Tickled until you can’t take it anymore. When my cousin wouldn’t stop, I went into a different head space. Stopped laughing and just lay there, limb, hoping she would lose interest if I stopped responding. Many children get violated like this. „You don’t really want me to stop, you’re laughing, you’re enjoying it“ is the gaslighting argument. I looked into the science on how happy laughter and ticklish laughter are actually not the same.
Perception of ticklish laughter
The vocal profile of emotional laughter may it be joyful or taunting is different from ticklish laughter. A computer can tell the two kinds apart with an 84% accurately (1). With magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) it is also possible to image how the different kinds of laughter are perceived in the human brain. An emotional laughter activates a part of the brain (arMFC) that helps process social interactions. Ticklish laughter on the other hand did not activate this part. Instead, the brain lit up in placed to process the higher acoustic complexity of a ticklish laugh. An emotional laughter therefore always carries more information (2). Important information that tells us rather our peers are embarrassed or having schadenfreude.
We can conclude that ticklish laughter is not produced in the same way as emotional happy laughter. Nor is it received the same in our brains. We are deceived by something that looks similar on a macroscopic level but is actually very different on closer inspection. As long a tickling is fun it’s great but if a child says STOP it needs to stop. Ticklish laughter does not an ultimate signal enjoyment.
Tickling is painful
Another way in which ticklish laughter is different from happy laughter is that people seem to also startle. At least at first and there is also a withdrawal reaction or even defensiveness e.g. arms press to the side of the body. And indeed, it was found that in order to be ticklish pain conduction neurons are required. Patients that had pain conducting neurons severed for chronic pain relief were no longer ticklish after the operation (3).
Socrates already noted that tickling is also somewhat a painful experience. Maybe we pursue is regardless of the pain because it becomes a bit of a daring game. The consequential adrenalin rush could lead to happy laughter which often does accompanies tickling during play.
Ticklish laughter is a complex phenomenon involving many layers of human behavior. For simpler people it is a perfect disguise for child abuse. Again, a lack of research and a lack of conversation about the topic lead to the socially accepted status of non-consensual tickling. During the research for this post, I came across the article The case against tickling. I could relate to the many first-hand experience that people left in the comments, it literally made me cry. It is so incredibly important that we heal from those adverse childhood experiences.
(1) Acoustic profiles of distinct emotional expressions in laughter (2009) D. P. Szameitat, K. Alter, A. J. Szameitat, D. Wildgruber, A. Sterr, C. J. Darwin
(2) It is not always tickling: Distinct cerebral responses during perception of different laughter types (2010) D. P. Szameitat, B. Kreifelts, K. Alter, A. J. Szameitat, A. Sterr, W. Grodd, D. Wildgruber
(3) Clinical and instrumental evaluation of sensory function before and after percutaneous anterolateral cordotomy at cervical level in man (1990) J. Lahuerta, D. Bowsher, J. Campbell, S. Lipton
