Test how well you can tell real laughter from fake laughter; learn how scientists used a video game to teach children empathy; and learn what causes eye, hand, and foot dominance. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes: Can You Tell Fake Laughter from Real Laughter? — https://curiosity.im/2B4Lek2 Scientists Used Video Games to Teach Children Empathy — https://curiosity.im/2wOq8oU Plus, we discuss hand/eye dominance using the following research: More than 500,000 years of right-handedness in Europe | Taylor & Francis — https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1357650X.2010.529451 Left-handedness: Genes and matter of chance | Genetic Literacy Project — https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/08/29/left-handedness-genes-and-a-matter-of-chance/ Footedness of left- and right-handers | American Journal of Psychology — https://www.jstor.org/stable/1421487?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents Sighting dominance, handedness, and visual acuity preference: three mutually exclusive modalities? | Opthalmic & Physiological Optics — https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1475-1313.2001.00549.x What being right or left-handed says about your brain | Quartz — https://qz.com/659767/what-being-right-or-left-handed-says-about-your-brain/ If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Test how well you can tell real laughter from fake laughter; learn how scientists used a video game to teach children empathy; and learn what causes eye, hand, and foot dominance.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:
Plus, we discuss hand/eye dominance using the following research:
If you love our show and you're interested in hearing full-length interviews, then please consider supporting us on Patreon. You'll get exclusive episodes and access to our archives as soon as you become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/curiositydotcom
Learn about these topics and more on Curiosity.com, and download our 5-star app for Android and iOS. Then, join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus: Amazon smart speaker users, enable our Alexa Flash Briefing to learn something new in just a few minutes every day!
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/hand-and-eye-dominance-causes-real-vs-fake-laughter-and-video-games-for-teaching-empathy
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three of your favorite Curiosity Daily stories from the past year, to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, we'll test how well you can tell real laughter from fake laughter, you'll learn how scientists used a video game to teach children empathy, and we'll answer a listener question about what causes eye, hand, and foot dominance.
CODY GOUGH: Let's dominate some curiosity. [LAUGHS] That's stupid. Let's satisfy some curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Can you tell real laughter from fake laughter? Well, a new study says you can. But we're going to see how good you are at it. That includes you, Cody.
CODY GOUGH: Oh, boy.
ASHLEY HAMER: First, here's some background. Greg Bryant is a Communications professor nicknamed The Laughter Guy, since he's done so much research on the topic. He gathered 884 people from 21 different countries, including six continents, to see if they could tell the difference between real laughter and fake laughter. Nearly 2/3 of participants were able to guess right, even if they were from different cultures or spoke different languages.
Along with his other research, Bryant says that this supports the idea that laughter is something intrinsic to humans, not just something with cultural roots. Humans are social creatures, right? Well, in another similar study, Bryant found that listeners from different cultures could tell when laughs were shared between strangers and when they were shared between friends. So a laugh is worth a thousand words. Anyway, let's see how well you do. Here's some real laughter and here's some fake laughter. Cody, are you ready?
CODY GOUGH: I am.
ASHLEY HAMER: So here's number one.
[LAUGH]
Want to hear it again?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
[LAUGH]
All right. I'm going to say that was a fake laugh.
ASHLEY HAMER: You are right.
CODY GOUGH: Yes! Number two.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK.
[LAUGH]
Fake or real?
CODY GOUGH: That was definitely a real laugh.
ASHLEY HAMER: That was a real laugh.
CODY GOUGH: Ah ha, yes!
ASHLEY HAMER: Number three.
[LAUGHS]
CODY GOUGH: Wait, play it again.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, that's weird one.
CODY GOUGH: What was that.
[LAUGHS]
It's not the most generic laugh, but I'm going to say it's a real laugh.
ASHLEY HAMER: It is a real laugh.
CODY GOUGH: Ooh. All right.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah.
CODY GOUGH: Pressure's on. I got to go four for four now.
ASHLEY HAMER: All right.
[LAUGHS]
You want to hear it again?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
[LAUGHS]
I'm going to say that was fake.
ASHLEY HAMER: That was fake.
CODY GOUGH: Aha!
ASHLEY HAMER: Four for four.
CODY GOUGH: All right.
ASHLEY HAMER: Nice.
CODY GOUGH: Very cool.
ASHLEY HAMER: You can test your friends at home by sharing our full write up on Curiosity.com and on the Curiosity app for Android and iOS, where we've got a video with all of these laughter samples.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Challenge them, see what happens. A team of researchers used video games to teach children empathy. This is not a drill.
ASHLEY HAMER: You love this, Cody. Don't you?
CODY GOUGH: You know I was so excited about this.
[LAUGHS]
I saw the headline, I'm like this is going in the podcast. I'm a gamer in case anyone out there.
ASHLEY HAMER: I think they figured that out.
[LAUGHTER]
We've got a smart audience.
