full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Sophie Scott: Why we should take laughter more seriously


Unscramble the Blue Letters


Good atnofroen. I'd like to talk to you about laughter and the importance of laughter as a skill. And to do so, I'm going to start by discussing some American foreign plcoiy because that's always - (Laughter) absolutely hilarious. (Laughter) Back in 1995, towards the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia, they'd been a very ill-tempered speech given by Boris Yeltsin at the UN about the involvement of the Russian Federation in NATO, and then he had a meeting with Bill Clinton, in which some of these same isuses were coming up, and it was considered to be, likely to be a bit of a row. So, what actually heeappnd when these two men came out? They gave a press cneefocnre about their summit. And can we learn anything about laughter if we watch this? (Video) Host: Good afternoon. Bill Clinton: Mr. President. (On stage) Sophie Scott: Watch Bill Clinton. (Video) Boris Yeltsin: (In Russian) Ladies and gentlemen, SS: Yeltsin - (Video) BY: (In Russian) dear jtrlunasios, SS: ... doesn't sonud very happy. (Video) BY: (In Russian) First of all, I have to say that I was coming to this meeting at the invitation of the pdieenrst of the uientd States, Bill Clinton, not with the same optimism as I am feeling right now. Interpreter: I want to say, first of all, that when I came here to the United States for this viist at the inttiivoan of the President of the United satets, Bill Clinton, I did not, at that time, have the drgeee of optimism with which I now am departing. BY: And this is all because of you - SS: (Laughter) (Video) BY: because even in all today's npsweareps, baesd on my yesterday's statement at the United naiotns, you predicted that our mneietg today would be a failure. Interpreter: And this is all due to you, because cnimog from my statement yesterday in the United Nations, and if you looked at the psres reports, one could see that what you were writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. (Laughter) SS: A big laugh. (Video) BY: And now, for the first time, I'm telling you that you have flaied. Interpreter: But now, for the first time, I can tell you that you're a disaster. (Laughter) SS: Enormous laugh. (Laughter) Helpless with the laegtuhr. (Laughter) (Video) BC: Be sure you get the right attribution there. (Laughter) SS: Boris Yeltsin now starts lnihguag. (Laughter) (Laughter) No one's able to get anything done for a while now. That tends to hppean with laughter. (Laughter) (Laughter) These guys. (Laughter) So what is laughter? Clearly, that was quite an enjoyable thing in a rather surprising seittng. Laughter, actually, is a very ittineresng behaviour. We tend to associate it with comedy and humour, but laughter is primarily a social behaviour. You're 30 times more likely to laugh with somebody else than if you're on your own. And frequently, this means your laughter happens when you're in conversation, because that tends to be what happens when you're with other people. And very often, that laughter is simply contagious laughter. You laugh just because other people are laughing. You just catch a laugh. You're much more likely to catch a laugh from someone you know than someone you don't know, and in conversations. We're still currently not laughing at jokes and humour with punchlines necessarily. We're laughing to show agreement. We're laughing to show understanding. We're laughing to show that we agree and we see where somebody's coming from. We share that experience. We laugh much more with people we know and people we feel comfortable around. We laugh - we don't laugh rather if we're fieenlg exposed or we're feeling awkward. When we're comfortable, when we can rleax, when we're with people faialmir to us, people we like, people with whom we shrae affection, we laugh even more. When we're children, we learn to laugh, and we learn to laugh primarily in play. And play is a very ianotmprt behaviour, and we frequently use laughter to indicate that we are palying. The same behaviour could simply be pure aggression (Laughter) where not for the marking of it as play. And this is done with laughter primarily. We will use laughter, not just to show that we're part of the same group of somebody - we like them, we understand them, we aerge with them. We will also use laughter to sort of show we understand that they may be trying to make us laugh; we pick up on their intentions. And we'll also use laughter to try and control situations. We'll use laughter to try and make ourselves feel better. And it only works if everybody joins in. If one person's going, "Hahahahaha," and no one else is laughing, that tends not to make anybody feel better at all. (Laughter) If everybody joins in, laughter is actually an effective way of ivpinromg the positive mood of a gruop of people. And people can use laughter because of this link, with sort of de-escalation from stress. People will use laughter to show that they're OK. "I'm angry that you've poured yellow paint all over me. I'm delighted. This is exactly how I hoped my day would go." (Laughter) clraehs Darwin, very interestingly, got a lot of sutff right about the sort of how we started to look at emotions in the study of psychology over the next 150 years after his wiirtng. He wrote about things like anegr and disgust and fear, but he also wrote a lot about laughter, and we largely ignored that. There's actually very, very little sinfiteicc research into