinbergen 1952).
Leyhausen (1973) was probably the first to
suggest that laughter is a displacement activity
similar to sand digging in sticklebacks,
self-licking in cats, and head scratching in
humans. Later, the idea was supported by Russell
(1987, 1996), who paralleled laughter with other
human "substitute responses" like floor pacing,
finger tapping, cold sweat, and vomiting.
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- Tinbergen (1952) believed that displacement
activities are mere substitutes and have no
motives of their own. Later, however, it was
shown that they are motivated by the same
stimuli as they would be in the normal context.
The only difference is that these stimuli are
weaker than the principal ones, so the
respective actions are inhibited under normal
conditions but become disinhibited in situations
of conflict between stronger drives,
frustration, motivational deadlock, or absence
of sensory feedback (Andrew 1956, van Iersel and
Bol 1958, Hinde 1970; McFarland 1985).
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- The disinhibition theory was used by
Porshnev (1974) who linked it with Pavlov's
ideas to hypothesize that human language was
originally a form of displacement activity that
had emerged by disinhibition and had later
itself become an inhibitor (specifically, a
means of inhibiting action in general and
aggression in particular).
- So if laughter is indeed a displacement
activity, one must, first, find its own motives,
and second, understand the reasons of its
inhibition under normal conditions. There is no
doubt that laughter is indeed strongly
suppressed most of the time. It always "waits"
for the moment to seize any opportunity and,
when disinhibited, it spontaneously breaks out
and, in turn, completely inhibits both speech
and action. This is strange, given that the
emotional component of laughter is small (Deacon
1992, 1997).
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- It is evidently not enough, then, to say
that laughter is merely an expression of
pleasure or that people laugh because humor is
associated with intellectual play (McGhee 1979),
pleasant psychological shift (Morreall 1987) or
disturbance adjustment (Russell 1987, 1996).
Moreover, certain kinds of laughter are neither
caused by humor nor pleasant (Black 1982,
Pfeifer 1994), and if they do not result from
organic disorders or direct stimulation of the
brain, it would be wrong to discard them as
"inappropriate" or "parasitic". The same applies
to the laughter of preschool children which
appears to be "silly", "groundless" or caused by
mere agitation (McGhee 1979).
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- Laughter as a social releaser
- To move a step further, one should recollect
that laughter is highly stereotypic, ritualized,
and contagious, and these features are typical
of displays which have a signal function in
animals and are known as social releasers
(Tinbergen 1959). According to Tinbergen (1952),
some displacement activities have been
ritualized and have assumed the function of
releasers. He suggested that laughter is a
releaser that has an appeasing function and has
evolved from the defense or threat display
through ritualization (Tinbergen 1959). The same
view was expressed by Lorenz (1963). Indeed,
ethological evidence suggests that laughter
derives from the relaxed open-mouth display, or
play face, which is a ritualized bite used by
nonhuman primates during quasi-aggressive play
(Bolwig 1964, van Hooff 1972). In terms of
vocalization, however, human laughter is
qualitatively different from that of the
chimpanzee (Provine and Bard 1996). Apes know
that the play face is a releaser and conceal it
when they do not want to play (Tanner and Byrne
1993). Human laughter, too, is highly social
(Chapman 1973; Provine 1996), and signals an
intention to play (Grammer and Eibl- Eibesfeldt
1990). It is contagious by itself, even in the
absense of any humor (Freedman and Perlick 1979;
Provine 1991, 1996). Also, it has been
experimentally demonstrated that humor and
laughter are social lubricants that reduce anger
and hostility (Dworkin and Efran 1967, Singer
1968, Landy and Mettee 1969).
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- But if the primary function of laughter was
to prevent aggression, why is it so rudimentary
in nonhuman primates and so highly developed in
humans? Also, why is it most expressed in young
monkeys and apes, who are not yet capable of
violence, and is known to decrease with age,
just the opposite of what might be expected if
the aggression prevention hypothesis were true?
