International Day of Happiness Special: Your Laughter Can Reveal Whether You're Genuinely Happy or Not

To mark the International Day of Happiness (March 20), researchers did a study which says that people can recognize whether a person is truly happy or not from his laughter.

There are many times when you fake a laugh. Be warned! People can tell whether you're genuinely happy or not by the sound of your laughter, according to researchers from the University of London.

"As we celebrate International Day of Happiness today, it's fascinating to consider the way our brain is able to detect genuine happiness in other people," said Dr McGettigan, lead author of the study in a press statement. "Our brains are very sensitive to the social and emotional significance of laughter."

For the study, a group of participants were made to listen to people producing genuine laughter, caused by watching funny YouTube videos and forced laughter. The researchers recorded the participants' brain responses to both types of laughter. Researchers found that the participants demonstrated different neurological responses when they heard false laughter.

This discovery led researchers to state that the brain is capable of distinguishing false laughter from a genuine one. Not just that, every time a person hears a false laughter, the brain automatically starts analyzing why the laughter is not genuine.

"During our study, when participants heard a laugh that was posed, they activated regions of the brain associated with mentalizing in an attempt to understand the other person's emotional and mental state," authors of the study said. "Indeed, some of the participants engaged parts of the brain that control movements and detect sensation. These individuals were more accurate at telling which of the laughs were posed, and which were real. This suggests that as listeners, 'trying out' how a laugh would feel if we produced it ourselves might be a useful mechanism for understanding its meaning."

International Day of Happiness was first observed by the UN General Assembly on March 20, 2013, and acknowledges the importance of happiness in the lives of people around the world.

Happiness doesn't only do wonders in boosting our mental stability; it also has many health benefits. According to a Harvard University report, genuinely happy people have younger hearts and younger arteries. They also recover more quickly from surgery, cope better with pain, have lower blood pressure, and have longer life expectancy than unhappy people.

Another study also stated that happy people have stronger immune systems. Additionally, happy people are better at looking after their health, too. When people's happiness levels improve, so do their health behaviors. They exercise more, wear sunscreen and go for regular checkups.

There is no definite definition of happiness. For some, happiness could be watching the sun set while for others it could mean spending time with the people they love. Genes have a role to play in how happy a person is but a person's level of happiness is not entirely predetermined by these genes, a 2013 study stated.

Findings of the new study were published online in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

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