More About Laughter As a Displacement Behavior

Many professionals see laughter as a displacement activity, with the same function as the several other behavioral alternatives, previously mentioned — fight, flee, freeze, feed, fornicate, fool around, fidget, and faint. When a creature is anxious and threatened, the bad feeling needs to be pushed away, and those are some of the options.

Canine expert Patricia McConnell often draws parallels between dogs and people. When faced with two incompatible desires, both species tend to react by manifesting displacement behaviors. About terminology, McConnell makes some very interesting points:

Note that being “stressed” is not inherently a negative state. Stress, if defined and used correctly in the biological sense, refers to being pushed out of a state physiological homeostasis, either by something negative or positive. Being excited about seeing a rock concert is as stressful as being afraid of going to the dentist.

We have probably all heard someone say, “I drink when I’m happy, I drink when I’m sad.” The same goes for eating. To celebrate victories, people consume massive feasts. To console themselves for losses, they do the same.

The uses of laughter

Laughter can be not only a defense, but a tactic. How so? A good case can be made that the bully, on some level, feels threatened, which is painful. To avoid that feeling, she chooses “fight,” and attacks the world preemptively, before it can hurt her again.

A familiar cultural figure is the little guy — or the fat guy — who survives in prison or some other hostile environment by being funny. Real laughter is involuntary, and the ability to tickle a bully’s funny-bone has genuinely saved lives. The rationale even fits with the theory.

If a potential victim is given the chance, he may not have to choose between fight and flight. If he can get the bully to laugh, there is a chance that the monster will keep him around as the court jester. The ability to (1) see something funny; (2) laugh about it; and (3) convey that thought to the bully — it all adds up to a displacement behavior that saves a life.

It triggers a complementary displacement behavior in the bully. Something bugged her and gave her a bad feeling that needed to be dispelled somehow. Violence would have been her first choice. But the victim caused the involuntary reaction of laughter, and diverted the bully onto a different track, with something new to alleviate her malaise.

Independent researcher Brad Bowins addressed this topic:

Mature defenses, including humor, sublimation, anticipation, altruism, and suppression, represent well-orchestrated composites of less mature defenses. These mature defenses involve relatively minor cognitive distortions, largely consisting of an attenuation of unwelcome experience. Humor alters the content of a potentially disturbing scenario so that it becomes lighter and more tolerable.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Stress? Fear? Or “Displacement Behavior”?, PatriciaMcConnell.com, 07/26/16
Source: “Psychological Defense Mechanisms: A New Perspective,” ResearchGate.net, April 2004
Image by naomii.tumblr.com/Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Laughter As Displacement Behavior

In an essay (as distinguished from a scientific paper) Basil Hugh Hall proposes that laughter is a displacement response — or at least, a phenomenon that parallels displacement activities, in being an effective alleviator of stress.

He establishes that displacement activities are likely to result from motivational ambivalence, anticipation of change in activity, actual change in activity, or internal conflict. (How, one might ask, is motivational ambivalence any different from internal conflict?)

This is a very long and complicated essay, so we will touch on only a few points. Here is an interesting thought:

The concepts of laughing with and at individuals have arisen due to a misunderstanding… I do not believe we laugh at, or laugh with, anyone, as the disinhibition of laughter is an involuntary response to conflict during event processing on a neurological level.

But here today we are not going that deep. When something is used for a different purpose than evolution intended it for, that’s exaptation. Hall’s piece is titled, “Laughter as an exapted displacement activity: the implications for humor theory.”

It is apparent how this makes sense in a very basic scenario, like the classic banana peel slip. The victim’s arms fly into the air; he drops any parcels he might be carrying; he makes hilarious faces and noises, and winds up butt-first on the ground. Which all seems, to any modern human, sufficient reason to laugh. But it goes much deeper.

Our ancestors

When a person sees someone fall, it provokes an instinctive response. If one member of the herd goes down, the enemy might also take down another member — namely, you. The sight of a fallen comrade is perceived as a threat, so the body gets ready to fight or flee (or perhaps to do one of the other displacement activities that have been discussed in recent posts.)

Or — the body laughs. Hall quotes an Oxford University Press dictionary that defines displacement activity as…

[…] the substitution of a irrelevant pattern of behaviour for behaviour that is appropriate to a particular situation, especially as a reaction to a conflict of motives.

