From a scientific standpoint, what is the purpose of laughter?

jesusfags

Break of tension, empathy, or just amusement
All social shit to get friends with people and show were you are in the hierarchy around

It probably evolved as a mutation of crying, given they both share a ton of physical symptoms. My intuition is that crying is a result of strong emotion, replacing fight-or-flight's evolutionary role and effectively forcing us to acknowledge each other as sapient. I'm not an evolutionary psychologist though, so don't take my word for it.

Why is it exactly that a smile face shape is used to express laughter, and not some other face expression, for example aggressive eyes or sticking out your tongue or whatever?

What?
Most people use this face.

Well hard question as expressing joy change to specie to specie

Maybe it is random, but some expressions are universal, aggressiveness for example:
>Tension of entire body(getting ready to do and receive damage)
>Blood starts flowing to were it must to a fight(that is why common puking and shit like that)
>Eyes open and locked on target
>Mouth closed really tight(or really open if you intend to use as a weapon)

Basically shaping your body as an armor and the certain parts as a weapon(in humans we usually close hands[not in some cultures] and almost universally mouth[to protect teeth and shit])

If you look closely an smile of amusement is the opposite of that...
>Your body usually gets open and relaxed
>Teeth are showed(except in asia)
>Palms are open
>Usually break visual contact
>Eyes will close a little bit or completely

Basically you get pretty accessible to an attacker, the difference between an tension laughter and an empathy/amusement

Is that you were stressed and are using laughs to release the stress, but everything pretty much remains the same

Continuing sticking out the tongue in most culture is related to an insult...

In Freud theories they say it is because it reminds a phallic symbol, in evolutionary psychology they say because showing and dangling your dick was an form of insult.

After clothes, those things changed

I think it started like a physical release (same as crying) since joy and sadness are such strong emotions; and from our social nature evolved till became a complex expression

>Thinks the idea of qualia is primarily held by Christians
Don't read much outside science do you

Hey, vsause, Michael here

Many animals laugh when tickled, it provides feedback to the other member of the social group strengthening bonds. It is also play behavior, the animal will try to resist tickling of sensitive parts of their body.

Chimpanzees laugh when they hear others laughing so apparently in apes the behavior became connected with other social stimuli.

Human verbal humor is a bit of a mystery, a valid theory would need to discern between instinctive and learned responses and provide a feasible explanation for each step of the proposed mechanism, as opposed to saying something like "debugging is useful and we laugh when we debug something so we evolved to enjoy debugging just because".

LAets test it. Hahahah funny post boy. Here, i dont know.

It's basically a non-verbal way of saying "something (unexpected) happened, but I'm/we're okay."

It's a way for a group to reassure itself that a situation is safe, or acceptable, despite a seeming ambiguity.

>i am butthurt

so we can post kek

Scientific, there is no purpose, there can only be benefits and/or disadvantages.
Because nature has no purpose, she just reacts on the situation.