[From Erling Jorgensen (2006.03.09 1420 EST)]
Bjorn Simonsen (2006.03.09,13:30 EUST)
Erling Jorgensen (2006.03.08 1225 EST)
And there may also be an anticipatory sense of
the tickling resolving quickly like an intentionally
(& cooperatively) produced error that is meant to
be quickly reduced that may contribute to the
laughter & enjoyment of some rounds of tickling,
sometimes even before the actual touching even starts.
Think of a child twisting & giggling as a finger
starts to rotate in his/her direction.
I dont understand what you say. How can a quickly reduced error
contribute to an emotion that leads to laughter.
First a clarification, I don’t see emotion as a causal feature that _leads
to_ laughter. Rather, laughter is one form of expressing a particular
emotion or cluster of emotions.
More centrally, however, I see different emotions as being correlated
with different patterns of how composite error is changing. (This is a
working hypothesis that’s open to change.) For instance, rapidly
increasing (composite) error seems correlated with emotions such as
fear or anger. Rapidly decreasing error seems correlated with emotions
such as joy or exhilaration. Bill, in his chapter on emotions, & Rick, in
his earlier response to your post, both emphasize the futher piece of
the cognitive interpretation of the event, and I’m not sure if I consider
that piece essential. In a sense, changes in composite error are already
their own (hard-wired?) interpretations, as I see it.
When we experience laughter, it seems that there is a gradually increasing
mismatch or error, followed by a relatively sudden reduction, as the
punch line resolves the joke & the (cognitive?) error that was carefully
built up. In a similar vein, “tickling” seems to be an enacted coordination
between two parties, where there is an agreed-upon increase in the
perceptual mismatch for one party (i.e., being touched in a way that
seems “too stimulating”), in the context of it “not going on too long” which
leads to a rather rapid reduction in the error. I’m thinking that it’s the
error reduction feature that makes for the enjoyable portion of a
tickling episode. And similarly, when the no-longer-funny tickling goes
on too long, it ceases to be enjoyable, but still has the spasmodic
expression of increasing error that looks like laughter.
I’m not sure if this conception holds. It’s actually quite a complicated
expression, this matter of laughter, the more you try to deconstruct it.
What helps to make sense of it for me is to look for how composite error
may be changing, and see if there are consistent aspects of emotional
expression that seem to be correlated with that.
All the best,
Erling
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