At the risk of sounding sexist, males don’t generally giggle - let’s establish that up front. (The only examples that I can think of are the Joker and Drew Carey…)
Teenage girls, by my lifelong observations, seem to giggle over EVERYTHING. (Unfortunately, some never grow out of it…not too long ago on the news, a middle-aged woman who just lost her home, husband and infant son couldn’t keep from “tee-hee”-ing throughout the 30 seconds or so.) I can understand looking at the positive side of life, but to incessantly giggle strikes me as mentally unbalanced. Any theories/comments? (Especially from females who do this.) By the way, guys don’t think giggling is cute at ANY age…I did have a girlfriend who used to do it “just to piss guys off”.
I used to work with one of these, I always felt that it was an attempt at, “I’m so cute and if I am cute everyone will give me my way and not blame me for anything because I am so cute”, kind of thing.
I theorize it has some correlation with how very little girls SCREEEEECH at the top of the lungs when they’re excited about something. Little boys don’t do that, or do it as much, do they?
All of my children (now grown) are boys. I can tell you, boys giggle. According to my parents, they giggled more than me and my sisters ever did. Their voices got deeper as they got older, at which point we could call it chuckling. They don’t do it quite as much now, because they’re large and in charge. So it can be suppressed, socially, but both sexes do it when young.
I’m trying to remember where I read this, but the memory it too vague: most laughter does not happen because something is funny. It’s a group solidarity thing. Much taping of groups went into the study’s researchers deciding that. If you get along with you co-workers, they will present comments in a certain tone of voice and you’ll laugh at it. They you’ll do the presenting and they’ll laugh.
Giggling would be a submissive form of this, or a pseudo-submissive form of this. I’m guessing that women who giggle either are more likely to be in non-dominant positions or have social imprinting that supports the display. And, of course, women have higher pitched voices, which will always be perceived as less dominant and therefor more giggle-like.
And I’ll agree that people often laugh under stress. That’s when you’d be feeling the need for group support and that sort of laughter is asking to be included into a group and protected.
Little boys don’t do the high-pitched scream as much, but they do bellow and shout everything at the tops of their lungs more frequently than little girls. The little girls I know are much better at using “inside voices” while the little boys are more likely to forget that their request to go to the bathroom doesn’t need to fill the room. As a whole, though, little kids are just plain loud.
My dad will say something terrible about someone or something (sometimes the person he’s talking to) and then force out a laugh, as if to make it seem not as bad. Remember the paramilitia gun nut in Bowling for Columbine who Mr. Moore interviewed in the guy’s house and who would say something really wacko about the government and then force out a laugh? Just like that. It’s really creepy.
I think the giggling is evenly spread between the sexes, we just call it different things depending on who’s giggling. Like someone else said above - a lower-pitched giggle is more often called a chuckle. As a recent example, I spent three hours in a bus with a gang of teen boys a few days ago. There was no end to the (often manic) giggling.
I agree. I’m a male and I was prone to nervous giggling at times as a teenager (and I wasn’t alone among my male friends in this). It usually came upon me at times when I knew it would be disastrous to giggle, and that alone would be enough to bring it on. (As a young soldier on the parade ground, at a funeral, etc., the more inappropriate the harder it was to stop).
Yup. I’ve known men who laughed under stress. Maybe men don’t giggle, but the nervous mechanism is the same.
Middlebro’s childhood screeches were high-pitched and loud enough to send out poor canary into epileptic-style fits on the floor of its cage. lobotomyboy63, often when I laugh real hard (my-sides-hurt hard), I feel hot - sometimes I even sweat. Which is kind of weird, as I can be out in 40C and not break into a sweat. The fanning is an instinctive response to cool down (it doesn’t quite make rational sense, since I’m probably not hot to a thermometer, but I do feel hot).
I used to work with a guy who would laugh in the same places that some people say “you know” or “umm.” Think of Dr. Hibbert on The Simpsons. He was very irritating to be around…
No one can ever say men and women are different about anything around here.
Giggling Christ on a giggle stick. . .no one is saying “why do women like to be irrational?” It’s f’n giggling. I swear if someone said “why do women get pre-menopausal”, someone would say, “I know a lot of men who get cranky every month and no one blames it on their hormones.”
No shit SOME men giggle. No sane person who pays attention think that boys, as a group, giggle as much as girls do, and it’s not a question of semantics.
Anyway, for anyone really interested in laughter, there was a great podcast recently by the radiolab people on the subject, and a female researcher actually touched on the notion of giggling girls (THE HORROR). The male host actually asked her (paraphrasing) “aren’t you playing into the stereotype of the giggling girls” and the researchers response was basically, “well, whatcha gonna do?”
And, yes, apparently rats laugh, and can get addicted to tickling, if anyone was wondering about that.