laughter. But Charles Darwin thughot that laughter was really important, and he thought that at its heart, it was an eposrexisn of joy; it's a joyful emotion. And it's joy in play, it's joy in company, it's joy in the company of those we love. I think it's really important to think about that when we think about laughter. We also think about how that could go wrong. Because we learn to laugh. beaibs will laugh when they're tickled or somebody plays peek-a-boo with them. But it's a behaviour we can encourage. We learn what laughter means. We learn to understand laughter. And we can see that going wrong. So this is a study that I did with my colleague Essi Viding at UCL last year, where we were studying teenage boys who are at risk of psychopathy. They have conduct disorders, and they have high inputs called callous-unemotional tairts. So they're not beiavhng well, and they don't care if they hurt ppeole. And what we find, when they listen to laughter compared to control teenage boys, who are normally developing, is that behaviourally, they don't find laughter coiautgnos. They don't join in when somebody else laughs, and they don't want to join in when somebody else laughs. If we look at their brain where normally, when people hear laughter, you can see this priming response, you can see people getting ready to join in, they show a significantly reduced effect. Now, we don't know, in this cnxoett, if we're seeing this because those boys have always had a problem learning to laugh because of these conduct disorders and these callous-unemotional traits that they have, has that affected how they engage with laughter, or have they never had the opportunity to learn to laugh? Had they not been lgueahd with? Have they not been played with? Of course, we need a lot more research to look into this. There's an even more extreme condition called "gelotophobia," where people not only don't want to join in when they hear laughter, they are alcievty frightened and respond aggressively to laughter. They're the kind of person who's walking down the streets, hears laughter, think they're being laughed at and they punch that person. And you never find ghileobpoota outside of the most profound psychological disturbances. So in fact, we can see laughter and the reaction to laughter spanning a huge different qliatuy and properties of human experience, and kind of lives that we can live. It can be an irclidenby positive social tool, or it can be something that you fear depending on your experiences. So, thinking about that, can we go back to that bit of film and think about why on earth Bill Clinton was laughing. Well, from the start, he's wniachtg Boris Yeltsin like a hawk. All his anetottin is on him. And he looks like - actually, he's waiting for a reason to lgauh. And then he gets his reason, because Boris Yeltsin says his name, Bill cotlnin, and he laughs then. It's pure laugh of recognition: "Yes, ha ha ha, my name is Bill Clinton." (Laughter) Don't knock it, if it gets a laugh, it gets a laugh. So that's his reason. He's got going. And then boirs Yeltsin says the line about that you thought it would be a disaster but you're the disaster. Actually, that's a mistranslation; he used the word "failure," and it's mistranslated by the Russian-American interpreter. People have said that Bill Clinton is laughing at this mistranslation. I don't know if that's giving, but possibly he is. Most people probably didn't pick up on that. It's likely that he's now just using that as a reason both to escalate the laughter and also to reframe what is quite an insulting comment by Boris Yeltsin as a joke. He's de-escalating the situation and he's re-presenting it to us as: This guy is hilarious. (Laughter) It completely changes our perception and importantly Boris Yeltsin's perception of what's going on. Boris yltisen, "So yeah, I am killing it here." (Laughter) "This is very funny." (Laughter) And he criears on; he now gets a smile out of Yeltsin who cracks, and then he gets his laugh. Boris Yeltsin starts to laugh, and he is laughing prilairmy here through pure cngtoaoin. For a while, they're both incapacitated by the laughter, and that happens with laughter; it will stop you doing anything else for a short amount of time. And then they go back. OK, they're doing OK. So why - why was Bill Clinton laughing? Well, we've got the recognition, and then we've got the the kind of comment, the joke of rienmarfg, and that's actually really important. He is de-escalating and reframes the whole thing. The atmosphere was tsene, and he turns that into a positive situation. So he's de-escalating the stress, and he's just reframing everything as "This is great fun we're having, and this is just hrluiioas. This guy's so funny." He's also showing that he is quite cobfoarmtle in that situation. We don't laugh when we feel exposed or awkward. So Clinton's showing he's confident: "This is fine. You guys might have been worried about this. I know we're golden. This guy's hilarious." And that really matters to us. We learn, when we are very, very young, to use our ptarnes laughter as a way of working out whether a suaitotin is serious or not. Children of 12 months old will use their parents laughter, or their absence of laughter, to work out if an unfamiliar situation is something they should worry about. We continue doing that, so it mratets that Bill Clinton is doing this. And he's also showing that he's alfifietad with Yeltsin. He's showing that he feels affection towards him. And Yeltsin does the same thing. We don't ctcah