{"id":523184,"date":"2026-06-28T21:21:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T21:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/523184\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T21:21:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T21:21:08","slug":"scientists-publish-extremely-serious-research-about-whether-tickling-apes-makes-them-giggle-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/523184\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Publish Extremely Serious Research About Whether Tickling Apes Makes Them Giggle"},"content":{"rendered":"

We love apes. We love that they\u2019re uncanny but pure reflections of our human quirks and foibles, at times silly, and at others sagacious. So what does an ape\u2019s laugh say about them? And what does it say about humans?<\/p>\n

Exploring these differences formed the crux of a new study<\/a> that documented laughing patterns between primates<\/a> \u2014 a very serious avenue of inquiry that involved tickling apes. For science, of course.<\/p>\n

The findings, published in the journal Communications Biology, revealed a rich spectrum of laughter across the species. Humans displayed the most variety, switching between giggles and guffaws, and changing up the tempo of their laughs. Apes, meanwhile, tended to stick with fixed patterns and tempos.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think we can say we are the masters of laughter,\u201d study coauthor Chiara De Gregorio, a researcher at the University of Warwick, told The New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can have a small, polite laugh in front of the Queen of England, and then we are in the pub with our friends, and we laugh so much in a different way,\u201d De Gregorio added. \u201cWe can even laugh in a way that communicates to the other person that we actually didn\u2019t find the joke they said funny.\u201d<\/p>\n

Loudly evacuate the air in your nostrils all you want \u2014 the researchers say this provides some intriguing insights into how our complex vocals evolved<\/a>. Laughter is a \u201cuniversal form of human non-linguistic vocal expression and, being shared by all extant great apes offers a valuable proxy for tracing the evolution of vocal control that ultimately enabled language,\u201d they wrote in the study.<\/p>\n

In their experiments, the researchers recorded the laughter of 13 young apes in captivity, including orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, and chimpanzees. Their humans were four children and no adults. (Perhaps because they\u2019re not yet self-conscious enough to change their laugh for an audience.)<\/p>\n

Intriguingly, when tickled, all species of primates, including humans, laughed in isochronous fashion, or at regular intervals, as if to a beat. Ha ha ha! The pause between each \u201cha\u201d was consistent. But this changed with laughter during play. It became less regular, probably because the subjects were moving around a lot more.<\/p>\n

The researchers concluded that this meant that tickling laughter provided an \u201cunaltered\u201d look at each species\u2019 natural laughing rhythm, and as a result, acts a \u201cwindow onto the evolutionary changes undergone by the phonatory-respiratory system of hominids,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n

Humans tended to laugh at a quicker tempo and were the only species to modulate their tempo based on the context, laughing faster during tickling than play. And our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, laughed faster than our most distant primate ones, gorillas and orangutans. That\u2019s no coincidence, as it shows an evolutionary trend in vocal flexibility.<\/p>\n

For social creatures like apes, the researchers note, being able to switch up your laugh is useful, conveying \u201csocially relevant information about emotional state, intent, and disposition.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLaughter is such an important part of our way of communication,\u201d De Gregorio told the NYT. \u201cIt\u2019s able to communicate way more than, \u2018I\u2019m playing and I\u2019m having fun.’\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers are the first to admit that the study is very small, so further work will need to bear out their findings. At the very least, they\u2019ve demonstrated that the way you chuckle, chortle, or cachinnate is no laughing matter.<\/p>\n

More on biology: You Are Not Prepared to Learn the Size of Neanderthal Infants<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We love apes. We love that they\u2019re uncanny but pure reflections of our human quirks and foibles, at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[220967,222949,61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-523184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-chiara-de-gregorio","tag-de-gregorio","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523184\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}