They reached this conclusion by hooking the subjects into an imaging procedure and tickling their feet. As the University of Freiburg’s Department of Medicine announced Thursday, there are only a few such studies.
Previous presentations showed brain activity not only in regions for sensory stimulus analysis and controlling laughing muscles, but also in regions for emotional processing of the situation during laughing.
Current research now sought to find out how emotional centers interfere with laughter. The aim was to find out whether emotional centers contribute to suppressing or reinforcing laughter by adapting it to the social context, or whether they actually trigger laughter.
A team led by Elise Wattendorf from the University of Freiburg School of Medicine began searching for clues in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences in Health in Freiburg and the Universities of Basel and Greifswald (D).
In the experimental setup, the subjects had to try to make verbal sounds while laughing at the tickling of their feet. For the first time, the researchers were able to capture an activity of the core ambiguity in the images.
In this core area in the brainstem, motor neuron activity took place during laughter, which directly coordinates respiratory and laryngeal activity. While this network was active, brain regions responsible for emotional processing and control continued to be much less involved.
Thus, the research puts the role of emotional circuits in laughter into perspective. As the University of Freiburg explains, this “may explain some fits of uncontrolled laughter”.
(SDA)