AcornaMordor
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I found an intriguing article in my searchings about Tickling. Allow me to past it for you. There is also another I found that I will similarly post after this one.
The Benefits of Laughter
Provided by Psychology Today
So much of our attitude about life and our capacity to meet life's challenges depends on the quality of the relationships we have, especially our most intimate relationships that when they go sour, life tends to feel bleak. Because the quality of our relationships has a powerful effect on physical and mental balance, as well as our sense of satisfaction in life, it's important that we keep our relationships rewarding and fresh.
The data on divorce provide compelling evidence that we are not succeeding at all. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce--cohabitation couplings are far likelier to end badly--and of marriages that endure, many are less than happy.
Most people know the value of a good relationship and, no matter how often they have lost at love, keep on hoping. As a result, advice on how to make relationships work fills shelves and shelves of bookstores and hours of talk-show time. Some of it is even good, the product of careful research on happy and unhappy couples.
But of all the elements that contribute to the warm atmosphere of a good relationship, there is one that seldom gets translated into advice or even therapy, yet is something that everyone desires and most people would like more of: Laughter.
It's a safe bet that most of the laughs married couples get come from TV laugh tracks, not from each other. They don't emanate from the relationship. More important, they don't feed it. And if the jokes that make the rounds by email are any gauge, often they are at the expense of it.
But homegrown laughter may be what ailing couples need most. Uniquely human, laughter is, first and foremost, a social signal--it disappears when there is no audience, which may be as small as one other person--and it binds people together. It synchronizes the brains of speaker and listener so that they are emotionally attuned.
These are the conclusions of Robert Provine, Ph.D., a neuroscientist who found that laughter is far too fragile to dissect in the laboratory. Instead, he observed thousands of incidents of laughter spontaneously occurring in everyday life, and wittily reports the results in Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (Penguin Books, 2001).
Laughter establishes--or restores--a positive emotional climate and a sense of connection between two people, who literally take pleasure in the company of each other. For if there's one thing Dr. Provine found it's that speakers laugh even more than their listeners. Of course levity can defuse anger and anxiety, and in so doing it can pave the path to intimacy.
Most of what makes people laugh is not thigh-slapper stuff but conversational comments. "Laughter is not primarily about humor," says Dr. Provine, "but about social relationships."
Among some of his surprising findings:
• The much vaunted health benefits of laughter are probably coincidental, a consequence of it's much more important primary goal: bringing people together. In fact, the health benefits of laughter may result from the social support it stimulates.
• Laughter plays a big role in mating. Men like women who laugh heartily in their presence.
• Both sexes laugh a lot, but females laugh more--126% more than their male counterparts. Men are more laugh-getters.
• The laughter of the female is the critical index of a healthy relationship
• Laughter in relationships declines dramatically as people age.
• Like yawning, laughter is contagious; the laugher of others is irresistible.
One of the best ways to stimulate laughter--and it's probably the most ancient way--is by tickling. Tickling is inherently social; we can't tickle ourselves. We tickle to get a response. Or to entice ticklee to turn around and become tickler.
Not only do most people like tickling--ticklers as well as ticklees--most recognize it is a way to show affection. What's more, adolescents and adults prefer to be tickled by someone of the opposite sex.
Tickling is probably at the root of all play and it is inherently reciprocal, a give-and-take proposition. In other words, it exactly represents the basic rhythm of all healthy relationships. Not to mention is triggers sexual excitation in adults.
But tickling declines dramatically in middle age. People begin a gradual "tactile disengagement," reports Dr. Provine. Tickle, touch, and play, so critically intertwined, all go into retreat, although these behaviors are at the root of our emotional being.
So the next time you have an argument with your mate, don't walk out of the room and slam the door. Try tickling your partner instead. (Most ticklish areas, in descending order: underarms, waist, ribs, feet, knees, throat, neck, palms.)
It won't make problems go away. But it can set the stage for tackling them together.
By: Hara Marano
Originally published by Psychology Today: April 29, 2003
And now this one I found most interesting. All those roman cartoons turned out to be accurate @.@
Tickling
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Tickling is the act of touching a part of the body lightly so as to cause laughter or twitching movements. It can give a mixed feeling of pleasure and displeasure.
The word evolved from the Middle English tikelen, perhaps frequentative of ticken, to touch lightly.
The sensation of surprise elicited by tickling protects against crawling animals and insects, such as spiders, mosquitos, scorpions or beetles, which may be why it evolved in many animals, including rats. However, the continued laughter produced by tickling cannot be explained with this evolutionary survival advantage alone.
