Humor, laughter, and emotions related to joy have beneficial effects on health and many other aspects of our lives.
Unfortunately, science has not paid as much attention to pleasant emotions as it has to unpleasant ones. Much more is known about fear, disgust, and sadness than about the emotions that lift our spirits. Research into joy and happiness was not seriously undertaken until the 1990s, perhaps with the goal of understanding negative emotions in order to avoid or intervene in them. Humor has always been considered something trivial. Quite the opposite of what we are going to explore in this lecture: it is something very serious and worthy of investigation due to the enormous benefits it brings to our species. To understand it, we will explain the neurobiological foundations of humor and joy.
