The Art of Laughter and Tears

As I search throughout some site and within the realm of my very mind I ponder on what I should write about. I remember that just minutes before I saw the picture of those two clowns. You know the ones with the laughter adjacent to the other one crying. Thus, this very question came to my mind. How do we laugh and cry; not only psychologically but also physiologically. This question  lead to my next blog concerning laughter and crying. What cause theses two phenomenon. What purpose do they serve? Lastly, do they bring some sort of benefit to us as humans and a society as a whole?

Crying is a more complicated process than one would at first imagine. First of all, there are three different types of tears. Basal tears keep our eyes lubricated constantly. The second type is reflex tears, which are produced when our eyes get irritated, like with onions or when something gets into our eyes. The third kind of tear is produced when the body reacts emotionally to something. Each type of tear contains different amounts of chemical proteins and hormones. Some neurologist have  encountered that the tears brought by emotional triggers contain higher levels of manganese and the hormone prolactin, and this contributes in a reduction of both of these in the body; thus it’s a reactionary tool against depression.

When emotions affect us, the nervous system stimulates the cranial nerve, in the brain and this sends signals to the neurotransmitters to the tear glands. Thus, we cry .The largest tear gland, the lacrimal gland produces the tears of emotion and reflex. Many believe that the body, in times of emotional stress, depends on this gland to release excess amounts of chemicals and hormones, returning it to a stable state.  This leaves the individuals with calm after they finished the waterworks. This proves not only the essence of crying but also its benefits.

Now that we examine the first mask (crying), it time to makes sense of the second one (laughter). How is this emotion triggered? Researchers have discovered that within four- tenths of a second of seeing something humorous, an electrical wave moved through the cerebral cortex of the brain. If the wave took a negative charge, there was laughter. Many areas of the brain are involved in making us laugh. The emotional, the intellectual, and the sensory processing parts of our brain all play our role in stimulating the motor sections of our brain to physically make us laugh. 

There is an old saying that states that "laugher it is the best medicine," this isn’t some old anecdote conceived by some dumbfound mystic for there is some truth behind this claim.  First of all, laughter is a way of relaxing our muscles. The diaphragm, abdominal, respiratory, facial, leg and back muscles all get a workout. Some experts have stated that laughing one hundred times is equal to a ten-minute workout on a rowing machine, or fifteen minutes on an exercise bike. Laughter helps promote healing in the body by lowering blood pressure and increasing blood flow. When we laugh, the production of T -cells that destroy tumors and viruses increase, and more Gamma interferon (which is a disease fighting protein) is released. Laughter has been found to reduce the amount of stress hormones and help us cope with our lives better. When others laugh, sometimes the laughter can be contagious. Everyone around them starts to laugh. Some people, when stressed or upset, go to a funny movie or a comedy club hoping to laugh all of their negative emotions away.

This is actually something that I myself experienced a while back when I was with some friend going to the movie theatre. I’ve just saw someone that I recently got over with and saw her on a date. Not a great start and I began to think about it a bit, and thought to myself I wasn’t going to enjoy the movie due to what I just saw. However when I went to see the movie, its constant moments of sheer comedy and cheap jokes triggered my instinctual amicability for theses senseless jokes and made me forget about what occurred a few hours ago. Comedy for me was the avail I soughed for and it indeed served me well.

Our physiological and emotional well-being isn’t the only things that benefit from the act of laughter. According to some researchers it I also a social tool applied in communication.  Laughter is used in making and strengthening our connections with each other. People that are more dominant, like a boss or head of a family, for example, use more humor than others around them. Laughter becomes away to show power over the emotional climate of the group. When someone is embarrassed or threatened, laughter can defuse the situation by deflecting the anger and accepting humiliation. 

To conclude this post, it seems that laughter as well as crying can be explained by not only psychological but also physiological means. There are various benefits from both emotions. They both seem to benefit the individual emotionally buy soothing emotional stresses cause by the strives of life. They both make great medicines in curing these emotional aches. These emotions even play a vital role in social psychology as a tool to demonstrate power or to appease the moment. Without these two emotions the world would truly loose something worthy of being a human trait. 

Work Cited:

"A Big Mystery: Why do we laugh?" 27 May 1999.

Frey, William H. II. Ph.D. Crying: The Mystery of Tears. Minnesota: Winston Press, 1985.

Greig, John Young Thomson M.A. The Psychology of Laughter and Comedy.

New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1969.

"How Laughter Works." 13 April 2000.

Lutz, Tom. Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears. New York:

W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Moody, Raymond A. Jr., M.D. Laugh after Laugh. Florida: Headwaters Press, 1978.

"Why we laugh."12 March 2000.

Chemistry of Love!

My apologies for not doing any blogs since the first two, but sadly I’ve just gone from a not so good experience involving love. Thus, it came to me!

Hey! Why not make this my new blog? And that how this blog came to be.

So we all have fallen in love at least once in your brief lives. Whether it was in kindergarten or when you were a junior in high school, you fell in love profoundly. Your perception of life suddenly changed. You were not effectuated with this individual. Every time you were around that person you felt this high. You felt this deep and sudden connection that you thought was special. You practically became obsessed with that person. Then one day something happens and your left heartbroken. You try to forgive that person yet you can’t, they roam through your mind every second.

