If you LOL on a tame joke, blame it on your genes, not sense of humour - Hindustan Times
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If you LOL on a tame joke, blame it on your genes, not sense of humour

IANS | By, New York
Jun 01, 2015 08:41 PM IST

If you crack up into a laughter in situations that people around you may not find too funny, it is in your genes, says a new study.

People who burst into laughter after a mildly humourous moment, even though everyone around them barely manages a smile, have it in their genes, says a new study.

The study that appeared in the journal Emotion finds that people with a certain genetic variant smile or laugh more while watching cartoons or subtly amusing film clips than others.

Those with short alleles of the gene 5-HTTLPR smile more than people with long alleles, the findings show.

An allele is a variant of a gene. Each gene has two alleles; humans inherit one allele from mother and one from father. "The short allele amplifies emotional reactions to both good and bad environments," says the author of the study, Claudia Haase from Northwestern University in the US.

The study combines three experiments from different Berkeley labs. In the first experiment, young adults were shown cartoons.

In the second experiment, young, middle-aged and older adults watched a subtly amusing clip from the film "Strangers in Paradise." The final experiment asked middle-aged and older spouses to discuss an area of disagreement in their marriage. The scientists videotaped the volunteers during the experiments.

Overall, 336 participants were included in the final analysis. The researchers collected saliva samples from the volunteers to analyse the 5-HTTLPR gene. The data from the three experiments combined indicates that people with the short allele of 5-HTTLPR show greater positive emotional expressions.

Specifically, people with the short allele display greater genuine smiling and laughing than people with the long allele.

People-who-burst-into-laughter-easily-have-it-in-their-genes-says-a-new-study
People-who-burst-into-laughter-easily-have-it-in-their-genes-says-a-new-study

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