It is also unknown why certain areas of the body are more ticklish than others, and it varies for different people. Many people find that their ribs are the most ticklish, while others find the soles of their feet to be the most ticklish. Other ticklish areas include the armpits, neck, stomach, and other sensitive areas.
Tickling is almost certainly a form of social interaction. One feature of tickling is that we do not laugh when we tickle ourselves, only when other people tickle us. This implies that the brain may have a different mechanism for responding to the two types of tickling. Charles Darwin theorised on the link between tickling and social relations, arguing that tickling provokes laughter through the anticipation of pleasure. If a stranger tickles a child without any preliminaries, catching the child by surprise, the likely result will be not laughter but withdrawal and displeasure. Darwin also noticed that for tickling to be effective, you must not know the precise point of stimulation in advance, and reasoned that this is why you cannot effectively tickle yourself.
The act of tickling has also been known as a method of torture, in that subjecting an extremely ticklish person to prolonged tickling can, in the end, be very painful for the victim. As early as Roman times, endless tickling of the feet was used as a brutal method of execution. Tickling as torture survived into the Middle Ages and Colonial American times, but to the lesser degree of being used as public humiliation. The stocks were a device which were specificaly designed to restrain a victim's bare feet, thus allowing passerbys to tickle torture the soles.
In the modern age, forced tickling can be found in the sexual fetish world of BDSM. Those who gain sexual pleasure from tickling are known to have a Tickle Fetish.
Researcher Sarah-Jayne Blakemore confirmed Darwin's propositions by investigating how the brain distinguishes between sensations we create for ourselves and sensations others create for us. Blackmore used robotic arms to tickle people and found them to be as effective as real people in provoking laughter. When her subjects used a joystick to control the tickling robot, however, they could not make themselves laugh. This suggests that when a person tries to tickle him- or herself, the cerebellum sends to the somatosensory cortex precise information on the position of the tickling target and therefore what sensation to expect. Apparently some cortical mechanism then decreases or inhibits the tickling sensation.
Washoe, a chimpanzee who learned to use the American Sign Language, has been reported to frequently make the sign for "tickle me" to researchers, similar to children who enjoy being tickled.
The idiom tickled pink means "pleased or delighted".
Hee. I didn't know ^.^;;;
The Benefits of Laughter
Provided by Psychology Today
So much of our attitude about life and our capacity to meet life's challenges depends on the quality of the relationships we have, especially our most intimate relationships that when they go sour, life tends to feel bleak. Because the quality of our relationships has a powerful effect on physical and mental balance, as well as our sense of satisfaction in life, it's important that we keep our relationships rewarding and fresh.
The data on divorce provide compelling evidence that we are not succeeding at all. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce--cohabitation couplings are far likelier to end badly--and of marriages that endure, many are less than happy.
Most people know the value of a good relationship and, no matter how often they have lost at love, keep on hoping. As a result, advice on how to make relationships work fills shelves and shelves of bookstores and hours of talk-show time. Some of it is even good, the product of careful research on happy and unhappy couples.
But of all the elements that contribute to the warm atmosphere of a good relationship, there is one that seldom gets translated into advice or even therapy, yet is something that everyone desires and most people would like more of: Laughter.
It's a safe bet that most of the laughs married couples get come from TV laugh tracks, not from each other. They don't emanate from the relationship. More important, they don't feed it. And if the jokes that make the rounds by email are any gauge, often they are at the expense of it.
But homegrown laughter may be what ailing couples need most. Uniquely human, laughter is, first and foremost, a social signal--it disappears when there is no audience, which may be as small as one other person--and it binds people together. It synchronizes the brains of speaker and listener so that they are emotionally attuned.
These are the conclusions of Robert Provine, Ph.D., a neuroscientist who found that laughter is far too fragile to dissect in the laboratory. Instead, he observed thousands of incidents of laughter spontaneously occurring in everyday life, and wittily reports the results in Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (Penguin Books, 2001).
Laughter establishes--or restores--a positive emotional climate and a sense of connection between two people, who literally take pleasure in the company of each other. For if there's one thing Dr. Provine found it's that speakers laugh even more than their listeners. Of course levity can defuse anger and anxiety, and in so doing it can pave the path to intimacy.
Most of what makes people laugh is not thigh-slapper stuff but conversational comments. "Laughter is not primarily about humor," says Dr. Provine, "but about social relationships."