Well, as the field of the human mind, Psychology has research and analyzed what love was biologically. And the findings were enlightening as they found out the regions of the brain that correspond to it. An anthropologist at Rutgers Univ. named Helen Fisher conducted an experiment. His subjects were none only than individuals which just fell in love. Her scans reported that there was region in the brain that lilted up, called the tegmental area. This part of the brain is a base for creating Dopamine for the brains higher regions. Dopamine is that little chemical that is responsible for making you feel that feeling when you got an A on a ridiculously hard test, find a hundred dollar bill on the floor or you just found out your favorite team just won the super bowl. Drugs ad Narcotics can also provide the same feeling in higher doses. Thus then in turn, is responsible for why we love to be around them, because we are awarded when we are.

However Dopamine isn’t working by itself. For the exhilaration you get after winning a game or acing a test doesn’t last longer than a few hours, so there must be some other agent involve that retains that obsession which feels far deeper than any mere addiction and then we look at the nucleus accumbens. In the brains nucleus accumbens processes signals from the lower brain; these signals being dopamine, serotonin and a key chemical called oxytocin. Oxytocin is the same chemical that flows throughout the body of mothers when they just have a child. So when a chemical like these flows through the bodies of new lovers it is quite clear why we feel this utter connection with that significant other.

Lastly we have a pair of shrimp-like structures called the caudate nuclei, which is the storage center for learned abilities and patterns. Such skills include riding a bike, driving a car, swimming and any other motor activity that isn’t easily forgotten. Thus when a newly fallen lover comes into term, this love becomes stored in this region and thus has a long permanence which is why it is basically hard to forget about a certain person for a prolonged period of time.

These three regions are the predominantly areas of the light up when the test of newly in love couples was done though some scans. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all relationships and this indeed does change after the relationship has become establish for a more prolonged time. However for the time being these three areas are active. More of the chemistry of love shall be discussed on later blogs.

Work Cited: "The Science of Romance". Kluger, Jeffrey. The Brain: A users Guide. Time Magazine. Time Inc. New York, New York 2009

What Really Is Psychology

After reading my previous blog, I have come to the conclusion that I mostly wrote about the job of a psychologist instead of what psychology really was. My attempt was to get you interested on the concepts of psychology, not the career path. Thus, I am left to create another blog about what psychology is.

Have you ever wonder why humans do the things they do and how they do it? Why do we act the way we do? Why do we perceive things the way we do? Why can we remember things from when we were toddlers, yet we forget what we wore last week? Why is it harder to learn a new language as you grow older? Why and how do we fall in love? What is intelligence; can some be born smart or is it something that develops as we grow? Why do we love music so much? What is addiction, and can it be cured? What are mental disorders and can they also be cured?

All these and many other questions involving the brain are examined by the field of psychology. The study of psychology also focuses on ways that we can improve ourselves an society as a whole. Many questions that once were left to philosophers can now answered by psychology and the fields that it integrates to.

What is most interesting about psychology that is rarely seen in other fields of study is the self-discoveries that happen when you become familiar with psychology. The study of psychology is the study of you, me, and everyone you know and how we interact with each other. You learn so many things about yourself about your peers, and society that will leave you saying "oh. That why we do this".

So, if you guys have any questions about why we do something and how it is done, then you should definitely visit this blog to learn about these and many more interesting facts about yourself that you previously didn’t know.

What Is Psychology?

Ok, before entering this blog, we must first find out what is about. Well this blog deals with the study of the mind also known as psychology. For those who are not familiar with the science, a brief introduction shall be presented.
Well psychology can be said as the integration between Philosophy and Neurobiology. In dictionary terms, it is called the study behaviors and mental processes. Thus, psychology tries to examine and explain how we think and why we think as we do. “Psychology is both an applied and academic field that studies the human mind and behavior. Research in psychology seeks to understand and explain thought, emotion and behavior. Applications of psychology include mental health treatment, performance enhancement, self-help, ergonomics and many other areas affecting health and daily life."
Psychology embodies various interesting topics such as, memory, language, intelligence, IQ, mental disorders, nature vs. nurture, emotions, personality, human development, to name a few. Another thing to note is that psychology embodies so many things that it is almost everywhere you look at. Psychologists today know use more empirical scientific methods to understand, explain, and predict human behavior. Psychological studies are highly structured, beginning with a hypothesis that is then empirically tested. Psychology has two major areas of focus: academic psychology and applied psychology. Academic psychology focuses on the study of different sub-topics within psychology including personality psychology, social psychology and developmental psychology.
Being a therapist isn't the only thing you can do as a psychologist, you can be a consultant, advertising agent, counselor, criminal investigator, editor, employment recruiter, guidance counselor, human resource manager, journalist, physician, social worker, teacher, university professor, statistician and many other job titles.
These psychologists conduct basic research that seeks to expand our theoretical knowledge, while other researchers conduct applied research that seeks to solve everyday problems. Applied psychology focuses on the use of different psychological principles to solve real world problems. Examples of applied areas of psychology include forensic, ergonomics, and industrial-organizational psychology many other psychologists work as therapists, helping people overcome mental, behavioral and emotional disorders.
Well that enough for now, in a later blog we can discuss the history of this exciting field of science.

References:
About.com -Psychology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology

Lets get started

first of all, this is the first time im doing this so this is just a testing blog. Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3,. cool , i will try to write down my crazy theories when i finish them a post them here for whoever watches. since my thought a nd theories are everchanging i will try to keep my theories up to date. im going to start with cycles once im done with that one........................., cool.