laughs off people we don't like. We don't catch laughs off people we don't know. So actually, they're marking their bond there. And the final point that I think is really intriguing is Bill Clinton, at no stage, makes it look like he's laughing at Boris Yeltsin. He goes to great pinas to iunlcde him. He's not going, "This guy is an idiot. Let's laugh at him." It would mean something very, very different if he did. In fact, I think generally, in American foreign policy, anybody's foreign policy, don't laugh in the face of a premier state from another country. It's probably eight-o'clock day-one of a rule. He includes him in that laughter. And this is a really important factor about laughter. Because laughter is about making and maintaining social bonds, people are very cautious about working out where they are in relation to that. And this does mean you can't just take a difficult situation and throw a squirt of laughter at it; you've got to make sure people feel included in that laughter. They're not feeling excluded or offended by that laughter. And this leads us back to perhaps a more important aspect of laughter. It's an important social skill that we leran to do. We learn about the soaicl use of laughter throughout our entire early adult life, and it's probably one of the more important social skills that we acquire. And we should probably take this a lot more seriously. We should think about the things that can affect our laughter. We can think about the things that we could do to encourage our understanding of our laughter. And perhaps the takeaway messgae is take laughter seriously. Think about your laughter. Don't uvarednule or trivialise your laughter. It matters. It matters a lot. It can sound like friendship. It can sometimes sound a lot like love. Thank you. (Applause)

Open Cloze


Good _________. I'd like to talk to you about laughter and the importance of laughter as a skill. And to do so, I'm going to start by discussing some American foreign ______ because that's always - (Laughter) absolutely hilarious. (Laughter) Back in 1995, towards the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia, they'd been a very ill-tempered speech given by Boris Yeltsin at the UN about the involvement of the Russian Federation in NATO, and then he had a meeting with Bill Clinton, in which some of these same ______ were coming up, and it was considered to be, likely to be a bit of a row. So, what actually ________ when these two men came out? They gave a press __________ about their summit. And can we learn anything about laughter if we watch this? (Video) Host: Good afternoon. Bill Clinton: Mr. President. (On stage) Sophie Scott: Watch Bill Clinton. (Video) Boris Yeltsin: (In Russian) Ladies and gentlemen, SS: Yeltsin - (Video) BY: (In Russian) dear ___________, SS: ... doesn't _____ very happy. (Video) BY: (In Russian) First of all, I have to say that I was coming to this meeting at the invitation of the _________ of the ______ States, Bill Clinton, not with the same optimism as I am feeling right now. Interpreter: I want to say, first of all, that when I came here to the United States for this _____ at the __________ of the President of the United ______, Bill Clinton, I did not, at that time, have the ______ of optimism with which I now am departing. BY: And this is all because of you - SS: (Laughter) (Video) BY: because even in all today's __________, _____ on my yesterday's statement at the United _______, you predicted that our _______ today would be a failure. Interpreter: And this is all due to you, because ______ from my statement yesterday in the United Nations, and if you looked at the _____ reports, one could see that what you were writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. (Laughter) SS: A big laugh. (Video) BY: And now, for the first time, I'm telling you that you have ______. Interpreter: But now, for the first time, I can tell you that you're a disaster. (Laughter) SS: Enormous laugh. (Laughter) Helpless with the ________. (Laughter) (Video) BC: Be sure you get the right attribution there. (Laughter) SS: Boris Yeltsin now starts ________. (Laughter) (Laughter) No one's able to get anything done for a while now. That tends to ______ with laughter. (Laughter) (Laughter) These guys. (Laughter) So what is laughter? Clearly, that was quite an enjoyable thing in a rather surprising _______. Laughter, actually, is a very ___________ behaviour. We tend to associate it with comedy and humour, but laughter is primarily a social behaviour. You're 30 times more likely to laugh with somebody else than if you're on your own. And frequently, this means your laughter happens when you're in conversation, because that tends to be what happens when you're with other people. And very often, that laughter is simply contagious laughter. You laugh just because other people are laughing. You just catch a laugh. You're much more likely to catch a laugh from someone you know than someone you don't know, and in conversations. We're still currently not laughing at jokes and humour with punchlines necessarily. We're laughing to show agreement. We're laughing to show understanding. We're laughing to show that we agree and we see where somebody's coming from. We share that experience. We laugh much more with people we know and people we feel comfortable around. We laugh - we don't laugh rather if we're _______ exposed or we're feeling awkward. When we're comfortable, when we can _____, when we're with people ________ to us, people we like, people with whom