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Joy is a survival instinct
Joy lifts people
Joy is an uplift that pulls a person up from feeling stuck, sad, or hopeless, which is why people can be lifted by good things at all. When two people laugh together, their brains start to synchronize. The body and brain are wired for that kind of closeness because it is hard to be human.
Joy in hard places
Some of the most striking joy reports come from the worst places. One was from a person caring for a spouse through chemotherapy, a messy and gross job, who felt so much love and sense of mattering that she could do it for the rest of her life. Another was from a student in a bomb shelter who had never felt so close to other human beings and called it one of the most joyful experiences of his life. Nobody would describe either as a happy moment.
Joy during war
Students joining a joy class from war zones answer the question of whether joy is irresponsible in the middle of a war. Their answer is that this is why joy is needed, because life is so uncontrollable. Even there, a part of a person can still find things to laugh about, connect with others, and notice beauty.
How do two people's brains start to synchronize?
Researchers measure this with hyperscanning, which records brain activity from two people at the same time. Uri Hasson and colleagues at Princeton reported in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a listener's brain activity mirrored a speaker's with a short delay while a story was told. The stronger the coupling, the better the listener understood the story. The pattern vanished when the speaker used a language the listener did not know.
Why can joy show up in the worst moments?
Psychologist Susan Folkman at the University of California, San Francisco, studied men caring for partners who were dying of AIDS in the 1990s. In a 1997 paper in Social Science and Medicine she reported that the caregivers described frequent positive emotions alongside heavy distress. Those moments often came from small things, such as a shared joke, a meaningful act of care, or a sense of having done something well. The finding led her to add positive emotion to her influential model of how people cope with stress.
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