CODY GOUGH: That's true. Well, for this study, researchers from University of Wisconsin-Madison randomly assigned 150 middle schoolers to two groups. They assigned one video game to each group and had them play the assigned game for two weeks. One game was an experimental empathy training game called Crystals of Kaydor. In this game, a space exploring robot crashes on an unfamiliar planet, and you can only repair your spaceship by building emotional rapport with the local alien inhabitants.
The player does this by identifying the type and intensity of emotion the alien's faces are displaying whether it's anger, fear, happiness, surprise, disgust, or sadness. The hope was that as they played, the kids would learn how to better understand the emotions of their fellow humans. The researchers measured how well the kids in this group could identify the characters' emotions in Crystals of Kaydor, while the second group played the 2011 action role playing game Bastion, which is not designed to measure emotion.
Both before and after the study period, the researchers scanned the children's brains in an fMRI machine to help them measure brain connectivity, especially in areas associated with empathy and emotion regulation. During each brain scan, the researchers also had participants complete tests that measured how accurately they could empathize with other people. And the results showed that the kids who had played Crystals of Kaydor showed greater connectivity in brain networks related to empathy and perspective taking, than those who had played Bastion.
Some Crystals of Kaydor players also showed more connectivity in emotion regulation and improved more on their empathy test after playing the video game. Kids who didn't show an increase in brain connectivity didn't improve their scores on the empathy test though. So while video games could help some kids build empathy skills, it's not a cure all for everyone. I also want to note, I have played Bastion and it's a phenomenal game. And there's a moral decision you have to make at the very end of the game.
ASHLEY HAMER: Maybe that threw a wrench in their results?
CODY GOUGH: I don't know. I don't know. It's an incredible game and won like every award in 2011. So highly recommend that.
ASHLEY HAMER: Mmh.
CODY GOUGH: I'm not getting paid to say that. It's just a great game. I was reading this study I'm like Bastion, I love that game.
ASHLEY HAMER: Today's episode is sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
CODY GOUGH: Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk. You could get in a crash and people could get hurt or killed. But let's take a moment to look at some surprising statistics.
ASHLEY HAMER: Almost 29 people in the United States die every day in alcohol impaired vehicle crashes. That's one person every 50 minutes.
CODY GOUGH: Even though drunk driving fatalities have fallen by a third in the last three decades, drunk driving crashes still claim more than 10,000 lives each year.
ASHLEY HAMER: Many people are unaware that driving while high can be just as dangerous. In 2015, 42% of drivers killed in crashes tested positive for drugs. Not so harmless after all, is it?
CODY GOUGH: And get this, from 2007 to 2015, marijuana use among drivers killed in crashes doubled. The truth is driving while high is deadly.
ASHLEY HAMER: So stop kidding yourself. If you're impaired from alcohol or drugs, don't get behind the wheel.
CODY GOUGH: If you feel different, you drive different. Drive high, you'll get a DUI.
ASHLEY HAMER: Drive sober or get pulled over.
CODY GOUGH: We've gotten a couple of questions about hand and eye dominance. Our Patreon supporter Michael, thanks Michael, writes, quote, "What causes us to have a dominant eye. Is there any connection between handedness and ocular dominance or are they completely separate? Is there anything that influences ocular dominance or is it purely rooted in chance?" Unquote. And Kristen in Connecticut wanted to know, is right-left dominance mainly nature or nurture. And what is the difference between hand and foot dominance say about the way your brain processes information. Great questions, Michael and Kristen.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK. Let's work our way down. Is right left dominance mainly nature or nurture? That is, are we taught to be right or left-handed or is it a genetic trait. This one's easy. It's genetic. Family and twin studies support the idea that handedness is encoded in your genes. And even fossil records show that humans have been mostly right-handed for at least half a million years. For most people, handedness matches footedness. Although that's more common for righties than lefties.
The same isn't true of eye dominance. Your dominant eye has about a 50/50 chance of being on the same side as your dominant writing hand. What's interesting though, is if you compare a person's dominant eye to a person's dominant throwing hand, they're slightly more likely to match. Also, eye dominance has nothing to do with which eye has better vision. It's just which eye your body tends to rely on most.
What this all says about your brain comes down to a concept known as lateralization. Basically, which hemisphere of your brain is dominant and how dominant it is. Most people have a dominant brain hemisphere probably, because it would be counterproductive for both sides to compete for processing power. This bares out in the statistics. Children who are strongly right or left-handed tend to have strong lateralization and therefore, have well developed language skills.
Ambidextrous children, kids who use their right and left hands about equally, don't seem to have strong lateralization and that's been linked to atypical development of motor and language abilities. Now, what this doesn't say is whether you're right or left brained and therefore creative or analytical. That is a big old myth. Thanks for the questions. If you have a question, go ahead and tweet at us or email it to podcast@curiosity.com.
CODY GOUGH: Read about today's stories and more on Curiosity.com.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for more of the best stories of the year on the award winning Curiosity Daily. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
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