we _____ affection, we laugh even more. When we're children, we learn to laugh, and we learn to laugh primarily in play. And play is a very _________ behaviour, and we frequently use laughter to indicate that we are _______. The same behaviour could simply be pure aggression (Laughter) where not for the marking of it as play. And this is done with laughter primarily. We will use laughter, not just to show that we're part of the same group of somebody - we like them, we understand them, we _____ with them. We will also use laughter to sort of show we understand that they may be trying to make us laugh; we pick up on their intentions. And we'll also use laughter to try and control situations. We'll use laughter to try and make ourselves feel better. And it only works if everybody joins in. If one person's going, "Hahahahaha," and no one else is laughing, that tends not to make anybody feel better at all. (Laughter) If everybody joins in, laughter is actually an effective way of _________ the positive mood of a _____ of people. And people can use laughter because of this link, with sort of de-escalation from stress. People will use laughter to show that they're OK. "I'm angry that you've poured yellow paint all over me. I'm delighted. This is exactly how I hoped my day would go." (Laughter) _______ Darwin, very interestingly, got a lot of _____ right about the sort of how we started to look at emotions in the study of psychology over the next 150 years after his _______. He wrote about things like _____ and disgust and fear, but he also wrote a lot about laughter, and we largely ignored that. There's actually very, very little __________ research into laughter. But Charles Darwin _______ that laughter was really important, and he thought that at its heart, it was an __________ of joy; it's a joyful emotion. And it's joy in play, it's joy in company, it's joy in the company of those we love. I think it's really important to think about that when we think about laughter. We also think about how that could go wrong. Because we learn to laugh. ______ will laugh when they're tickled or somebody plays peek-a-boo with them. But it's a behaviour we can encourage. We learn what laughter means. We learn to understand laughter. And we can see that going wrong. So this is a study that I did with my colleague Essi Viding at UCL last year, where we were studying teenage boys who are at risk of psychopathy. They have conduct disorders, and they have high inputs called callous-unemotional ______. So they're not ________ well, and they don't care if they hurt ______. And what we find, when they listen to laughter compared to control teenage boys, who are normally developing, is that behaviourally, they don't find laughter __________. They don't join in when somebody else laughs, and they don't want to join in when somebody else laughs. If we look at their brain where normally, when people hear laughter, you can see this priming response, you can see people getting ready to join in, they show a significantly reduced effect. Now, we don't know, in this _______, if we're seeing this because those boys have always had a problem learning to laugh because of these conduct disorders and these callous-unemotional traits that they have, has that affected how they engage with laughter, or have they never had the opportunity to learn to laugh? Had they not been _______ with? Have they not been played with? Of course, we need a lot more research to look into this. There's an even more extreme condition called "gelotophobia," where people not only don't want to join in when they hear laughter, they are ________ frightened and respond aggressively to laughter. They're the kind of person who's walking down the streets, hears laughter, think they're being laughed at and they punch that person. And you never find ____________ outside of the most profound psychological disturbances. So in fact, we can see laughter and the reaction to laughter spanning a huge different _______ and properties of human experience, and kind of lives that we can live. It can be an __________ positive social tool, or it can be something that you fear depending on your experiences. So, thinking about that, can we go back to that bit of film and think about why on earth Bill Clinton was laughing. Well, from the start, he's ________ Boris Yeltsin like a hawk. All his _________ is on him. And he looks like - actually, he's waiting for a reason to _____. And then he gets his reason, because Boris Yeltsin says his name, Bill _______, and he laughs then. It's pure laugh of recognition: "Yes, ha ha ha, my name is Bill Clinton." (Laughter) Don't knock it, if it gets a laugh, it gets a laugh. So that's his reason. He's got going. And then _____ Yeltsin says the line about that you thought it would be a disaster but you're the disaster. Actually, that's a mistranslation; he used the word "failure," and it's mistranslated by the Russian-American interpreter. People have said that Bill Clinton is laughing at this mistranslation. I don't know if that's giving, but possibly he is. Most people probably didn't pick up on that. It's likely that he's now just using that as a reason both to escalate the laughter and also to reframe what is quite an insulting comment by Boris Yeltsin as a joke. He's de-escalating the situation and he's re-presenting it to us as: This guy is hilarious. (Laughter) It completely changes our perception and importantly Boris Yeltsin's perception of what's going on. Boris _______, "So yeah, I am killing it