Lewis Jacobs / Lewis Jacobs/NBC

We'll miss you most of all, Abed.

If you, like "Community's" Abed, sometimes have a hard time differentiating between TV and real life, we have some sad news for you. 

NBC just announced its midseason lineup -- a schedule that does not include the low-rated but much-loved "Community." (Aaand here's where we must say: Msnbc.com is a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft.)

Fans on Twitter are already freaking out, even though the show is not being cancelled, and will just be shelved briefly, according to The New York Times. But as we reported back in May, recent research suggests that if you're already mourning the loss of your favorite characters, you're likely not the only one. When a favorite TV show goes off the air, even temporarily, its absence has a real psychological impact on its most fanatical viewers. 

"We develop these relationships with certain characters," lead study author Emily Moyer-Guse, who's also an assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University, told me back in May. "We develop them over time -- it's actually part of the normal way we watch and enjoy TV," said Moyer-Guse. "We watch these shows, and we start to think of them like a friend.

"It’s kind of the same things that drive real relationships with people," she explained. Moyer Guse did her study during the TV writers' strike of 2007 and 2008, when so many shows were briefly off the air. These fans knew their shows were coming back, but they were still sad about even briefly losing them. More from our earlier post:

(Study participants) were also asked why they watched TV -- for companionship? To relax? To escape? Finally, the students were asked what they did with their newfound free time, now that their shows were off the air.

People who said they had deeper "friendships" with their favorite TV characters also said they felt lonelier in the characters' absence. And the students who said they watched TV for companionship reported the most distress related to their shows' temporary absences. And, no, people didn't use this break in the TV season to do crazy things like exercise, garden or read -- most said they just watched reruns, or surfed the Internet.

Are you already sad about "Community's" hiatus? 

Related: 

• Sources: 'Community' isn't canceled
• Losing 'Oprah' may lead to lots of lonely ladies
• Watching 'Jersey Shore' will make you dumber

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NBC.com

Hahahaha, laughs the live studio audience watching NBC's new sitcom, "Whitney."

Two new fall TV shows premiering this week, "2 Broke Girls" on CBS and "Whitney" on NBC, are counting on an old-fashioned sitcom standby to help them get chuckles and ratings: the laugh track.

Some TV networks and producers may love to use laugh tracks, and some viewers have grown to accept them as part of a program's background noise, much like the music or special effects used in a drama. Others -- including many television critics -- loathe the made-for-TV mirth.

But no matter your opinion of the canned ha-ha's, shows continue to use them because they work! They're meant to make the audience at home feel like they're part of a bigger crowd sitting in a movie theater or at a comedy club.

"We're much more likely to laugh at something funny in the presence of other people," says Bill Kelley, a psychology professor at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H, who has studied the brain's response to humor. Hearing others laugh -- even if it's prerecorded -- can encourage us to chuckle and enjoy ourselves more. In fact, a 1974 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that people were more likely to laugh at jokes that were followed by canned laughter.

Kelley's own research compared student's reactions to an episode of "Seinfeld," which has a laugh track, to those watching "The Simpsons," which lacks one. Brain scans suggested that people found the same things funny and the same regions of their brain lit up whether or not they heard others laughing.

While his findings may give reason to do away with a laugh track, Kelley still sees value in them. When done well, he says, they can give people pointers about what's funny and help them along. But when done poorly, he admits, you notice a laugh track and it seems unnatural and out of place. 

Some beloved shows, like "30 Rock," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Modern Family," "The Office" and "Glee," have said no to the laugh track, preferring the audience's authentic reactions to their humor and punch lines. They let viewers decide for themselves when and how much something tickles their funny bone.

But not all laugh tracks are created equal. Both "Whitney" and "2 Broke Girls" tape before a live studio audience and record the audience's giggles and guffaws. Even though they get a genuine human reaction to the show's jokes and humor, producers often "sweeten" a laugh track, meaning they edit it. 

Sound engineers might insert some chortles if a wisecrack fell flat or lengthen the time an audience spends cracking up. They may also tone down the woman who loudly cackles at the wrong times or the obnoxious guy who is perpetually in stitches.

For comedies that don't shoot live, such as "How I Met Your Mother," they rely on "canned laughter," a pre-recorded mix of tee-hees and chuckles that may sound phony. Hearing it may make you wish had a mute button for the synthetic snickers. 

