In 1897, psychologists G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin described a "tickle" as two different types of phenomena.[2] One type is caused by very light movement across the skin. This type of tickle, called a knismesis, generally does not produce laughter and is sometimes accompanied by an itching sensation.
Physiology
James John Hill
Tickling results from a mild stimulation moving across the skin, and is associated with behaviors such as smiling, laughter, twitching, withdrawal and goose bumps.
The tickle can be divided into two separate categories of sensation, knismesis and gargalesis. Knismesis, also known as a "moving itch", is a mildly annoying sensation caused by a light movement on the skin, such as from a crawling insect. This may explain why it has evolved in many animals.[3] For example, a dog exhibiting the scratch reflex is an example of knismesis. When stimulated in the saddle region, most dogs will exhibit a reflexive rhythmic twitching of their hind legs. This reflex can be brought on by actions such as scratching, brushing, stroking, or even tapping the sensitive area. Horses also exhibit a response to knismesis, as they can be observed twitching the panniculus carnosus muscle in response to insects landing on their sides. Gargalesis reactions refer to a laughter-provoking feeling caused by a harsher, deeper pressure, stroked across the skin in various regions of the body.[3] These reactions are thought to be limited to humans and other primates, although some research has indicated that rats can also be tickled in this way.[4] A German study also indicates that the gargalesis type of tickle triggers a defense mechanism for humans in the hypothalamus conveying submissiveness or fleeing from danger.[5]
It appears that the tickle sensation involves signals from nerve fibres associated with both pain and touch. In 1939, Yngve Zotterman of the Karolinska Institute studied the knismesis type of tickle in cats, by measuring the action potentials generated in the nerve fibres while lightly stroking the skin with a piece of cottonwool. Zotterman found that the "tickling" sensation depended, in part, on the nerves that generate pain.[6] Further studies have discovered that when the pain nerves are severed by surgeons, in an effort to reduce intractable pain, the tickle response is also diminished.[7] However, in some patients that have lost pain sensation due to spinal cord injury, some aspects of the tickle response do remain.[8] Tickle may also depend on nerve fibres associated with the sense of touch. When circulation is severed in a limb, the response to touch and tickle are lost prior to the loss of pain sensation.[9]
It might be tempting to speculate that areas of the skin that are the most sensitive to touch would also be the most ticklish, but this does not seem to be the case. While the palm of the hand is far more sensitive to touch, most people find that the soles of their feet are the most ticklish.[9][10] Other commonly ticklish areas, in decreasing order of effect, include the armpits, the neck, under the chin and the ribs.[10]
Some evidence suggests that laughing associated with tickling is a nervous reaction that can be triggered; indeed, very ticklish people often start laughing before actually being tickled.[11]
Tickle fight
A tickle fight is a playful leisure activity[12] in which two people, or sometimes more, tickle each other to the point where one of the participants gives up.[citation needed] It can occur as a sudden outburst without consensus about it,[citation needed] or as a carefully designed challenge with clear ground rules.[13] Tickle fighting is similar to pillow fighting, in the sense that they are both silly and playful activities, usually not taken too seriously.[citation needed] Tickle fighting is especially enjoyed by young children.[14] Tickle fight should not be confused with tickle torture, which is an abusive and serious torturing method.[citation needed]
A participant in a tickle fight can be called a tickler.[15][16][17]
Social aspects
François Boucher – Le sommeil interrompu
Charles Darwin theorized on the link between tickling and social relations, arguing that tickling provokes laughter through the anticipation of pleasure.[18] If a stranger tickles a child without any preliminaries, catching the child by surprise, the likely result will be not laughter but withdrawal and displeasure. Darwin also noticed that for tickling to be effective, you must not know the precise point of stimulation in advance, and reasoned that this is why most people cannot effectively tickle themselves.