here." (Laughter) "This is very funny." (Laughter) And he _______ on; he now gets a smile out of Yeltsin who cracks, and then he gets his laugh. Boris Yeltsin starts to laugh, and he is laughing _________ here through pure _________. For a while, they're both incapacitated by the laughter, and that happens with laughter; it will stop you doing anything else for a short amount of time. And then they go back. OK, they're doing OK. So why - why was Bill Clinton laughing? Well, we've got the recognition, and then we've got the the kind of comment, the joke of _________, and that's actually really important. He is de-escalating and reframes the whole thing. The atmosphere was _____, and he turns that into a positive situation. So he's de-escalating the stress, and he's just reframing everything as "This is great fun we're having, and this is just _________. This guy's so funny." He's also showing that he is quite ___________ in that situation. We don't laugh when we feel exposed or awkward. So Clinton's showing he's confident: "This is fine. You guys might have been worried about this. I know we're golden. This guy's hilarious." And that really matters to us. We learn, when we are very, very young, to use our _______ laughter as a way of working out whether a _________ is serious or not. Children of 12 months old will use their parents laughter, or their absence of laughter, to work out if an unfamiliar situation is something they should worry about. We continue doing that, so it _______ that Bill Clinton is doing this. And he's also showing that he's __________ with Yeltsin. He's showing that he feels affection towards him. And Yeltsin does the same thing. We don't _____ laughs off people we don't like. We don't catch laughs off people we don't know. So actually, they're marking their bond there. And the final point that I think is really intriguing is Bill Clinton, at no stage, makes it look like he's laughing at Boris Yeltsin. He goes to great _____ to _______ him. He's not going, "This guy is an idiot. Let's laugh at him." It would mean something very, very different if he did. In fact, I think generally, in American foreign policy, anybody's foreign policy, don't laugh in the face of a premier state from another country. It's probably eight-o'clock day-one of a rule. He includes him in that laughter. And this is a really important factor about laughter. Because laughter is about making and maintaining social bonds, people are very cautious about working out where they are in relation to that. And this does mean you can't just take a difficult situation and throw a squirt of laughter at it; you've got to make sure people feel included in that laughter. They're not feeling excluded or offended by that laughter. And this leads us back to perhaps a more important aspect of laughter. It's an important social skill that we _____ to do. We learn about the ______ use of laughter throughout our entire early adult life, and it's probably one of the more important social skills that we acquire. And we should probably take this a lot more seriously. We should think about the things that can affect our laughter. We can think about the things that we could do to encourage our understanding of our laughter. And perhaps the takeaway _______ is take laughter seriously. Think about your laughter. Don't __________ or trivialise your laughter. It matters. It matters a lot. It can sound like friendship. It can sometimes sound a lot like love. Thank you. (Applause)

Solution


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  2. catch
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  6. charles
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  26. gelotophobia
  27. united
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  54. yeltsin
  55. feeling
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  62. visit
  63. clinton
  64. contagious
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  68. sound
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  70. laugh
  71. situation
  72. laughter
  73. include
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  75. meeting
  76. babies

Original Text


Good afternoon. I'd like to talk to you about laughter and the importance of laughter as a skill. And to do so, I'm going to start by discussing some American foreign policy because that's always - (Laughter) absolutely hilarious. (Laughter) Back in 1995, towards the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia, they'd been a very ill-tempered speech given by Boris Yeltsin at the UN about the involvement of the Russian Federation in NATO, and then he had a meeting with Bill Clinton, in which some of these same issues were coming up, and it was considered to be, likely to be a bit of a row. So, what actually happened when these two men came out? They gave a press conference about their summit. And can we learn anything about laughter if we watch this? (Video) Host: Good afternoon. Bill Clinton: Mr. President. (On stage) Sophie Scott: Watch Bill Clinton. (Video) Boris Yeltsin: (In Russian) Ladies and gentlemen, SS: Yeltsin - (Video) BY: (In Russian) dear journalists, SS: ... doesn't sound very happy. (Video) BY: (In Russian) First of all, I have to say that I was coming to this meeting at the invitation of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, not with the same optimism as I am feeling right now. Interpreter: I want to say, first of all, that when I came here to the United States for this visit at the invitation of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, I