Press release: Holding back laughter
No. 204 - 16.12.2025
Research team investigates strategies to control laughter – and when social cues override them
In many everyday and professional situations, laughing at the wrong moment can be inappropriate or disruptive, making the ability to hold back amusement an important skill. Yet resisting laughter is often difficult – especially when someone else laughs. A research team at the University of Göttingen investigated how laughter can be regulated and found that social cues can strongly interfere with these efforts. The results were published in the journal Communications Psychology.
The researchers ran three experiments with a total of 121 participants, using facial electromyography (fEMG) to record tiny muscle reactions involved in smiling and laughter – signals often too subtle to detect with the naked eye. Participants listened to short jokes while applying specific instructions designed to regulate their reactions. The instructions told the participant to focus on a colourful hidden-object wallpaper (for distraction), keep their facial expressions under control (for expressive suppression), and reinterpret the jokes in a less amusing way (for cognitive reappraisal). The data showed these regulation strategies differed in their effectiveness: distraction and suppression most strongly reduced laughter-related facial activity, while reappraisal mainly influenced how funny the jokes felt. When another person’s laughter was added, suppressing one’s own amusement became noticeably more difficult.
The results showed that the best way to hold back laughter was to use the techniques of suppression and distraction, while cognitive reappraisal could be a useful way to reduce how funny the jokes themselves felt. “Yet even these strategies reached their limits in certain social settings,” explained Professor Anne Schacht at Göttingen University’s Institute of Psychology. “Hearing another person laugh made it much harder to control laughter. This just goes to show how strongly our emotional reactions are affected by the presence of others and how deeply humans are social beings.”
This research was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and by the Leibniz ScienceCampus Primate Cognition.
Original publication: Mitschke, V., et al. “Laughter regulation in solitary and social contexts varies across emotion regulation strategies” Communications psychology (2025). DoI: 10.1038/s44271-025-00368-6
Contact:
Professor Anne Schacht
University of Göttingen
Faculty of Biology and Psychology
Institute of Psychology – Department of Cognition, Emotion and Behaviour
Goßlerstraße 14, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
Tel: +49 (0)551 39-23676