Darwin explained why we laugh when we are tickled by saying, "The imagination is sometimes said to be tickled by a ludicrous idea; and this so-called tickling of the mind is curiously analogous with that of the body. Laughter from being tickled [is manifestly a] reflex action; and likewise this is shown by the minute unstriped muscles, which serve to erect the separate hairs on the body".[19]
Tickling is defined by many child psychologists as an integral bonding activity between parents and children.[20] In the parent–child concept, tickling establishes at an early age the pleasure associated with being touched by a parent with a trust-bond developed so that parents may touch a child, in an unpleasant way, should circumstances develop such as the need to treat a painful injury or prevent them from harm or danger.[20] This tickling relationship continues throughout childhood and often into the early to mid teen years.
Another tickling social relationship is that which forms between siblings of relatively the same age.[20] Many case studies have indicated that siblings often use tickling as an alternative to outright violence when attempting to either punish or intimidate one another. The sibling tickling relationship can occasionally develop into an anti-social situation, or tickle torture, where one sibling will tickle the other without mercy. The motivation behind tickle torture is often to portray the sense of domination the tickler has over the victim.[20]
As with parents and siblings, tickling serves as a bonding mechanism between friends, and is classified by psychologists as part of the fifth and highest grade of social play which involves special intimacy or "cognitive interaction".[20] This suggests that tickling works best when all the parties involved feel comfortable with the situation and one another.[21] It can also serve as an outlet for sexual energy during adolescence,[22] and a number of people have stated in a study that their private areas were ticklish.[23][24]
While many people assume that other people enjoy tickling, a recent survey of 84 college students indicated that only 32% of respondents enjoy being tickled, with 32% giving neutral responses and 36% stating that they do not enjoy being tickled.[25] The study also found a very high level of embarrassment and anxiety associated with tickling. However, in the same study the authors found that the facial indicators of happiness and amusement do not correlate, with some people who indicated that they do not enjoy being tickled actually smiling more often during tickling than those who indicated that they do enjoy being tickled,[25] which suggests that the facial indicators are not produced in response to the same emotions as under typical circumstances. It has also been suggested that people may enjoy tickling because it elicits laughter as well as the feeling of being tickled. Social psychologists find that mimicking expressions generally cause people to some degree experience that emotion.[9]
Excessive tickling has been described as a primary sexual obsession and, under these circumstances, is sometimes considered a form of paraphilia.[26] Tickling can also be a form of sexual harassment.[21]
Purpose
Some of history's greatest thinkers have pondered the mysteries of the tickle response, including Plato, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei and Charles Darwin.[9] In The Assayer, Galileo philosophically examines tickling in the context of how we perceive reality:[27]
When touched upon the soles of the feet, for example, it feels in addition to the common sensation of touch a sensation on which we have imposed a special name, "tickling." This sensation belongs to us and not to the hand... A piece of paper or a feather drawn lightly over any part of our bodies performs intrinsically the same operations of moving and touching, but by touching the eye, the nose, or the upper lip it excites in us an almost intolerable titillation, even though elsewhere it is scarcely felt. This titillation belongs entirely to us and not to the feather; if the live and sensitive body were removed it would remain no more than a mere word.
Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin believed that humorous laughter requires a "light" frame of mind. But they differed on ticklish laughter: Darwin thought that the same light state of mind was required, whereas Bacon disagreed. When tickled, noted Bacon, "men even in a grieved state of mind, yet cannot sometimes forbear laughing."[28]
One hypothesis, as mentioned above, is that tickling serves as a pleasant bonding experience between parent and child.[9] However, this hypothesis does not adequately explain why many children and adults find tickling to be an unpleasant experience. Another view maintained is that tickling develops as a prenatal response and that the development of sensitive areas on the fetus helps to orient the fetus into favourable positions while in the womb.[29]
It is unknown why certain people find areas of the body to be more ticklish than others; additionally, studies have shown that there is no significant difference in ticklishness among the genders.[30] In 1924, J. C. Gregory proposed that the most ticklish places on the body were also those areas that were the most vulnerable during hand-to-hand combat. He posited that ticklishness might confer an evolutionary advantage by enticing the individual to protect these areas. Consistent with this idea, University of Iowa psychiatrist Donald W. Black observed that most ticklish spots are found in the same places as the protective reflexes.[31]
A third, hybrid hypothesis, has suggested that tickling encourages the development of combat skills.[9] Most tickling is done by parents, siblings and friends and is often a type of rough-and-tumble play, during which time children often develop defensive and combat moves. Although people generally make movements to get away from, and report disliking, being tickled, laughter encourages the tickler to continue. If the facial expressions induced by tickle were less pleasant the tickler would be less likely to continue, thus diminishing the frequency of these combat lessons.