Now, it makes even more sense. For most people, watching someone fall involves a conflict of motives. I, the onlooker, feel an impulse to flee from the unseen enemy. It is countermanded by the altruistic instinct to stay and help. On the third hand, even though my brain instantly computes that there is no physical danger, helping would simply be a lot of hassle. Either way, I want to get out of there. So instead, I laugh.

Hall refers to experts who say:

[H]uman laughter has its counterparts in the laughter-like behavior in the apes, it is likely that the evolutionary forerunner of human laughter was of value in intraspecific interactions in some primate groups including our hominid ancestors.

In this scenario, a “staccato vocalization” existed before language. For a band of apes ambushed by a predator, it is appropriate to scatter in panic — but not if this is a false alarm. The theory is that the alpha male would decide whether the threat was legitimate, and if not, would calm the group by producing “an audible and contagious displacement activity” that was the precursor of laughter.

But the late Mitch Hedberg, a revered comedian, could set up and almost complete a joke, and then pause, and wait. In few microseconds, the audience would deduce the punchline, and break into delighted laughter. It was telepathy, genius, magic — a whole different level of transaction. Obviously, there is a spectrum.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Laughter as an exapted displacement activity: the implications for humor theory,” ResearchGate.net, June 2009
Image by Anno Málie/Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Responses to Perceived Threat

In order to recognize PTSD and depression in chimpanzees and apes, scientists use specific criteria described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But this only works in close confinement. In the wild, and in sanctuary sites, it is hard to measure physiological markers because the whole point of those environments is that animals are not interfered with.

In the wild, chimpanzees groom themselves and each other. This has nothing to do with hair styling or fingernail painting, but could be more accurately be called hygienic cleaning. It just means picking off parasites and other insects, dirt clods, dried skin, or plant debris. It gives them something to do with their hands, and serves important social functions. The information may seem gratuitous in this context, but the big picture is that possibly these animal investigations could reveal important secrets about how to prevent childhood obesity.

Like detectives or lawyers, medical researchers sift through tons of evidence in the hope of connecting two obscure facts and making some kind of breakthrough. The habits of non-human creatures may seem off-topic, but everything has to be noticed. Nobody wants future researchers to look back in scorn, asking, “Why didn’t they see that?”

Different strokes for different folks

When faced by the internal threat of anxiety or the external threat of attack, some animals engage in feather-plucking, paw-licking and hair-pulling, as mentioned in the previous post. Those weird behaviors (and no doubt others) could be regarded as grooming gone wild. It is normal, acceptable activity multiplied to the nth power, crossing over the line into self-harm.

While some species will react to bad feelings with self-soothing grooming activities, distressed chimps generally do not use grooming as a displacement activity. They are much more likely, when mentally/emotionally upset, to avoid grooming themselves or others. When confined, they may smear their feces around the environment, which could qualify as a displacement behavior.

Freezing as a response

We also mentioned how professionals in the field have speculated that there may be many more possible threat responses than previously believed. Depending on how they are defined, those would be fight, flee, freeze, feed, fornicate, fool around, fidget, and faint. Some are very relevant to human overeating; others not so much.

Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D., talks about freezing, an option that sometimes works for animals, being adaptive in many cases. Immobility can equal invisibility, depending on the degree of camouflage that nature has provided, and how the predator’s eyes are constructed, and whether the predator has a great sense of smell, and on whether something more interesting attracts the monster’s attention in the meantime.

When both fight and flight are impossible, freezing is an option. Even a spider on a wall is less likely to be noticed when still than when walking.

In a human we might call freezing impractical, based on a childish belief that the aggressor will become bored or distracted; or forget about, or literally be unable to see the victim. But as many children have learned from alcoholic or otherwise rage-fueled parents, immobility can sometimes buy safety. Dr. Seltzer says,

Under such unnerving circumstances, “freezing up” or “numbing out” — in a word, dissociating from the here and now — is about the only and (in various instances), best thing you can do.

In horses, a brain chemical causes the freeze reflex, but it can be deceptive. Senior instructor at Tellington TTouch Training Robyn Hood writes,

We often see a “freeze” response, labeled by some people, as the horse being “stubborn…” At this point the horse is usually holding his breath and when the rider insists the horse go forward, the horse shoots forward or explodes bucking.

