Laughing and Crying 
have for the moment inspired you with, 
are not such as would lead you to 
rejoice in any indignity offered them; 
but rather, such as would make you 
resent the indignity. And now, while 
you are contemplating the reconciliation 
with a pleasurable sympathy, there 
appears from behind the scenes a tame 
kid, which, having stared round at the 
audience, walks up to the lovers and 
sniffs at them. You cannot help joining 
in the roar which greets this contretemps. 
Inexplicable as is this irresistible burst 
on the hypothesis of a pleasure in 
escaping from mental restraint; or on 
the hypothesis of -a pleasure from 
relative increase in_ self-importance, 
when witnessing the humiliation of 
others; it is readily explicable if we 
consider what, in such a case, must 
become of the feeling that existed at the 
moment the incongruity arose. <A large 
mass of emotion had been produced; or, 
to speak in physiological language, a 
large portion of the nervous system 
was in a state of tension. There was 
also great expectation with respect to 
the further evolution of the scene—a 
quantity of vague, nascent thought 
and emotion, into which the existing 
quantity of thought and emotion was 
about to pass. 
A DIVERSION OF ENERGY 
“Had there been no interruption, the 
body of new ideas and feelings next 
excited, would have sufficed to absorb 
the whole of the liberated nervous 
energy. But now, this large amount of 
nervous energy, instead of being allowed 
to expend itself in producing an equiv- 
alent amount of new thoughts and 
emotions which were nascent, is sud- 
denly checked in its flow. The channels 
along which the discharge was about to 
take place, are closed. The new channel 
opened—that afforded by the appear- 
ance and proceedings of the kid—is a 
small one; the ideas and feclings sug- 
gested are not numerous and massive 
enough to carry off the nervous energy 
to be, expended: The -éxcess* must 
therefore discharge itself in some other 
direction; and in the way already 
explained, there results an efflux through 
the motor nerves to various classes of 
the muscles, producing the half-convul- 
sive actions we term laughter.”’ 
285 
As he goes on to point out, this line 
of explanation (properly modified in 
the light of more recent psychology) 
will explain the fact that, in a greup of 
persons, some will laugh at a given 
incident and others will not. It is, in 
some cases at least, because the amount 
of emotion present varied in the differ- 
ent persons; some required physical 
action to relieve their feelings; others 
had no feelings to relieve. 
In sum, then, we know that, in emo- 
tion, the ductless glands at once pour 
out an unusual amount of secretions, to 
prepare the body for an emergency that 
is supposed to be near. These secre- 
tions cannot be recalled; and if the 
emergency does not bring physical 
action to use them up, they must be 
burned up as waste material, at some 
expense to the bodily mechanism. To 
obviate this, the muscular activity of 
laughter has therefore been evolved to 
use up these surplus fuels, when they 
are not needed for the purpose for which 
they were produced; and thus the body 
is relieved of them without any damage. 
“Crying, like laughter,” Dr. Crile 
continues, “is always preceded by a 
stimulation to some motor action which 
may or may not be performed. If a 
mother is anxiously watching the course 
of a serious illness of her child and if, 
in caring for it, she is stimulated to the 
utmost to perform motor acts, she will 
continue in a state of motor tenseness 
until the child recovers or dies. If 
relief is sudden, as in a crisis of pneu- 
monia, and the mother is not exhausted, 
she will easily laugh; if tired, she may 
cry. If death occurs, the stimulus to 
“motor -acts is suddenly withdrawn and 
she then cries aloud, and performs 
many motor acts as a result of the 
intense stimulus to motor activity 
which is no longer needed in the 
physical care of her child. With this 
clue we can find the explanation of 
many phenomena. We can understand 
why laughter and crying are so fre- 
quently interchangeable; why they often 
blend and why either gives a sense of 
reliel.” 
Laughter and crying, in short, are 
two forms of the same mechanism—a 
human safety valve to prevent the 
results of emotion from injuring the 
body. 
