Laugh Your Way to Hope

Bonnano (pictured left) and Keltner interviewed forty-five widows and widowers who had lost a spouse in the previous sixth months.  Bonnano used these interviews as a baseline for following them in their recovery for several years to chart and understand their recovery processes (or the lack thereof).  Keltner used facial emotion/expression studies to predict potential recovery based on positive affect shown during those interviews.

The first finding demonstrated that positive emotions during early bereavement are not signs of denial, repression and later difficulties.  "Measures of laughter (and smiling) predicted reduced grief as assessed at six, fourteen, and twenty-five months postloss"  (The quotes in this post are from Keltner's book, Born to Be Good).

Such laughter and smiling took place during the conversations about life after the loss of the spouse.  This wasn't laughter induced by a joke or a funny movie.  This was pleasure and joy expressed during the process of remembering the spouse, the death, and life after loss.  The laughter and smiling wasn't in the absence of tears but rather in the midst of them.

The Culture of Bereavement Orthodoxy encourages (requires) us to get in touch with our feelings and express our anger.  That is regarded as healthy.  However, this study and many others have shown that such demonstrations do not lead to greater long-term health.  "Just as important, people who showed more anger were observed to be experiencing more anxiety, depression and disengagement from daily living, for the next two years," Keltner writes.

The people who laughed and smiled as they shared their stories were not unusual in terms of the circumstances of spousal death.  They were not suffering less financially or otherwise as a result of the loss.  They weren't overall happier people before the loss.  Nothing set the laughers apart from the non-laughers that would skew the results and save the normative understandings of bereavement recovery.  They laughed in the midst of the tears, and that predicted a healthier recovery path.

But why does laughing help?  It's the role of laughter as an emotional vacation that makes the difference.  "Metaphorically," Keltner writes, "laughers were taking a vacation from the stress of their partners' deaths, freed from the tension of stress-related physiology."  I remember so many times thinking to myself, "I wish I could just go and have some fun."  I should have done more of that.

Laughter is, however, more than a metaphorical vacation.  Laughter creates the capacity to consider alternative paths to the future.  So laughter is a hope-building behavior.  Keltner notes this capacity: "data suggested that laughter is not a sign of denial of trauma, as widely assumed, but an indicator of a shift toward a new perspective enabled by the imagination."  The laughers were the ones who could begin to see a new way into the future and who were freed up to imagine a different kind of life.

"Laughter was part of these individuals' shift in viewing the death of their spouses.  It was a portal into a new understanding of their lives.  A laugh is a lightning bolt of wisdom, a moment in which the individual steps back and gains a broader perspective upon their lives and the human condition."

If your bereaved friend or family member wants to go have some fun, be first in line to help make that happen!  If that person has lost the capacity for fun, find some gentle ways to help restore that capacity.  That's not denial.  That's a tested strategy for healthy recovery.