Among some of his surprising findings:
• The much vaunted health benefits of laughter are probably coincidental, a consequence of it's much more important primary goal: bringing people together. In fact, the health benefits of laughter may result from the social support it stimulates.
• Laughter plays a big role in mating. Men like women who laugh heartily in their presence.
• Both sexes laugh a lot, but females laugh more--126% more than their male counterparts. Men are more laugh-getters.
• The laughter of the female is the critical index of a healthy relationship
• Laughter in relationships declines dramatically as people age.
• Like yawning, laughter is contagious; the laugher of others is irresistible.
One of the best ways to stimulate laughter--and it's probably the most ancient way--is by tickling. Tickling is inherently social; we can't tickle ourselves. We tickle to get a response. Or to entice ticklee to turn around and become tickler.
Not only do most people like tickling--ticklers as well as ticklees--most recognize it is a way to show affection. What's more, adolescents and adults prefer to be tickled by someone of the opposite sex.
Tickling is probably at the root of all play and it is inherently reciprocal, a give-and-take proposition. In other words, it exactly represents the basic rhythm of all healthy relationships. Not to mention is triggers sexual excitation in adults.
But tickling declines dramatically in middle age. People begin a gradual "tactile disengagement," reports Dr. Provine. Tickle, touch, and play, so critically intertwined, all go into retreat, although these behaviors are at the root of our emotional being.
So the next time you have an argument with your mate, don't walk out of the room and slam the door. Try tickling your partner instead. (Most ticklish areas, in descending order: underarms, waist, ribs, feet, knees, throat, neck, palms.)
It won't make problems go away. But it can set the stage for tackling them together.
By: Hara Marano
Originally published by Psychology Today: April 29, 2003
And now this one I found most interesting. All those roman cartoons turned out to be accurate @.@
Tickling
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Tickling is the act of touching a part of the body lightly so as to cause laughter or twitching movements. It can give a mixed feeling of pleasure and displeasure.
The word evolved from the Middle English tikelen, perhaps frequentative of ticken, to touch lightly.
The sensation of surprise elicited by tickling protects against crawling animals and insects, such as spiders, mosquitos, scorpions or beetles, which may be why it evolved in many animals, including rats. However, the continued laughter produced by tickling cannot be explained with this evolutionary survival advantage alone.
It is also unknown why certain areas of the body are more ticklish than others, and it varies for different people. Many people find that their ribs are the most ticklish, while others find the soles of their feet to be the most ticklish. Other ticklish areas include the armpits, neck, stomach, and other sensitive areas.
Tickling is almost certainly a form of social interaction. One feature of tickling is that we do not laugh when we tickle ourselves, only when other people tickle us. This implies that the brain may have a different mechanism for responding to the two types of tickling. Charles Darwin theorised on the link between tickling and social relations, arguing that tickling provokes laughter through the anticipation of pleasure. If a stranger tickles a child without any preliminaries, catching the child by surprise, the likely result will be not laughter but withdrawal and displeasure. Darwin also noticed that for tickling to be effective, you must not know the precise point of stimulation in advance, and reasoned that this is why you cannot effectively tickle yourself.
The act of tickling has also been known as a method of torture, in that subjecting an extremely ticklish person to prolonged tickling can, in the end, be very painful for the victim. As early as Roman times, endless tickling of the feet was used as a brutal method of execution. Tickling as torture survived into the Middle Ages and Colonial American times, but to the lesser degree of being used as public humiliation. The stocks were a device which were specificaly designed to restrain a victim's bare feet, thus allowing passerbys to tickle torture the soles.
In the modern age, forced tickling can be found in the sexual fetish world of BDSM. Those who gain sexual pleasure from tickling are known to have a Tickle Fetish.
Researcher Sarah-Jayne Blakemore confirmed Darwin's propositions by investigating how the brain distinguishes between sensations we create for ourselves and sensations others create for us. Blackmore used robotic arms to tickle people and found them to be as effective as real people in provoking laughter. When her subjects used a joystick to control the tickling robot, however, they could not make themselves laugh. This suggests that when a person tries to tickle him- or herself, the cerebellum sends to the somatosensory cortex precise information on the position of the tickling target and therefore what sensation to expect. Apparently some cortical mechanism then decreases or inhibits the tickling sensation.
Washoe, a chimpanzee who learned to use the American Sign Language, has been reported to frequently make the sign for "tickle me" to researchers, similar to children who enjoy being tickled.
The idiom tickled pink means "pleased or delighted".
Hee. I didn't know ^.^;;;
