We tend to think of laughter as a social performance — the audible signal that something is funny, the punctuation on a joke well received. Even people who study emotion professionally can drift into treating laughter as essentially expressive, as the outward visible surface of an inner state. But a growing body of research is [...] The post Laughter activates many of the same brain reward circuits as food and sex, and a 2025 study finds it measurably lowers cortisol and may restructure how the