Popular shows that currently dub in the yuks, whether they tape before a live audience or not, include "Two and a Half Men," "The Big Bang Theory" and "Mike & Molly." Past sitcom sensations, from "Seinfeld" and "Cheers" to "Friends" and "Frasier," also turned to some form of electronically enhanced giggles.

Do shows with TV laugh tracks make you yuk or say "yuck"? Can you tune them out or do they drive you crazy?

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Colleen Hayes / ABC

Emily Van Camp stars in the new series, "Revenge."

In Wednesday night's premiere of ABC's new show "Revenge," viewers met the seductive, sophisticated Emily Thorne, who returns to Southampton, N.Y., 17 years later to wreak havoc on her father's enemies. It seems she'll pick them off one at a time.

But in real life, is revenge really as sweet as it seems?

Actually, it is -- at least, it is at first. “When (people) exact revenge, there is genuinely a feeling of relief and even a release of serotonin and oxytocin into the brain that will make someone feel better,” says Mia Bloom, PhD, professor of international studies and women studies at Penn State University.

Even if the act of revenge is as simple as approaching the person who slighted you for a conversation, ignoring an email or sabatoging a co-worker's project, getting back at the person who's wronged you can be simply satisfying.

“This is everything from the person who cuts you off in traffic and you show them a certain finger on your hand or you beep at them can be a way of making you feel better," Bloom explains. "It doesn’t have to be taking an AK-47 and going in and shooting up people who have done you wrong.”

Bloom examined female participation in the world’s most recognized terrorist groups in her book, “Bombshell: Women and Terrorism”, slated for an Oct. 1 release, says women typically resort to acts of terrorism and suicide bombings for five reasons: revenge, redemption, relationship, respect and rape. Like the character in the ABC drama series, the violent acts often aren’t for personal gratification. Most often, they are altruistic or a way of avenging wrongs done to their relatives, communities or religion.

Although executing a revenge plot makes us feel better because of the chemical reaction in our brains, Blooms says it also has a dark downside.

“It creates a cycle of violence,” she explains. “The moment a person exacts revenge, there is a response and another response. Violence is never a solution because it becomes never-ending.”

Bloom, who interviewed dozens of women who committed or attempted to commit violent acts include Catholic women in Ireland, Hindu women in Sri Lanka and American women recruited to go to Iraq and Afghanistan, say after the seeking revenge people often experience high levels of guilt, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and other forms of trauma.

“They express regret,” she says. “A failed bombers will say I went to the market, but I saw kids, and they couldn’t cross that line. It’s very difficult to take another life, no matter who that person is and what that person did.”

When's the last time you got back at someone? Tell us about it, and how you felt afterward. Did it make you feel better? Or did it end up making you feel worse?

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Charles Rex Arbogast / AP

Bye, Oprah. We'll miss you. (Some of us more than others, suggests a recent study.)

If you're one of the zillions who is tearful over the thought of life without "The Oprah Winfrey Show," now you have a scientific excuse for your sadness. (You get a scientific excuse! And you get a scientific excuse! And -- OK, that's enough.)

A recent study showed that when a favorite TV show goes off the air -- even temporarily -- its absence can leave the show's most fanatical viewers feeling lonelier. In 'Oprah's' case, we're thinking the rather emotive women featured on the blog Faces of the Last Season of Oprah will be among those having the hardest time dealing with the loss of the show, which ends its 25th and final season on Wednesday.

If you're blue over losing Oprah -- or the characters from shows-gone-by like "Lost" or "Arrested Development" -- that feeling can be explained by a term coined in the 1950s by a pair of psychiatrists: You've developed a "parasocial," or one-sided, relationship with the people that live inside your TV (or inside your computer screen, if Hulu is more your thing).

"We develop these relationships with certain characters -- and it doesn't have to be a fictional character; it could be a TV personality, like Oprah," says Emily Moyer-Guse, an assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University. She's the lead author of the new study, which was published in the journal Mass Communication and Society.

Related: Oprah's 10 most memorable moments

"We develop them over time -- it's actually part of the normal way we watch and enjoy TV," says Moyer-Guse. "We watch these shows, and we start to think of them like a friend." Not to say many of us actually believe we're friends with Oprah or other TV personalities; but the people in the media we choose to spend our time with likely have qualities we'd seek out in friendships. "It’s kind of the same things that drive real relationships with people," she explains.