To understand how much of the tickle response is dependent on the interpersonal relationship of the parties involved, Christenfeld and Harris presented subjects with a "mechanical tickle machine". They found that the subjects laughed just as much when they believed they were being tickled by a machine as when they thought they were being tickled by a person.[32] Harris goes on to suggest that the tickle response is reflex, similar to the startle reflex, that is contingent upon the element of surprise.[9]
Self-tickling
The question as to why a person could not tickle themselves was raised by the Greek philosopher Aristotle.[9]
Knismesis may represent a vestige of the primitive grooming response, in effect; knismesis serves as a "non-self detector" and protects the subject against foreign objects. Perhaps due to the importance of knismesis in protection, this type of light touch is not dependent on the element of surprise and it is possible for one to induce self-knismesis, by light touching.[24]
Gargalesis, on the other hand, produces an odd phenomenon: when a person touches "ticklish" parts on their own body no tickling sensation is experienced. It is thought that the tickling requires a certain amount of surprise, and because tickling oneself produces no unexpected motion on the skin, the response is not activated.[24] In 1998, Blakemore and colleagues analyzed the "self-tickle" response by using MRI technology to investigate how the brain distinguishes between sensations we create for ourselves and sensations others create for us. When subjects used a joystick to control a "tickling robot", they could not make themselves laugh. This suggests that when a person tries to tickle themselves, the cerebellum sends to the somatosensory cortex precise information on the position of the tickling target and therefore what sensation to expect. Apparently an unknown cortical mechanism then decreases or inhibits the tickling sensation.[33]
While the reasons for the inhibition of the tickling sensation during self-tickling remain unknown, research shows that the human brain is trained to know what sensation to expect when the body moves or performs an action.[34] Another reason may be the lack of awareness of many sensations arising from self-movement, such as not paying attention to one's own vocal cords. When we try to tickle ourselves by grabbing our sides, the brain foresees this contact between body and hand and prepares itself for it. This removes the feeling of unease and panic, causing the body to not react to tickling in the same way it would if someone else supplied the stimulus.
However, some people with schizophrenia have the ability to tickle themselves. Non-pathological individuals high in schizotypical traits also have a greater self-tickling ability than people low in schizotypical traits. This is suggested to possibly correlate with a less pronounced ability of these people to track and attribute the results of their own actions.[35][36]
Although some consensual tickling can be a positive, playful experience, non-consensual tickling can be frightening, uncomfortable, and painful for the recipient. Heinz Heger, a man imprisoned in the Flossenbürg concentration camp during World War II, witnessed Nazi prison guards perform tickle torture on a fellow inmate. He describes this incident in his book The Men with the Pink Triangle:[37] "The first game that the SS sergeant and his men played was to tickle their victim with goose feathers, on the soles of his feet, between his legs, in the armpits, and on other parts of his naked body. At first the prisoner forced himself to keep silent, while his eyes twitched in fear and torment from one SS man to the other. Then he could not restrain himself and finally he broke out in a high-pitched laughter that very soon turned into a cry of pain, while the tears ran down his face, and his body twisted against his chains. After this tickling torture, they let the lad hang there for a little, while a flood of tears ran down his cheeks and he cried and sobbed uncontrollably."
