Science Says … Laughter Is Contagious

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TThere are few things more enjoyable in life than a giddy, fleeting laugh shared with a friend. When the mood hits you, laughter can become contagious. But sometimes these bouts of hilarity arise at the wrong time, when social mores call for solemnity and a poker face. Anyone who has found themselves laughing at a funeral, for example, knows how difficult it can be to suppress your giggles.

Recently, a research team from the University of Göttingen decided to study the strategies humans can use to keep our laughter a secret when situations demand seriousness. Some approaches work better than others, they discovered, but everything works less well when others around us are laughing. They published their results in Psychology of communication.

“Hearing another person laugh made it much more difficult to control the laughter,” co-author Anne Schacht, a psychologist at the University of Göttingen, said in a statement. “It shows how much our emotional reactions are affected by the presence of others and how humans are social beings.”

Read more: »Why is this funny?»

The topic of laughter regulation has received very little scientific attention, Schacht and colleagues note, although much research has focused on other types of emotional management, including negative emotional states like anger and sadness and positive emotions like happiness and pride.

To fill this gap, the scientists conducted three separate experiments with a total of 121 study participants. Volunteers were asked to listen to 100 jokes read by two men and two women in an amused and enthusiastic tone (although readers were asked not to laugh) and to use one of three approaches to keep a straight face: distract themselves with a large animated illustration in which objects were hidden, focus on controlling their facial expressions, and reinterpret the jokes so that they did not feel funny.

To measure the effectiveness of these strategies, scientists used a technology called facial electromyography to record tiny muscle movements involved in smiling and laughing that are invisible to the naked eye. They also created a smile index to quantify the combined activity of certain facial muscles. Laughter in particular involves the muscles around the mouth, eyes and eyebrows, including the zygomaticus major, orbicularis oculi and corrugator. To see what the volunteers thought of the jokes, they asked them to rate how funny they were on a scale of 1 to 5.

In all three experiments, the jokes were the same, but the conditions were a little different. In the first experiment, participants were asked to either reappraise the jokes or control their facial muscles. In the second, they were asked to entertain themselves with the illustration. In the third case, they were asked to resort exclusively to self-suppression. In the first two, the participants were alone, but in the third, the scientists were fed video laugh tracks.

What the scientists found was that distraction and suppression did the best job of calming the funny facial muscles, while rethinking jokes mainly caused participants to feel differently about their sense of humor. Removal also worked less well with the best jokes and did not affect funnyness ratings.

But the funniest, if not least surprising, finding was that listening to a laugh track made the jokes more hilarious and made it harder for participants to control their own amusement.

All this to say that laughter is truly contagious.

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Main image: SazidGraphics / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on December 18, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.