Laughter May Be Best Medicine for Bad Joke
Good news for joke-tellers everywhere: Laughter can make a bad joke seem funnier, a study finds. People found jokes paired with laughter funnier than jokes without, and the more natural sounding the laughter was, the better. This effect was the same for people who have autism as it was for those who don’t, which suggests that autistic people may not interpret all social cues as differently as expected. “There’s quite a lot of research arguing that people with autism process social information differently, and there is a little bit of evidence that they process laughter differently,” said Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London who was a co-author on the study published in Current Biology. This research suggests that the way people with autism interpret laughter may not be so different after all. People with autism tend to have trouble with social interactions, which could stem from how they process social cues like laughter. In order to study how individuals with autism and those without process laughter, a research team led by University College London Ph.D. student Qing Ceci Cai leveraged the power of the pun. Ready, set, laugh Cai scoured the internet for simple jokes …