I wanted to find a correlation between a person's heart rate and the moment when they find something funny. I used a heart beat sensor to detect my own heart beats while I watched a recent episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, a show that will often make me laugh aloud. In addition to measuring my heart rate, I also jotted down the time stamp of the show whenever I found something funny or shocking, so not necessarily whenever I'm "laughing out loud".
I found that the heart beat rate seems to only change when I am audibly laughing. There were several moments in the episode when something funny happened, but there was barely a change in the IBI. There were also many shocking moments in the episode where I think I audibly gasped, but that also did not seem to affect the heart rate enough to be noticeable. The IBI also seemed fairly consistent, going down to about 300 ms whenever I laughed. The highest my heart rate got to was about 105 bpm.
After my test results, my conclusion is that the heart beat seems to change only during more physical reactions. I hoped to find a more clear correlation between the actual moment of someone finding something funny and the heart, but it seems like I might need to use a different sensor to detect that. I also wish to do the same test with media that are less comedic but still bring up emotional responses from the viewer.