The Science of Laughing Through the Tears

The Atlantic:

Oriana Aragón was watching Conan O’Brien’s late night show on TBS when she noticed something strange: The fashion model and actress Leslie Bibb—O’Brien’s guest for the evening—began describing “a thing where if people have babies, I’m like, ‘Oh, that baby’s so cute, I just want to punch it in the face. Like, ‘That dog is cute, I’m gonna kick it in the head.’ I don’t know, I just want tosqueeze something.”

Aragón, a psychology researcher at Yale University, was intrigued, so she called her father the next day. “I told him about this actress that wanted to kick puppies, and he said, ‘Well, it’s not that different from grandma pinching your cheeks,’” Aragón explains. “All these similar situations where weird negative expressions come out … Had my dad not made that very flat observation, I probably would have let it go.”

Read the whole story: The Atlantic