did not, at that time, have the degree of optimism with which I now am departing. BY: And this is all because of you - SS: (Laughter) (Video) BY: because even in all today's newspapers, based on my yesterday's statement at the United Nations, you predicted that our meeting today would be a failure. Interpreter: And this is all due to you, because coming from my statement yesterday in the United Nations, and if you looked at the press reports, one could see that what you were writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. (Laughter) SS: A big laugh. (Video) BY: And now, for the first time, I'm telling you that you have failed. Interpreter: But now, for the first time, I can tell you that you're a disaster. (Laughter) SS: Enormous laugh. (Laughter) Helpless with the laughter. (Laughter) (Video) BC: Be sure you get the right attribution there. (Laughter) SS: Boris Yeltsin now starts laughing. (Laughter) (Laughter) No one's able to get anything done for a while now. That tends to happen with laughter. (Laughter) (Laughter) These guys. (Laughter) So what is laughter? Clearly, that was quite an enjoyable thing in a rather surprising setting. Laughter, actually, is a very interesting behaviour. We tend to associate it with comedy and humour, but laughter is primarily a social behaviour. You're 30 times more likely to laugh with somebody else than if you're on your own. And frequently, this means your laughter happens when you're in conversation, because that tends to be what happens when you're with other people. And very often, that laughter is simply contagious laughter. You laugh just because other people are laughing. You just catch a laugh. You're much more likely to catch a laugh from someone you know than someone you don't know, and in conversations. We're still currently not laughing at jokes and humour with punchlines necessarily. We're laughing to show agreement. We're laughing to show understanding. We're laughing to show that we agree and we see where somebody's coming from. We share that experience. We laugh much more with people we know and people we feel comfortable around. We laugh - we don't laugh rather if we're feeling exposed or we're feeling awkward. When we're comfortable, when we can relax, when we're with people familiar to us, people we like, people with whom we share affection, we laugh even more. When we're children, we learn to laugh, and we learn to laugh primarily in play. And play is a very important behaviour, and we frequently use laughter to indicate that we are playing. The same behaviour could simply be pure aggression (Laughter) where not for the marking of it as play. And this is done with laughter primarily. We will use laughter, not just to show that we're part of the same group of somebody - we like them, we understand them, we agree with them. We will also use laughter to sort of show we understand that they may be trying to make us laugh; we pick up on their intentions. And we'll also use laughter to try and control situations. We'll use laughter to try and make ourselves feel better. And it only works if everybody joins in. If one person's going, "Hahahahaha," and no one else is laughing, that tends not to make anybody feel better at all. (Laughter) If everybody joins in, laughter is actually an effective way of improving the positive mood of a group of people. And people can use laughter because of this link, with sort of de-escalation from stress. People will use laughter to show that they're OK. "I'm angry that you've poured yellow paint all over me. I'm delighted. This is exactly how I hoped my day would go." (Laughter) Charles Darwin, very interestingly, got a lot of stuff right about the sort of how we started to look at emotions in the study of psychology over the next 150 years after his writing. He wrote about things like anger and disgust and fear, but he also wrote a lot about laughter, and we largely ignored that. There's actually very, very little scientific research into laughter. But Charles Darwin thought that laughter was really important, and he thought that at its heart, it was an expression of joy; it's a joyful emotion. And it's joy in play, it's joy in company, it's joy in the company of those we love. I think it's really important to think about that when we think about laughter. We also think about how that could go wrong. Because we learn to laugh. Babies will laugh when they're tickled or somebody plays peek-a-boo with them. But it's a behaviour we can encourage. We learn what laughter means. We learn to understand laughter. And we can see that going wrong. So this is a study that I did with my colleague Essi Viding at UCL last year, where we were studying teenage boys who are at risk of psychopathy. They have conduct disorders, and they have high inputs called callous-unemotional traits. So they're not behaving well, and they don't care if they hurt people. And what we find, when they listen to laughter compared to control teenage boys, who are normally developing, is that behaviourally, they don't find laughter contagious. They don't join in when somebody else laughs, and they don't want to join in when somebody else laughs. If we look at their brain where normally, when people hear laughter, you can see this priming response, you can see people getting ready to join in, they show a significantly reduced effect. Now, we don't know, in this context, if we're seeing this because those boys have always had a problem learning to laugh because of these conduct disorders and