The Emotional Correlates of Smiling and Laughter: A Preliminary Research Study

The facial expressions of smiling and laughter have, undoubtedly, fascinated scientists and philosophers for centuries. The enormous literature available on the subject is crowded with all sorts of hypothetical theories, case studies, and experimental reports. As Izard puts it, referring to the broader but not less heterogeneous topic of emotion, “all of these theoretical frameworks are to some extent allied with venerable tenets of folk wisdom.”¹ Exhaustive reviews of the literature have been compiled by various authors.²-⁷ Despite this interest and the clinicians’ recognition of the importance of smiling and laughter during the process of therapy, systematic study of the meaning and function of these expressive cues has been conspicuously absent from psychotherapy research.

My interest in the subject arose from the clinical observation that a considerable number of patients in psychoanalytic therapy would report a striking diversity of feelings, frequently unpleasant ones, concommitant with the expressions of smiling or laughter. This fact clearly differed from a voluminous bulk of theoretical as well as experimental work which considers smiling and laughter reliable and valid indicators of pleasurable emotions. In effect, from Darwin through Freud to modern scholars (with few exceptions), smiling and laughing have been considered the expressions of happiness and high spirits par excellence. Darwin interpreted laughter “primarily to be the expression of mere joy or happiness.”⁸ He considered the smile a pattern that differs from laughter only in degree — that is, a diminutive form of laughter. Freud understood laughter in terms of “a quota of psychical energy which has earlier been used for the cathexis of particular psychical paths has become unusable, so that it can find free discharge.”⁹ He studied laughter as a response to specific psychodynamics such as the joke, the comic, and humor. He felt that in all three