Study of the defensive responses in both animals and humans inspired Karin Roelofs, Professor of Experimental Psychopathology at the Behavioral Science Institute at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands, to write,

Freezing is not a passive state but rather a parasympathetic brake on the motor system, relevant to perception and action preparation.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Trauma and the Freeze Response: Good, Bad, or Both?,” PsychologyToday.com, 07/08/15
Source: “The 5 F’s — Flight, Fight, Freeze, Fidget, Faint,” TellingtontTouch.com, Nov. 2001
Source: “Freeze for action: neurobiological mechanisms in animal and human freezing,” NIH.gov, 02/27/17
Image by Arend via Flickr/Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

More Teens Try to Lose Weight But Success Is Elusive

A report from the Centers for Disease Control indicates that weight loss aspiration is trending with the young. “More U.S. Teenagers Are Trying to Lose Weight Than in Years Past” is the title of a recent piece by Jamie Ducharme. Granted, a lot of kids approach this problem in healthful ways. But many are doing it wrong, which explains the subtitle, “That May Be Reason for Concern.”

The observation that “rising childhood and adolescent obesity rates likely play a part in the increase,” while it may not be totally in the “Well, duh!” category, seems rather obvious. But that is the nature of scientific reports. Authors in that genre are obliged to spell things out in the plainest language, so the people who pay for the information can benefit from it.

Among obese teens, it appears that the proportion of individuals who are actively trying to shed pounds has increased to around 75%. About 30% of obese boys are taking active measures to reduce, while about 45% of the girls are trying. Hispanic teenagers of both genders are more likely to be trying to lose, than their white, black or Asian counterparts.

What an expert says

Ducharme quotes Dr. Sarah Armstrong, to the effect that efforts to place the emphasis on overall health are not succeeding as well as the medical community would hope. This may be because the zeitgeist still generates plenty of social stigma, and teenagers are very sensitive to it. You can tell them that general fitness is the most important thing. You can suggest that, rather than speak in terms of losing weight, they concentrate on merely holding steady and not gaining for a few months. But all they hear is that they are too fat.

Of teenagers interviewed on the subject, four out of five claim to have tried exercise. Dr. Armstrong is a researcher in adolescent obesity at Duke University, and sympathizes with the efforts made by teens, who often sincerely try to cut their food intake.

The thing about adolescents, she points out, is that they are not particularly knowledgeable about methodologies. In pursuit of thinness, they are liable to take things to extremes, and pass from the land of reasonable and prudent measures into the territory of eating disorders and street drugs.

Dr. Armstrong casts her gaze beyond the unhappy patients and sees “the systems and environmental-level drivers of obesity.” She would like for schools to take a more active part, by providing better nutrition options and physical activity programs. The food industry is also regarded with suspicion.

Policy changes, expense does not

Not long after that article was published, Dr. Armstrong appeared in the news again as the lead author of new policy from the American Academy of Pediatrics. In October, the institution issued guidance based on studies suggesting that…

[…] bariatric surgery in teens can result in marked weight loss lasting at least several years, with few complications. In many cases, related health problems, such as diabetes and high blood pressure, vanished after surgery.

Even children who have not reached puberty have had weight-loss surgery that is considered successful, or at least better than not having it. Pre-teens account for fewer than 2,000 such operations each year. Dr. Armstrong always stresses the importance of the patient having full understanding of the future consequences which, admittedly, children are unlikely to possess. She says,

It’s a lifelong decision with implications every single day for the rest of your life.

Of course, for most of America’s severely obese young people, the question is moot, because the costs of preparation, surgery, and aftercare can easily mount to $20,000. Even in cases where money is not an obstacle, many pediatricians are still reluctant to recommend surgery. The new published policies, hopefully, will help them form a better picture of what to expect and what to recommend to their patients.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “More U.S. Teenagers Are Trying to Lose Weight Than in Years Past,” TIME.com, 07/17/19
Source: “More kids who are severely obese should have weight-loss surgery, pediatricians say,” LATimes.com, 10/28/19
Image source: Wellness GM on Flickr