Back to Moyer-Guse's new study: Remember the TV writers' strike in 2007 and 2008? Moyer-Guse was missing her favorite show, "Lost," and wondered how others were handling the temporary loss of their favorite programs. So in the spring of 2008, she and former Ohio State graduate student Julie Lather rounded up 403 undergrads to answer an online questionnaire, all about TV.

They asked the volunteers about their "relationship" with their favorite TV characters, instructing the students to rate on a scale of 1 to 5 how much they agreed with the sentence, "My favorite character makes me feel comfortable, as if I am with a friend." Other questions were meant to suss out how much the show meant to the students, by rating from 1 to 5 how much they agreed with a statement like this one: "Now that my favorite television show is off the air, I feel more lonely."

Related: Imagining a world without Oprah

They were also asked why they watched TV -- for companionship? To relax? To escape? Finally, the students were asked what they did with their newfound free time, now that their shows were off the air.

People who said they had deeper "friendships" with their favorite TV characters also said they felt lonelier in the characters' absence. And the students who said they watched TV for companionship reported the most distress related to their shows' temporary absences. And, no, people didn't use this break in the TV season to do crazy things like exercise, garden or read -- most said they just watched reruns, or surfed the Internet.

Moyer-Guse's research didn't look at any shows that have been on the air as long as Oprah's has, but it's clear that the longer a person has been watching a show, the stronger their parasocial bond with the program and its characters will be.

"Part of what drives it is the predictability, and the knowing that this is someone that is always going to be there, and you know what to expect from this individual," Moyer-Guse says. "For a whole generation of the population, it’s something that’s always been on, every day."

Is there a TV show you're still mourning? Leave a comment telling us what it is, and why you miss it.

Follow Melissa Dahl on Twitter @melissadahl.

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NBC Universal

Looks like a fun "Office" party.

There's a reason certain episodes of "The Office" or "Curb Your Enthusiasm" -- or those painful audition episodes of "American Idol" -- make you so uncomfortable. A team of European scientists has uncovered a neural explanation for vicarious embarrassment, that cringe-inducing phenomenon of feeling embarrassed for someone.

Whether Michael Scott, the boss of the fictional paper company in "The Office" (or -- even worse -- his British counterpart David Brent), realizes he's humiliating himself or not, observing his awkward moments activates the region of our brains that processes empathy. That's what's making us squirm, according to the study, published this week in the journal PLoS ONE.

In one experiment, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brain's "pain matrix" -- the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula -- while the 619 participants read a series of vignettes describing embarrassing moments. (Yes, that "pain matrix" is the area that processes actual, physical pain, but previous research has shown that this is where social pain, including empathy, is felt, too.) Protagonists in the vignettes slipped in mud, walked around with their fly open, burped loudly in a fancy restaurant and wore T-shirts bragging about their sexual prowess. In other words, some realized they were being ridiculous, while others did not.

"Vicarious embarrassment was experienced regardless of whether the observed protagonist acted accidentally or intentionally and was aware or unaware that he/she was in an embarrassing situation," write the study authors, led by Sören Krach and Frieder M. Paulus from Philipps-University Marburg, Germany.

Video: Will Ferrell ready for work at "The Office"

The participants were also asked to rate how embarrassed they would feel if they were in the person's position -- and also whether they were feeling chagrined for that person -- and then took another survey intended to rate the participants' empathy. Not surprisingly, empathetic folks were more likely to experience secondhand embarrassment, proving what we already suspected: If you can't stand to watch deluded reality show contestants humiliate themselves on national TV, it's because you are just such an incredibly nice person.

By the way: We are delighted to report that there is a German word for this very specific feeling: "Fremdscham." It's the emotional mirror of the more-familiar German word: "Schadenfreude," the pleasure we sometimes feel from the misfortune of others.

Can you hardly sit through an episode of the British or American versions of "The Office"? Did you have to leave the room all those years ago when William Hung made his "American Idol" debut? Tell us your favorite example of experiencing secondhand embarrassment. (Or should we say,"fremdscham.")

You can find The Body Odd on Facebook, and follow Melissa Dahl @melissadahl.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.