Before attempting to answer these questions, we
will briefly address weeping and yawning, of
which much less is known.
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- Weeping
- Certain oft-cited anecdotal zoological
examples notwithstanding, weeping is uniquely
human. According to Darwin (1872:154), "a habit
like weeping must have been acquired since the
period when man branched off from the common
progenitor of the genus Homo and of the
non-weeping anthropomorphous apes." Weeping,
like laughter, appears to be a releaser since it
is very stereotypic and communicative. And, like
laughter, it disrupts speech and immobilizes
(Deacon 1992, 1997).
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- Although in modern society weeping is
believed to be contagious only in young children
(Hoffman 1977; Hatfield 1993) and is suppressed
by adults in most situations, it was evidently
much more social in the past. Collective weeping
rites have been described in Australian
aborigines, Andamanese natives, and American
Indians, and they were related not only to
funerary events but to occasions like reception
of guests or reconciliation rites where
collective weeping was regarded as an expression
of friendship and social cohesion (Mauss 1969;
Radcliffe-Brown 1933). Friederici (1907) termed
this custom "greeting with tears". In many
archaic religious traditions, collective weeping
and laughter were performed either
simultaneously or in succession since death was
associated with eating, coitus, and rebirth
(Reinach 1912, Frazer 1923, Hocart 1927,
Freidenberg 1997).
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- It has often been claimed that weeping is
adaptive because tears lubricate the eyeball and
have bactericidal properties. But again, if this
physiological mechanism is so valuable, why
don't apes need it? Before this question has
been answered we can only say that weeping in
humans should be best regarded as a displacement
activity and a social releaser.
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- Yawning
- Yawning, which is phylogenetically very much
older than laughter or weeping, also appears to
be a displacement activity (Tinbergen 1952). Its
physiological meaning has become less clear than
ever since the old idea that yawning is caused
by the deficit of oxygen and the excess of
carbon dioxide in blood was not supported by
experimental data (Provine, Tate and Geldmacher
1987). This does not mean that yawning is
physiologically useless in all vertebrates. This
only means that natural selection might have
adjusted an old display, which man had inherited
from his remote ancestors, for some new purpose.
Indeed, according to the principle formulated by
Baerends (1958), displays are evolutionarily
more conservative than their motivations.
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- Yawning is doubtless a social releaser since
it is stereotypic and contagious to such an
extent that the mere mention of it makes people
yawn (Provine 1986). Yawning is certainly
associated with sleepiness, but this can not
explain its high contagiousness, because
observing a sleeping person does not induce
yawning in the observers or make them drowsy.
Paralinguistically, yawning signals not merely
sleepiness (Provine, Hamernik and Curchak 1987),
but, more generally, lack of interest. Although
we have no evidence of collective yawning rites,
yawning was doubtless less individual in the
past than it is now. Otherwise it is impossible
to explain its extreme contagiousness. As our
observations indicate, yawning in monkeys is
very collective and means that the animals are
about to cluster and fall asleep. In humans,
yawning, like laughter and weeping, is
suppressed most of the time. When disinhibited,
it disrupts speech and inhibits action.
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- Laughter, weeping, and yawning: common
function?
- So all the three expressive patterns can be
regarded as both displacement activities and
social releasers. Moreover, it turns out that
they are more similar than they appear at first
sight. Maybe they originally had a common
function? If they did, what was it? Our
hypothesis is very simple. However semantically
dissimilar laughter, weeping, and yawning may be
now, they have had a primary common function
which was precisely the same as it is at
present: to inhibit speech and action in as many
people as possible. Total incompatibility of
speech with laughter or weeping (at least
sobbing) has been well demonstrated on the brain
level (Deacon 1992, 1997). Clearly, yawning is
no less speech-inhibiting. Pleasure or relief
that can be individually derived from these
displays are epiphenomena. Each of the three
can, but none of them must, be pleasant per se.
Their primary adaptive value should be sought at
the social, not at the individual level.
