What about chuckling at a joke you didn’t think was funny or even understand? The list goes on and on when we’re talking about situations when we laugh, but they don’t have anything to do with something being funny. Why do we do it?

Laughing in the awkward, negative sense often helps us deal with things that mostly stem from fear. Dr. Margee Kerr, a sociologist from the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in the study of fear and wrote a book called, "Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear," says that “we laugh at things like this because they violate our expectations.”

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