Is laughing contagious?

[deleted-27311]

I need an experiment for my science fair that can prove if laughing is contagious
Our science fair project is to be done by April 28th, and today is like the 15th.. only 13 days left...
sooo i really need an experiment that can be done in a short amount of time..
Any ideas? ;]

[deleted-71447]

Hi jennalocious,
Welcome to the Ask an Expert forums. Before you design an experiment, you might want to take a few minutes to expand on your scientific question. "Laughing is contagious" conveys the idea that people tend to laugh in the presence of others' laughter, whether or not they see the humor that sparked the original laughter. I expect you have experienced this yourself, as have most people, so the statement, in its most general sense, can probably be accepted as true. Would you agree? If so, I would advise digging a little deeper to find an aspect of the question that makes you wonder. For example, if you spend some time brainstorming and reading what has been written on this topic (try typing your question into an internet search engine) you'll find lots of related questions. What makes laughter contagious? Is it the sight of someone laughing, or the sound, or the combination of the two? How much does the audio vs visual response differ for different people? Or, taking a different approach, is someone more likely to laugh spontaneously in the presence of a group of people as opposed to when they are with a single person? If you take a few minutes to brainstorm questions like these, I think you'll find something that really makes you wonder.

Once you have finalized your question (or decided to stick with your original question), and done some background research, we can help you come up with your experimental procedure. Have you had a chance to read these?
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ndex.shtml
In particular:
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... tion.shtml
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... dure.shtml
Those might be helpful.

Chris

[deleted-27311]

hey,
thanks a lot for your suggestions, =]
I researched about my topic, and as you have said, I found some information about it.
soo..I decided to choose the problem/question "What makes laughter contagious? Is it the sight of someone laughing, or the sound, or the combination of the two? How much does the audio vs visual response differ for different people?"
I thought about my experiment, and I really want the experiment to be less than 3 days.. atleast.. which is kind of impossible? :/ sigh
anyway,,
i really hope you can help me come up with an experiment that will take less amount of time!! )
many thanks,

Jenn

[deleted-71447]

Hi Jenn,
Congrats on moving forward with your project. For your new question, you should write one that is completely in your own words rather than copying the questions from my previous post. Don't try to just change the words in my questions to form a new sentence, but rather think about the ideas behind the questions and write an entirely new question from scratch. This will help you to focus on the single aspect that is most interesting to you, and will help you to start thinking about exactly what you would like to do. Once you've done that, I'll be glad to assist you with designing some sort of experiment. As you are working on your question, you can think about what sorts of resources you will need to conduct your experiment. Do you have some way to play audio and/or visual footage of laughter?
Looking forward to hearing more,
Chris

[deleted-27311]

hey chis,

I came up with my own question and it is going to beeeeee :
How is laughing contagious? Does hearing other people laugh have a larger effect on a person OR does looking at other people laugh have a larger effect on a person?

For the experiment--- I finally came up with a brief idea, and I think i should video a person laughing for 3 minutes? is that too long? and let the participants (2 people at a time) sit. First, i will play the audio (just the sound of the video), and then i will play the video muted, and record the data..
but the problem is... how am i going to "measure" people's laughter? i mean, how am i going to know which one' (hearing or looking) is having a larger effect on a person?


-Jenn

[deleted-71447]

Hi Jenn,
Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. I actually thought I had replied to this but I must not have sent the message.
If you are still looking for ideas of how to measure laughter, I can imagine that you could:
(1) create a scale (for example 1 to 5) with specific criteria that you use to evaluate where the laughter falls on that scale. For example 1- no signs of laughter or amusement, 2 - smiling, no audible laughter, no change of posture 3 - brief audible laughter less than 10% of the time, little or no movement in response to humor, 4 - extended audible laughter and/or movement (clapping, etc) associated with humor 5 - continuous laughter. Those are just examples and you should customize them to your needs if you decide to use this approach. The advantage here is that you can customize the scale to capture all sorts of behavior associated with laughter.
(2) You could try to measure some aspect of their behavior, for example, the total length of time that you hear audible laughter from them. This is more objective (less prone to personal bias) and more quantitative than the first approach, which is usually a good thing, but it has the disadvantage that it will be difficult to choose a single measure that will capture all possible responses to humor. Some people laugh audibly, some suppress the audible laughter and hide their face in their hands, some snort involuntarily, etc.
You could try both of these and see which one works the best.

Three minutes sounds OK to me, though it might be a little long. Maybe one minute would suffice. Try listening to / watching it yourself and see what you think. What's the idea behind having two volunteers at once? That could complicate your results, because they will be responding to each other as well as to the recordings.

One more thing - you might want to randomize your trials by playing the audio and video in a different order each time. It's possible, for example, that people will tend to relax and laugh more later in the trial (or get bored and stop laughing later in the trial), which would bias your results if you always played the audio first and video second.

I hope that helps!
Chris