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- The idea that culture is a burden is very
old. Perhaps its most ardent advocate was Freud
(1978). But then language, too, is a burden:
first, because it automatically gives rise to
culture as a system of norms and taboos imposed
on people (Porshnev 1974), and secondly, because
of the informational shock resulting from the
acquisition of a radically new system of
symbolic communication. Porshnev (1974) noted
that yawning might have provided early hominids
with a means of coping with language shock. The
same applies to laughter and weeping. In fact,
all the three are signs of refusal. According to
Freud (1959), humor is "an attitude by means of
which a person refuses to suffer", and the ego
"refuses to be distressed by the provocations of
reality." The definition is much too narrow, of
course, since any reality assimilation is
tiresome at the least (McGhee 1979). Humor,
then, is a playful refusal to deal with reality
in a culturally appropriate way.
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- In the same line, weeping means a refusal to
counter reality because it is too sad or too
touching (Plessner 1970), and yawning a refusal
to be interested in it. And, because
assimilating symbolic information, reacting to
the provocations of new cultural reality in an
adequate way, and even merely being interested
apparently required more mental strength and
persistence than might be expected from
creatures who had just descended from the apes
(known to be highly negativistic), refusal, if
only a temporary and imaginary one, to do so
meant reversal and, at the same time, liberation
(Mindess 1971). Perhaps the rudimentary
"laughter" of young monkeys and apes, too, is
not so much a means of preventing aggression, as
a sign of liberation, and an invitation to join
in getting liberated, from the necessity to
comply with social norms. This is something that
most adult animals either do not need or cannot
afford. In this respect, as in many other
respects as well, man is neotenic since he
retains this juvenile feature, the capacity to
laugh, throughout the lifespan.
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- For apes, as for other mammals, the
principal means of preventing stress is sleep.
Another means, which is important also for
maintaining social integration in primate
groups, is grooming. It has been hypothesized
that in the course of human evolution, social
grooming was replaced by language, which had
become the principal factor of within-group
integration (Dunbar 1993). If so, language had
not merely introduced a new stress factor but
had also deprived humans of an old
stress-reducing device. In this situation, sleep
would evidenty not suffice, so new means had to
be urgently developed and/or old ones had to be
adjusted ad hoc.
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- Conclusions
- It appears likely, then, that laughter,
weeping, and yawning were psychological defense
means that protected early humans from stress
caused by language and culture, prevented
neuroses, and at the same time, being
presymbolic, ensured social cohesion on a deeper
level than language could do. Paradoxically,
laughter and weeping are often regarded as
atavisms (which is to some extent correct), and
yet they are almost uniquely human. It is
precisely at the early stage of human history
that they were especially adaptive. No wonder
apes begin to joke as soon as they acquire the
ability to sign; they do not begin to weep
evidently for physiological reasons. We do not
know how often the symbolizing apes yawn or how
much they sleep. In humans, humor is indeed
known to reduce stress (Dixon 1980; Lefcourt and
Martin 1986), and it can be seen as an
alternative to neurosis (Elitzur 1990). People
who are susceptible to boredom appreciate humor
more (Ruch 1988). Although the stress-reducing
function of weeping and yawning has not yet been
experimentally demonstrated, there is little
doubt that it does, or at least did, exist.
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- However, because all the three patterns are
manifestations of negativism and make people
mute, weak, and inactive, they can only be used
during relatively short and sharply delineated
breaks between normal activities, otherwise
culture would have been endangered. This
explains why they are real displacement
activities that are inhibited most of the time.
Yet, unlike displacement activities in animals,
they are strongly motivated and, when
disinhibited, they violently break out and begin
to function as social releasers.
- Laughter, weeping and yawning are not the
only patterns that interfere with speech.
Respiratory adjustments such as coughing,
sneezing, and nose blowing are speech-inhibiting
and are sometimes used as paralinguistic means.
However, they are by far less contagious (in a
psychological, not medical, sense) and, although
sometimes being similar to displacement
activities, they can hardly be described as
social releasers.
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