An article in the British Medical Journal describes a European method of tickle torture in which a goat was compelled to lick the victim's feet after they had been dipped in salt water. Once the goat had licked the salt off, the victim's feet would be dipped in the salt water again and the process would repeat itself.[38] In ancient Japan, authority figures could administer punishments to those convicted of crimes that were beyond the criminal code. This was called shikei, which translates as 'private punishment'. One such torture was kusuguri-zeme: "merciless tickling."[39]
In Vernon Wiehe's book Sibling Abuse, he published his research findings regarding 150 adults who were abused by their siblings during childhood. Several reported tickling as a type of physical abuse they experienced, and based on these reports it was revealed that abusive tickling is capable of provoking extreme physiological reactions in the victim, such as vomiting, incontinence (losing control of bladder), and loss of consciousness due to inability to breathe.[40]
"Different Types of Laughter Modulate Connectivity within Distinct Parts of the Laughter Perception Network." Dirk Wildgruber, Diana P. Szameitat, Thomas Ethofer, Carolin Brück, Kai Alter, Wolfgang Grodd, Benjamin Kreifelts.[ISBNmissing]
Related Research Articles
Humour or humor is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humours, controlled human health and emotion.
Laughter is a pleasant physical reaction and emotion consisting usually of rhythmical, usually audible contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system. It is a response to certain external or internal stimuli. Laughter can rise from such activities as being tickled, or from humorous stories, imagery, videos or thoughts. Most commonly, it is considered an auditory expression of a number of positive emotional states, such as joy, mirth, happiness or relief. On some occasions, however, it may be caused by contrary emotional states such as embarrassment, surprise, or confusion such as nervous laughter or courtesy laugh. Age, gender, education, language and culture are all indicators as to whether a person will experience laughter in a given situation. Other than humans, some other species of primate show laughter-like vocalizations in response to physical contact such as wrestling, play chasing or tickling.
In neuroanatomy, the trigeminal nerve (lit. triplet nerve), also known as the fifth cranial nerve, cranial nerve V, or simply CN V, is a cranial nerve responsible for sensation in the face and motor functions such as biting and chewing; it is the most complex of the cranial nerves. Its name (trigeminal, from Latin tri- 'three' and -geminus 'twin') derives from each of the two nerves (one on each side of the pons) having three major branches: the ophthalmic nerve (V1), the maxillary nerve (V2), and the mandibular nerve (V3). The ophthalmic and maxillary nerves are purely sensory, whereas the mandibular nerve supplies motor as well as sensory (or "cutaneous") functions. Adding to the complexity of this nerve is that autonomic nerve fibers as well as special sensory fibers (taste) are contained within it.
An erogenous zone is an area of the human body that has heightened sensitivity, the stimulation of which may generate a sexual response such as relaxation, sexual fantasies, sexual arousal, and orgasm.
An itch is a sensation that causes a strong desire or reflex to scratch. Itches have resisted many attempts to be classified as any one type of sensory experience. Itches have many similarities to pain, and while both are unpleasant sensory experiences, their behavioral response patterns are different. Pain creates a withdrawal reflex, whereas itches leads to a scratch reflex.
In physiology, a stimulus is a change in a living thing's internal or external environment. This change can be detected by an organism or organ using sensitivity, and leads to a physiological reaction. Sensory receptors can receive stimuli from outside the body, as in touch receptors found in the skin or light receptors in the eye, as well as from inside the body, as in chemoreceptors and mechanoreceptors. When a stimulus is detected by a sensory receptor, it can elicit a reflex via stimulus transduction. An internal stimulus is often the first component of a homeostatic control system. External stimuli are capable of producing systemic responses throughout the body, as in the fight-or-flight response. In order for a stimulus to be detected with high probability, its level of strength must exceed the absolute threshold; if a signal does reach threshold, the information is transmitted to the central nervous system (CNS), where it is integrated and a decision on how to react is made. Although stimuli commonly cause the body to respond, it is the CNS that finally determines whether a signal causes a reaction or not.