these callous-unemotional traits that they have, has that affected how they engage with laughter, or have they never had the opportunity to learn to laugh? Had they not been laughed with? Have they not been played with? Of course, we need a lot more research to look into this. There's an even more extreme condition called "gelotophobia," where people not only don't want to join in when they hear laughter, they are actively frightened and respond aggressively to laughter. They're the kind of person who's walking down the streets, hears laughter, think they're being laughed at and they punch that person. And you never find gelotophobia outside of the most profound psychological disturbances. So in fact, we can see laughter and the reaction to laughter spanning a huge different quality and properties of human experience, and kind of lives that we can live. It can be an incredibly positive social tool, or it can be something that you fear depending on your experiences. So, thinking about that, can we go back to that bit of film and think about why on earth Bill Clinton was laughing. Well, from the start, he's watching Boris Yeltsin like a hawk. All his attention is on him. And he looks like - actually, he's waiting for a reason to laugh. And then he gets his reason, because Boris Yeltsin says his name, Bill Clinton, and he laughs then. It's pure laugh of recognition: "Yes, ha ha ha, my name is Bill Clinton." (Laughter) Don't knock it, if it gets a laugh, it gets a laugh. So that's his reason. He's got going. And then Boris Yeltsin says the line about that you thought it would be a disaster but you're the disaster. Actually, that's a mistranslation; he used the word "failure," and it's mistranslated by the Russian-American interpreter. People have said that Bill Clinton is laughing at this mistranslation. I don't know if that's giving, but possibly he is. Most people probably didn't pick up on that. It's likely that he's now just using that as a reason both to escalate the laughter and also to reframe what is quite an insulting comment by Boris Yeltsin as a joke. He's de-escalating the situation and he's re-presenting it to us as: This guy is hilarious. (Laughter) It completely changes our perception and importantly Boris Yeltsin's perception of what's going on. Boris Yeltsin, "So yeah, I am killing it here." (Laughter) "This is very funny." (Laughter) And he carries on; he now gets a smile out of Yeltsin who cracks, and then he gets his laugh. Boris Yeltsin starts to laugh, and he is laughing primarily here through pure contagion. For a while, they're both incapacitated by the laughter, and that happens with laughter; it will stop you doing anything else for a short amount of time. And then they go back. OK, they're doing OK. So why - why was Bill Clinton laughing? Well, we've got the recognition, and then we've got the the kind of comment, the joke of reframing, and that's actually really important. He is de-escalating and reframes the whole thing. The atmosphere was tense, and he turns that into a positive situation. So he's de-escalating the stress, and he's just reframing everything as "This is great fun we're having, and this is just hilarious. This guy's so funny." He's also showing that he is quite comfortable in that situation. We don't laugh when we feel exposed or awkward. So Clinton's showing he's confident: "This is fine. You guys might have been worried about this. I know we're golden. This guy's hilarious." And that really matters to us. We learn, when we are very, very young, to use our parents laughter as a way of working out whether a situation is serious or not. Children of 12 months old will use their parents laughter, or their absence of laughter, to work out if an unfamiliar situation is something they should worry about. We continue doing that, so it matters that Bill Clinton is doing this. And he's also showing that he's affiliated with Yeltsin. He's showing that he feels affection towards him. And Yeltsin does the same thing. We don't catch laughs off people we don't like. We don't catch laughs off people we don't know. So actually, they're marking their bond there. And the final point that I think is really intriguing is Bill Clinton, at no stage, makes it look like he's laughing at Boris Yeltsin. He goes to great pains to include him. He's not going, "This guy is an idiot. Let's laugh at him." It would mean something very, very different if he did. In fact, I think generally, in American foreign policy, anybody's foreign policy, don't laugh in the face of a premier state from another country. It's probably eight-o'clock day-one of a rule. He includes him in that laughter. And this is a really important factor about laughter. Because laughter is about making and maintaining social bonds, people are very cautious about working out where they are in relation to that. And this does mean you can't just take a difficult situation and throw a squirt of laughter at it; you've got to make sure people feel included in that laughter. They're not feeling excluded or offended by that laughter. And this leads us back to perhaps a more important aspect of laughter. It's an important social skill that we learn to do. We learn about the social use of laughter throughout our entire early adult life, and it's probably one of the more important social skills that we acquire. And we should probably take this a lot more seriously. We should think about the things that can affect our laughter. We can think about the things that we could do to encourage our understanding of our laughter. And perhaps the takeaway message is take laughter seriously. Think about your laughter. Don't undervalue or trivialise your laughter. It matters. It matters a lot. It can sound like friendship. It can sometimes sound a lot like love. Thank you. (Applause)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
