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Ever Experienced an Uncontrollable and Contradictory Emotion?

It's a common enough experience that it's now been scientifically studied. Ever wept tears of joy, or giggled uncontrollably at a funeral? These inappropriate and oddly contradictory responses to stimuli are known as dimorphous expressions, which scientists now say serve a purpose:

...it’s our brains’ way of creating emotional balance when faced with overwhelming feelings.
“People may be restoring emotional equilibrium with these expressions,” Aragon said. “They seem to take place when people are overwhelmed with strong positive emotions, and people who do this seem to recover better from those strong emotions.”

My seestah and I had our own Chuckles incident two months after Mom died, when we decided to attend her Hospice's annual commemoration at a local church. After a few words we were invited to stand up one by one and call out the name of our loved one who had died that previous year.

We all sighed and murmured as each name was tearfully spoken. Then, after a long pause when no names had been called and it seemed about time to move on, someone else stood up and offered yet another name, which either jogged another person's memory or gave them the courage to speak out, and another string of names ensued. Another uncomfortably long silence was followed by a renewed roll call. It ocurred to me that people were starting to just randomly call out names of long-dead relatives just to have someone to talk about. During the next pregnant pause I leaned over and whispered to mimi2three, "My dog Spot." She snickered and quickly shushed me as she was surrounded by her peers.

Finally the roll call ended, and we were each given a lit candle with a protective paper cone around the bottom. We spread out in a large circle around the perimeter of the church and the leader then took us through what I couldn't help but begin to see as candle calisthenics. "Now hold your candle high above you to symbolize heaven...now turn around and hold your candle out in front of you to symbolize something something....now turn to the person on the right with your candle..."

I whispered to mimi2three, "Now do the hokey-pokey with your candle...." and she began to sputter, lowering her head so that her shaking shoulders and snuffling sounds could be mistaken for crying. I pressed on because I could, urging her to greater fits of giggles, but the final blow came when an elderly lady patted her shoulder and said, "That's all right dear, just let it all out."

We barely made it to the parking lot before we both fell about in great braying donkey-sobs of laughter.

I now know we merely experienced a perfectly normal dimorphous expression of overwhelming emotion.

That seeming polarity in responses to a rush of emotions is the brain’s way of keeping our emotional temperatures in the proper zone. Subjects in the study were better able to return to a neutral emotional state in a short period of time as a result of having paired seemingly conflicting emotions to certain stimuli.
Researchers also cited examples of aggressive behaviors accompanying positive feelings. For example, most of us are familiar with the sudden urge to pinch the cheek of an adorable baby, or wanting to, in the words of many participants in the study, “eat them up.”