Goose bumps, goosebumps or goose-pimples are the bumps on a person's skin at the base of body hairs which may involuntarily develop when a person is tickled, cold or experiencing strong emotions such as fear, euphoria or sexual arousal.
Tickle torture is the prolonged use of tickling to abuse, dominate, harass, humiliate, or interrogate an individual. While laughter is popularly thought of as a pleasure response, in tickle torture, the one being tickled may laugh whether or not they find the experience pleasant. In a tickling situation, laughter can indicate a panic reflex rather than a pleasure response. Tickle torture can cause real physical and mental distress in a victim.
Knismesis and gargalesis are the scientific terms, coined in 1897 by psychologists G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin, used to describe the two types of tickling. Knismesis refers to the light, feather-like type of tickling. This type of tickling generally does not induce laughter and is often accompanied by an itching sensation. Gargalesis refers to harder, laughter-inducing tickling, and involves the repeated application of high pressure to sensitive areas.
Cutaneous innervation refers to an area of the skin which is supplied by a specific cutaneous nerve.
Group Aβ of the type II sensory fiber is a type of sensory fiber, the second of the two main groups of touch receptors. The responses of different type Aβ fibers to these stimuli can be subdivided based on their adaptation properties, traditionally into rapidly adapting (RA) or slowly adapting (SA) neurons. Type II sensory fibers are slowly-adapting (SA), meaning that even when there is no change in touch, they keep respond to stimuli and fire action potentials. In the body, Type II sensory fibers belong to pseudounipolar neurons. The most notable example are neurons with Merkel cell-neurite complexes on their dendrites and Ruffini endings. Under pathological conditions they may become hyper-excitable leading to stimuli that would usually elicit sensations of tactile touch causing pain. These changes are in part induced by PGE2 which is produced by COX1, and type II fibers with free nerve endings are likely to be the subdivision of fibers that carry out this function.
The axon reflex is the response stimulated by peripheral nerves of the body that travels away from the nerve cell body and branches to stimulate target organs. Reflexes are single reactions that respond to a stimulus making up the building blocks of the overall signaling in the body's nervous system. Neurons are the excitable cells that process and transmit these reflex signals through their axons, dendrites, and cell bodies. Axons directly facilitate intercellular communication projecting from the neuronal cell body to other neurons, local muscle tissue, glands and arterioles. In the axon reflex, signaling starts in the middle of the axon at the stimulation site and transmits signals directly to the effector organ skipping both an integration center and a chemical synapse present in the spinal cord reflex. The impulse is limited to a single bifurcated axon, or a neuron whose axon branches into two divisions and does not cause a general response to surrounding tissue.
Tactile discrimination is the ability to differentiate information through the sense of touch. The somatosensory system is the nervous system pathway that is responsible for this essential survival ability used in adaptation. There are various types of tactile discrimination. One of the most well known and most researched is two-point discrimination, the ability to differentiate between two different tactile stimuli which are relatively close together. Other types of discrimination like graphesthesia and spatial discrimination also exist but are not as extensively researched. Tactile discrimination is something that can be stronger or weaker in different people and two major conditions, chronic pain and blindness, can affect it greatly. Blindness increases tactile discrimination abilities which is extremely helpful for tasks like reading braille. In contrast, chronic pain conditions, like arthritis, decrease a person's tactile discrimination. One other major application of tactile discrimination is in new prosthetics and robotics which attempt to mimic the abilities of the human hand. In this case tactile sensors function similarly to mechanoreceptors in a human hand to differentiate tactile stimuli.
Hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy (HSAN) or hereditary sensory neuropathy (HSN) is a condition used to describe any of the types of this disease which inhibit sensation.
