Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

It is assumed in the study of parent-child attachment: M. Mikulincer and P. R. Shaver, “The Attachment Behavioral System in Adulthood: Activation, Psychodynamics, and Interpersonal Processes,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 35, ed. Mark P. Zanna (New York: Academic Press, 2003), 53–152.

The Woody Allen hypothesis has deep roots in Judeo-Christian thought about original sin and the fall from grace: One of the best books I’ve read on happiness is historian Darrin McMahin’s broad survey of how the concept and practice of happiness have changed over 2,500 years of Western culture. McMahin, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2006).

This is a standard evolutionary principle: R. J. Andrew, “The Origin and Evolution of the Calls and Facial Expressions of the Primates,” Behavior 20 (1963): 1–109. P. Rozin, “Towards a Psychology of Food and Eating: From Motivation to Module to Model to Marker, Morality, Meaning, and Metaphor,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 5 (1996): 18–24.

downplay any sudden abundance in resources through modesty and generosity: Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest.

LAUGHTER

 

Jared Diamond argues: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

It is a point that evolutionists Matthew Gervais and David Sloan Wilson: Gervais and Wilson, “The Evolution and Functions of Laughter: A Synthetic Approach,” Review of Quarterly Biology 80 (2006): 395–430.

What separates mammals from reptiles are the raw materials of laughter: MacLean was one of the first to make this point in explaining how mammals’ brains differ from those of reptiles. Paul D. MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution (New York: Plenum, 1990).

Yet the laughter of chimps and apes is more tightly linked to inhalation and exhalation patterns: Robert Provine has written a wonderful book on laughter. Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Viking, 2000).

Boyle’s descriptions: T. C. Boyle, Drop City (New York: Penguin, 2003), various pages.

Estimates indicate that: Provine, Laughter.

Laughter is contagious: Robert Provine, “Contagious Laughter: Laughter Is a Sufficient Stimulus for Laughs and Smiles,” Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 30 (1992): 1–4. Provine also details some wonderful episodes of contagious laughter in Laughter.

laughter is intertwined with our breathing: Provine was the first to make this point, in Laughter.

Measures include speech rate, pitch, loudness: Klaus Scherer is to the voice in emotion what Ekman is to the face. He was the first to chart systematically how the different emotions will be expressed in difficult acoustic qualities like pitch, amplitude, and variation. K. R. Scherer, “Vocal Affect Expression: A Review and a Model for Future Research,” Psychological Bulletin 99 (1986): 143–65.

Bachorowski was the first to put laughs through this complex form of acoustic analysis: Jo-Anne Bachorowski has done for the laugh what Ekman did for the smile—provide an objective, anatomically based rationale for explaining some of the varieties of the laugh. Bachorowski and M. J. Owren, “Not All Laughs Are Alike: Voiced by Not Voiced Laughter Readily Elicits Positive Affect,” Psychological Science 12 (2001): 252–57.

In his remarkable meditation on laughter: Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Penguin, 1981).

The laughs of friends, as opposed to those of strangers: Smoski and Bachorowski, “Antiphonal Laughter between Friends and Strangers,” Cognition and Emotion 17 (2003): 327–40.

Here a remarkable discovery: Bachorowski, Smoski, and Owren, “The Acoustic Features of Human Laughter,” Journal of Acoustic Society of America 110 (2001): 1581–97.

laughter preceded language in human evolution: For analyses of the evolution of laughter, see Provine, Laughter; Gervais and Wilson, “The Evolution and Functions of Laughter.”

Recent neuroscientific data on laughter: B. Wild, F. A. Rodden, W. Grodd, and W. Ruch, “Neural Correlates of Laughter and Humor,” Brain 126, no. 10 (2002): 2121–38.

tension and ambiguity: for an excellent treatment of humor and laughter, see Michael L. Apte, Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

Provine turned his astute ear to the laughter that occurs in the real world: Robert Provine, “Laughter Punctuates Speech: Linguistic, Social, and Gender Contexts of Laughter,” Ethology 95 (1993): 291–98.