Field Work in the Bonding Ritual Known as Laughter

I have a friend who has a doctorate in linguistics--in “plurals,” to be precise. An old gentleman once said to him: “There’s one--and there’s more than one. What’s to know?” But, of course, there’s often much more to stuff like this than you’d imagine at first glance.

Laughter, for instance. Yes, psychologists study it. (Still other scientists study tickling, but we won’t go there today.) The very physics of the act have been carefully dissected, we learn from our trusty 653-page “Handbook of Emotions.”

Want to laugh? Contract your facial orbicularis oculi muscles and your zygomatic major muscles--and your levator labii supiriosis, risorius, mentalis, depressor anguli oris and orbicularis oris muscles too. Let air out of the mouth while you’re doing it, an action that includes a slew of other muscles we won’t list.

None of that, of course, explains why we laugh. The handbook astutely notes that “humor (in the form of jokes, cartoons, funny stories or films, comedy, parody, practical jokes, music, pantomime, etc.) is a reliable elicitor of exhilaration.” But other scientists have sneaked around with note pads observing people and found that only 10% to 20% of day-to-day laughs are in response to something funny.

Laughter’s real job may be about easing tension and strengthening human bonds, which may be why people are 30 times more likely to laugh when they’re with others versus alone (although there are scary exceptions to this).

There are lots of different laugh sounds, recently described by laugh researchers at Vanderbilt University as bird chirps, pig snorts, frog croaks and more. The Vanderbilt psychologists reported that choosing the right kind of laugh may be crucial for getting along smoothly with the opposite sex.

Women’s laughs in the presence of male strangers, they’ve found, are the high-pitched kind that touches men’s emotions--which might be an unconscious attempt to charm and disarm this larger, potentially threatening creature.

Men, meanwhile, may howl like hyenas in the privacy of the locker room, but they have softer, low-key laughs in the presence of female strangers--ones, suggest the scientists, that aren’t likely to scare the gals away.

Finally, to learn more than you ever wanted to about another obvious-sounding subject--why men like to grow beards--check out the scholarly article “I’m Sick of Shaving Every Morning, or the Cultural Implications of ‘Male’ Facial Presentation” at https://www.mundanebehavior.org.

The Truth About Those E-Mail Warnings

Did anyone fool you April 1? Here’s a Web site (https://www.my-health2000.com/get/aprilfool/) that will help you avoid being suckered the rest of the year, at least about some of the wilder “health hazard” e-mails in circulation. (For sweepstakes offers and those $60,000 “checks” that have “this is not a check” written faintly on them, you’re on your own.)

Here are some shock-horror-alerts you may have already received:

* Tampons contain asbestos that manufacturers deliberately add to make women bleed more and thus use more tampons. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which reviews the design of all tampons, asbestos is not an ingredient in any of them.

Toxic dioxin is another ingredient of tampons, the warning also claims. The FDA, however, says that trace amounts of dioxin are detectable in tampons but at levels so minuscule they pose no threat.

* Antiperspirants give you breast cancer because sweating is the way the body rids itself of cancer-causing toxins. (Also, the warning says, part of the breast that commonly gets cancer--the “upper outer quadrant”--is at risk because it’s near lymph glands containing all those toxins.)

The American Cancer Society points out that studies looking at risk factors for breast cancer have never detected a link with antiperspirants. What’s more, sweating is not how a body releases toxins. And the reason why the upper outer quadrant is a common breast cancer site? Most of the breast tissue is there.

Don’t be suckered.