What is the difference between humour and laughter

I thought laughter and humor were very similar but you appear to have a different opinion. Laughter is a sound; the expression of mirth, joy, or scorn through a chuckle or explosive noise. While closely connected, laughter and humor are not synonyms. They represent two different concepts, with each cerebral hemisphere contributing specialized functions.

The functions necessary to develop a sense of humor appear to be centered in the right frontal lobe. This part of the brain is alert to subtleties, nuances, and pulls all the threads together e.

As Rita Carter put it in Mapping the Mind, seeing a nice-looking person slip on a banana peel may not be very funny, but watching a pompous bully come a cropper, is! The left hemisphere understands the actual words and appears to be attracted by wordplay. It tends to be very literal in developing an interpretation of a joke. As a verb , humor means to accommodate or entertain , especially to an unreasonable request. A father might humor his son by making sure none of the food on his dinner plate touches each other, for instance.

What does humour mean? Humour is an alternative spelling of the same word. It is the predominant spelling in British English; American writers are more likely to use humor. This distinction follows the American convention of dropping the U from words that end in -our , like colour , labour , and honour. As you can see from the chart below, humour is much more common in British English sources,.

The same caveats apply to the chart below, which graphs humor vs. Renner and Manthey investigate humor creation abilities in their study of self-presentation styles and dispositions to ridicule and being laughed at. They derive scores for quantitative e. Results show that both gelotophilia and histrionic self-presentation are supported by fluency and quality of humor creation abilities.

Three manuscripts examine gelotophobia in circumscribed groups. Kohlmann et al. Deviations from normal weight were related to experiencing teasing, which in turn was related to the fear of being laughed at. The four studies suggest that research on well-being of youth with weight problems would benefit from studying weight-related teasing and mockery in connection with gelotophobia.

Tsai et al. As in prior studies, the ASD group was found to have a higher level of gelotophobia and the present study reveals that they also have lower levels of gelotophilia and katagelasticism. However, extraversion fully accounted for the observed lower gelotophobia scores among the ASD sample, and partly for the differences found for gelotophilia.

They showed an extraordinarily high level of the fear of being laughed at i. The section on playfulness consists of five contributions of which two have a qualitative approach, while the others are quantitative in nature. Two contributions focus on play the behavior associated with trait playfulness and playfulness in school and the others employ adult samples. With 1, Tweets reaching an upper bound of 3,, followers March 25th, 1 , Barnett's article attracted much attention on social media.

Her analyses show that teachers react differently—more negatively—toward playfulness expressed by boys than by girls kindergarten-aged children followed up across 3 years. In contrast, playfulness in girls did not seem to be a concern for the teachers. The methodology employed and the study of gender differences provides a valuable update on earlier literature. Overall, the emerging question is how teachers, schools and societies in general may benefit from playfulness in the classroom.

Pinchover 's pilot study examines the interplay of playfulness in teachers and their students. Taking the limitations of this initial study into account, this may indicate that teacher behavior impacts children's playfulness. Given that there is initial evidence for a contribution of playfulness to academic achievement and more robust data on a beneficial use for stress coping, some functions of playfulness may be helpful for students in their learning experience and development.

The idea that a playful state of mind contributes to innovativeness and creativity has received much interest in the literature for overviews see Proyer et al. Heimann and Roepstorff introduce microphenomenological interviews as a method for research in playfulness. In this initial study, they found that autonomy and self-expression were of particular importance for achieving a playful state of mind.

Proyer et al. Self- and peer-ratings i. Overall, playfulness is linked to some facets of physical functioning. Future research will have to clarify the pathways and moderators of these associations e. Finally, Pang and Proyer present first data on a comparison of playfulness scores in samples from two regions in the P.

China and a sample from German-speaking countries—using measures from both, the East and the West. The article provides details on cultural differences and linguistic challenges in the translation of the term playfulness. Overall, the findings indicate that differences are smaller than expected, but that the differentiation between private and public situations impacts how people in the two regions enjoy expressing their playfulness.

This study narrows a gap in the literature by providing initial data on cross-cultural differences see also Barnett, and highlights that larger scale cross-cultural comparisons are encouraged. These five studies support the notion that playfulness has an impact on various domains of life, but also that more research will be needed for a better understanding of its role across different age groups.

Cheerfulness has a tradition in psychological research for more than years e. Trait cheerfulness, seriousness, and bad mood have been proposed to form the temperamental basis of humor.

Washburn in her early studies claimed that a person in the attitude of cheerfulness is incapable of a depressing thought, and meanwhile there is ample evidence that trait cheerful individuals maintain being in a cheerful state i. The contributions of the present collection of articles are diverse. First, a training of humor yielded outcomes for cheerfulness, seriousness, and bad mood in the desired direction with medium to large effect sizes Tagalidou et al.

Different to a recent study Ruch et al. Congruent with the assumption that cheerfulness predicts smiling and laughter, Auerbach shows that trait cheerful patients showed more genuine smiling and laughter during a hospital clown intervention than low trait cheerful individual do.

Next to the long version with items, they provide the standard short form with 60 items and deliver initial validation data. Utilizing a task-switching paradigm they find that while trait cheerfulness does not influence switching costs it modulates preparation and repetition effects.

Studies like this are needed to further illuminate the processes associated with the traits be it cheerfulness, playfulness, or humor. Bruntsch and Ruch find trait cheerfulness and low bad mood facilitating the detection of ironic praise.

The individual contributions show how humor, laughter, playfulness, and cheerfulness are related and yet heterogeneous. Each field would profit from starting to talk to each other, see overlaps in scope, finding common structure, common language, and work on theories connecting these fields. Combining the domains in the prediction of important criteria might be important too.

The topics studies in this research topic plus others may be understood as nodes in a larger net and the interrelations need to be better explored. It is positive to see that integrative models within the domains are now developed.

This indeed needs to be the prime goal, namely to work on a solid structure within the four fields. It took research of personality and intelligence more than half a century to arrive at models that are shared by many. Later generations of researchers then found that the competing models were incomplete variants and do fit into a more general, often hierarchical model.

We recommend concerted efforts to solve those basic questions, perhaps by compiling special issues on pertinent topics. All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

We would like to thank all the authors who agreed to participate in this Topic with their original contributions, and to all the reviewers who promoted the quality of research and manuscripts with their comments.

Furthermore, special remarks go to Frontiers staff and Professors Marcel Zentner and Anat Bardi for the opportunity they gave to us. Barnett, L. The inculcation of adult playfulness: from west to east. Play 6, — Berlyne, D. Lindzey and E. Bishop, D. Parental conceptual systems, home play environments, and potential creativity in children.