Although humor is a phenomenon experienced by most humans, its exact cause is a topic of heavy debate. There are many theories of humor which attempt to explain what it is, what social functions it serves, and what would be considered humorous. Although various classical theories of humor and laughter may be found, in contemporary academic literature, three theories of humor appear repeatedly: relief theory, superiority theory, and incongruity theory. These theories are used as building blocks for the rest of the theories. Among current humor researchers, there has yet to be a consensus about which of these three theories of humor is most viable. Some proponents of each theory originally claimed that theirs, and theirs alone, explained all cases of humor. However, they now acknowledge that although each theory generally covers its area of focus, many instances of humor can be explained by more than one theory. Similarly, one view holds that theories have a combinative effect; Jeroen Vandaele claims that incongruity and superiority theories describe complementary mechanisms that together create humor.
The somatosensory system, or somatic sensory system is a subset of the sensory nervous system. It has two subdivisions, one for the detection of mechanosensory information related to touch, and the other for the nociception detection of pain and temperature. The main functions of the somatosensory system are the perception of external stimuli, the perception of internal stimuli, and the regulation of body position and balance (proprioception).
Laughter in animals other than humans describes animal behavior which resembles human laughter.
A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the surroundings through the detection of stimuli. Although, in some cultures, five human senses were traditionally identified as such, many more are now recognized. Senses used by non-human organisms are even greater in variety and number. During sensation, sense organs collect various stimuli for transduction, meaning transformation into a form that can be understood by the brain. Sensation and perception are fundamental to nearly every aspect of an organism's cognition, behavior and thought.
As long as humans have experienced pain, they have given explanations for its existence and sought soothing agents to dull or cease painful sensations. Archaeologists have uncovered clay tablets dating back as far as 5,000 BC which reference the cultivation and use of the opium poppy to bring joy and cease pain. The Greek writer Homer's The Odyssey, written in 800 BC, features the character of Telemachus using opium to soothe his pain and forget his worries. While some cultures researched analgesics and allowed or encouraged their use, others perceived pain to be a necessary, integral sensation. Physicians of the 19th century used pain as a diagnostic tool, theorizing that a greater amount of personally perceived pain was correlated to a greater internal vitality, and as a treatment in and of itself, inflicting pain on their patients to rid the patient of evil and unbalanced humors.
Tactile hallucination is the false perception of tactile sensory input that creates a hallucinatory sensation of physical contact with an imaginary object. It is caused by the faulty integration of the tactile sensory neural signals generated in the spinal cord and the thalamus and sent to the primary somatosensory cortex (SI) and secondary somatosensory cortex (SII). Tactile hallucinations are recurrent symptoms of neurological diseases such as schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, Ekbom's syndrome and delirium tremens. Patients who experience phantom limb pains also experience a type of tactile hallucination. Tactile hallucinations are also caused by drugs such as cocaine and alcohol.
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↑ Newman B, O'Grady MA, Ryan CS, Hemmes NS (1993). "Pavlovian conditioning of the tickle response of human subjects: Temporal and delay conditioning". Perceptual and Motor Skills. 77 (3 Pt 1): 779–785. doi:10.2466/pms.1993.77.3.779. PMID8284153. S2CID38446310.
↑ Darwin, C. 1872/1965. The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray. (pp. 201-202)[ISBNmissing]
↑ Loftis, Fridlund; Jennifer (April 1990). "Alan". Relations Between Tickling and Humorous Laughter: Preliminary Support for the Darwin-Hecker Hypothesis. Biological Psychology. 30 (141–150): 201.
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↑ Simpson JY. On the attitude of the fetus in utero. Obstetric Memoirs, vol ii. Philadelphia: Lippincott; 1855–1856.
↑ Weinstein, S. 1968. "Intensive and extensive aspects of tactile sensitivity as a function of body part, sex, and laterality." In The Skin Senses, ed. D. R. Kenshalo. Springfield, Ill.: Thomas. pp. 195–222.
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