boris yeltsin 8
bill clinton 6
good afternoon 2
american foreign 2
catch laughs 2
important social 2



Important Words


  1. absence
  2. absolutely
  3. acquire
  4. actively
  5. adult
  6. affect
  7. affected
  8. affection
  9. affiliated
  10. afternoon
  11. aggression
  12. aggressively
  13. agree
  14. agreement
  15. american
  16. amount
  17. anger
  18. angry
  19. applause
  20. aspect
  21. associate
  22. atmosphere
  23. attention
  24. attribution
  25. awkward
  26. babies
  27. based
  28. behaving
  29. behaviour
  30. behaviourally
  31. big
  32. bill
  33. bit
  34. bond
  35. bonds
  36. boris
  37. boys
  38. brain
  39. called
  40. care
  41. carries
  42. catch
  43. cautious
  44. charles
  45. children
  46. clinton
  47. colleague
  48. comedy
  49. comfortable
  50. coming
  51. comment
  52. company
  53. compared
  54. completely
  55. condition
  56. conduct
  57. conference
  58. considered
  59. contagion
  60. contagious
  61. context
  62. continue
  63. control
  64. conversation
  65. conversations
  66. country
  67. cracks
  68. darwin
  69. day
  70. dear
  71. degree
  72. delighted
  73. departing
  74. depending
  75. developing
  76. difficult
  77. disaster
  78. discussing
  79. disgust
  80. disorders
  81. disturbances
  82. due
  83. early
  84. earth
  85. effect
  86. effective
  87. emotion
  88. emotions
  89. encourage
  90. engage
  91. enjoyable
  92. enormous
  93. entire
  94. escalate
  95. essi
  96. excluded
  97. experience
  98. experiences
  99. exposed
  100. expression
  101. extreme
  102. face
  103. fact
  104. factor
  105. failed
  106. failure
  107. familiar
  108. fear
  109. federation
  110. feel
  111. feeling
  112. feels
  113. film
  114. final
  115. find
  116. fine
  117. foreign
  118. frequently
  119. friendship
  120. frightened
  121. fun
  122. funny
  123. gave
  124. gelotophobia
  125. generally
  126. gentlemen
  127. giving
  128. golden
  129. good
  130. great
  131. group
  132. guy
  133. guys
  134. ha
  135. happen
  136. happened
  137. happy
  138. hawk
  139. hear
  140. hears
  141. heart
  142. helpless
  143. high
  144. hilarious
  145. hoped
  146. huge
  147. human
  148. humour
  149. hurt
  150. idiot
  151. importance
  152. important
  153. importantly
  154. improving
  155. incapacitated
  156. include
  157. included
  158. includes
  159. incredibly
  160. inputs
  161. insulting
  162. intentions
  163. interesting
  164. interestingly
  165. interpreter
  166. intriguing
  167. invitation
  168. involvement
  169. issues
  170. join
  171. joins
  172. joke
  173. jokes
  174. journalists
  175. joy
  176. joyful
  177. killing
  178. kind
  179. knock
  180. ladies
  181. largely
  182. laugh
  183. laughed
  184. laughing
  185. laughs
  186. laughter
  187. leads
  188. learn
  189. learning
  190. life
  191. line
  192. link
  193. listen
  194. live
  195. lives
  196. looked
  197. lot
  198. love
  199. maintaining
  200. making
  201. marking
  202. matters
  203. means
  204. meeting
  205. men
  206. message
  207. mistranslated
  208. mistranslation
  209. months
  210. mood
  211. nations
  212. nato
  213. necessarily
  214. newspapers
  215. offended
  216. opportunity
  217. optimism
  218. pains
  219. paint
  220. parents
  221. part
  222. people
  223. perception
  224. person
  225. pick
  226. play
  227. played
  228. playing
  229. plays
  230. point
  231. policy
  232. positive
  233. possibly
  234. poured
  235. predicted
  236. premier
  237. president
  238. press
  239. primarily
  240. priming
  241. problem
  242. profound
  243. properties
  244. psychological
  245. psychology
  246. psychopathy
  247. punch
  248. punchlines
  249. pure
  250. quality
  251. reaction
  252. ready
  253. reason
  254. recognition
  255. reduced
  256. reframe
  257. reframes
  258. reframing
  259. relation
  260. relax
  261. reports
  262. research
  263. respond
  264. response
  265. risk
  266. row
  267. rule
  268. russian
  269. scientific
  270. setting
  271. share
  272. short
  273. show
  274. showing
  275. significantly
  276. simply
  277. situation
  278. situations
  279. skill
  280. skills
  281. smile
  282. social
  283. sophie
  284. sort
  285. sound
  286. spanning
  287. speech
  288. squirt
  289. stage
  290. start
  291. started
  292. starts
  293. state
  294. statement
  295. states
  296. stop
  297. streets
  298. stress
  299. study
  300. studying
  301. stuff
  302. summit
  303. surprising
  304. takeaway
  305. talk
  306. teenage
  307. telling
  308. tend
  309. tense
  310. thinking
  311. thought
  312. throw
  313. tickled
  314. time
  315. times
  316. today
  317. tool
  318. traits
  319. trivialise
  320. turns
  321. ucl
  322. understand
  323. understanding
  324. undervalue
  325. unfamiliar
  326. united
  327. video
  328. viding
  329. visit
  330. waiting
  331. walking
  332. war
  333. watch
  334. watching
  335. word
  336. work
  337. working
  338. works
  339. worried
  340. worry
  341. writing
  342. wrong
  343. wrote
  344. yeah
  345. year
  346. years
  347. yellow
  348. yeltsin
  349. yesterday
  350. young
  351. yugoslavia