Lectures and seminars Cognitive Neuroscience Club: Reconstructing Laughter and Smiles Across 13 Million Years of Hominid Evolution

Abstract

Laughter and smiles are arguably the strongest behavioural indicators of positive emotional states in humans and they also represent pervasive tools of social communication, help to develop and maintain social relationships, and affect individuals‘ health and wellbeing. It, thus, may not come to a surprise that these important behaviours are deeply rooted in human biology. More specifically, empirical research on hominids suggests that laughter and smiles are evolutionarily continuous, going back to at least the past 13 million years. As a result, an in-depth evaluation of laughter and smiles in great apes may provide a better understanding of why humans, a highly social-cognitive species, behave the way they do. This talk explores how laughter and smiles evolved from ancestral apes by assessing the form and function of these expressions within their natural contexts – leading to the Complexity and Continuity Hypothesis of Laughter and Smiles, which proposes that these fundament behaviours were already used in complex and positive ways by ancestral apes as part of their everyday social communication, before they became pervasive social tools of humans.