ArticlePloS one2021
Laughter influences social bonding but not prosocial generosity to friends and strangers.
Article in PloS one, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 17 citations in OpenAlex.
- Detecting social cues conveyed by laughter and associations with callous-unemotional traits in early childhood.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2026Article
- Laughter in the making: social bonding and coordination in dance practices.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Relaxed vigilance: humor as a regulatory capacity in care systems.Frontiers in sociology · 2026Article
- Liberating the mental health and wellbeing benefits of laughing alone: a new taxonomic model and scoping review for future research.Discover mental health · 2025Review
- Why friendship and loneliness affect our health.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- In sync through laughter? An fNIRS hyperscanning study on neural synchrony and social connection.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Synchronous and anti-phase drumming elicit similar prosocial behavior ratings.Frontiers in cognition · 2024Article
- Gaming motivation and well-being among Norwegian adult gamers: the role of gender and disability.Frontiers in medical technology · 2024Article
- Only empathy-related traits, not being mimicked or endorphin release, influence social closeness and prosocial behavior.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The origins and function of musical performance.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Laughter and its role in the evolution of human social bonding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Managing the stresses of group-living in the transition to village life.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Exploring the Interplay Between Lifestyle Medicine and Oral Health: A Bidirectional Relationship.American journal of lifestyle medicineArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans deploy a number of specific behaviours for forming social bonds, one of which is laughter. However, two questions have not yet been investigated with respect to laughter: (1) Does laughter increase the sense of bonding to those with whom we laugh? and (2) Does laughter facilitate prosocial generosity? Using changes in pain threshold as a proxy for endorphin upregulation in the brain and a standard economic game (the Dictator Game) as an assay of prosociality, we show that laughter does trigger the endorphin system and, through that, seems to enhance social bonding, but it does not reliably influence donations to others. This suggests that social bonding and prosociality may operate via different mechanisms, or on different time scales, and relate to different functional objectives.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.