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THE LATEST NEWS IN LAUGHTER
"It doesn´t matter why you laugh. Even in small doses, it improves our overall quality of life. You can condition people to feel more positive."
Jodi Deluca, Ph.D., Neuroscientist, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Florida.
Dose yourself with laughter daily by sharing jokes with friends or co-workers, having fun, watching funny videos or TV, or reading humorous cartoons or satire. Seek out opportunities to share a laugh.
Laughter cuts health costs
New research in Japan has shown that laughter therapy is an efficient low-cost medical treatment that cuts health costs. Geneticist Kazuo Murakami considers that laughter is a stimulant, which can trigger energy inside a person´s DNA potentially helping cure disease.
"A laughing therapy has no side-effect, meaning it is an epoch-making treatment for clinical medicine," he said. "If we prove people can switch genes on and off by an emotion like laughter, it may be the finding of the century which should be worth the Nobel Prize or even go beyond that."
His research is published in the January 2006 edition of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, a US academic journal.
The ministry of economy, trade and industry believes that laughter therapy could be used as preventive medical care.
With the ministry´s financial support, Osaka Sangyo University in western Japan formed a joint venture with researchers, firms and doctors in 2004 to provide elderly people with a complete medical care program combining physical training and laughter therapy.
According to project officials, the 92 participants polled said their combined annual medicare costs fell 23 per cent after they joined the program.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/01/12/1136956307785.html
Laugh away the kilojoules
Having a laugh can be a kilojoule burner, scientists reported at the European Congress on Obesity. Researchers from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee monitored the heart rate, breathing information and laughter of 90 people locked in a room watching comedy clips on TV. Those laughing burned 20 per cent more kilojoules. Laughing 10-15 minutes a day would burn 2.2 kilograms a year the researchers reported.
Laughing helps arteries and boosts blood flow
New research suggests that laughter helps the linings of the arteries stay healthy and thus reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Michael Miller of The University of Maryland Medical Centre presented results of a study in March 2005 showing that laughter relaxes arteries and boosts blood flow. “15 minutes of hearty laughter should be part of a healthy lifestyle.” Miller says.
Before and after showing comedy clips to 20 volunteers he and his team made ultrasound measurement of blood flow and dilation. Arteries relaxed and blood flowed more freely for 30 to 45 minutes afterwards for 19 of the 20 volunteers.
When scenes from a harrowing video were watched, the artery wall constricted reducing blood flow in 14 volunteers.
For more information: www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7103
Laughter Therapy in Brazil
A Brazilian health centre is treating patients suffering from depression, stress and diabetes with ´laughter therapy´. Patients who attend the weekly sessions, at Fortaleza, north-eastern Brazil, are encouraged to all laugh out loud together. To help put patients in the mood, staff organise activities, such as paper fights and karaoke sessions, to make them laugh. Pensioner Aldira Rodrigues told Jornal Hoje: "I have been to many doctors and have never seen anything like that before. I found it weird at first."
Dr Jaqueline Sales said: "Laugh can help in the treatment of various conditions, especially those connected to depression, anxiety, hypertension and diabetes." Story filed: 15:05 Thursday 15th May 2003.
Laughter on the menu
if you have diabetes, makes sure you put laughter on the menu when planning your meals. Positive emotions such as laughter may help to control spikes in blood sugar levels after a meal. People in a study who watched a funny video during dinner had lower blood sugar levels after the meal compared to the people who watched a lecture video during dinner. Keeping blood sugar levels stable will help to ward off diabetic complications.
Laughter lowered the increase in postprandial blood glucose.
Hayashi K, Hayashi T, Iwanaga S, Kawai K, Ishii H, Shoji S, Murakami K.
Laughing aloud
Laughter is contagious. But to really share the benefits you may have to laugh out loud. A recent study revealed that voiced, songlike laughter elicits a more positive response from listeners than an unvoiced laugh.
Laughing out loud may help your friends and family members to share in the stress-reducing benefits of a belly laugh.
Not all laughs are alike: voiced but not unvoiced laughter readily elicits positive affects.
Bachorowski JA, Owren MJ.
We tested whether listeners are differentially responsive to the presence or absence of voicing, a salient, distinguishing acoustic feature, in laughter. Each of 128 participants rated 50 voiced and 20 unvoiced laughs twice according to one of five different rating strategies. Results were highly consistent regardless of whether participants rated their own emotional responses, likely responses of other people, or one of three perceived attributes concerning the laughers, thus indicating that participants were experiencing similarly differentiated affective responses in all these cases. Specifically, voiced, songlike laughs were significantly more likely to elicit positive responses than were variants such as unvoiced grunts, pants, and snort like sounds. Participants were also highly consistent in their relative dislike of these other sounds, especially those produced by females. Based on these results, we argue that laughers use the acoustic features of their vocalizations to shape listener affect.
Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203, USA. j.a.bachorowski@vanderbilt.edu
Hearty laughs
A recent study indicated that people with a good sense of humour and a propensity to laugh may be less likely to develop heart disease compared to people who possess antisocial, type A personalities. Meeting stressful situations with a sense of humour may be particularly relevant to heart health.
Doses of laughter may help relieve hay-fever symptoms
According to a recent study, fostering a happy frame of mind may bring allergy symptom relief. In the study, the allergic responses of study participants were significantly lower after viewing a humorous videotape than they were after viewing a non-humorous tape.
Researchers are not sure why laughter may alleviate allergic symptoms. However, laughter does reduce stress, tension, and anxiety, which may help strengthen the immune system.
Effect of humour on allergen-induced wheat reactions. Kimata, H., Journal of the American Medical Association 2001 Feb 14; 285(6):738.
Levity Defies Gravity: Using Humor in Crisis Situations©
A cartoon depicts a man, talking to the desk sergeant at a police station, describing how his house was caught in a storm, was washed of its foundation, slid down the hill, crossed the main highway, and ended up in the ocean floating away. The desk sergeant replied, "Okay buddy, I´ll just put ´No fixed address´."
Humor is one of the healthiest and most powerful methods to help provide perspective on life´s difficult experiences, and it is frequently shared during periods of crisis. However, during a crisis humor is often experienced and perceived by individuals immersed in the crisis as insensitive and even hurtful. What then, differentiates healthful and harmful humor in a crisis?
We know that, in general, humor aimed at oneself is well received by others. When we are the target of our own humor, others share our humor but are not threatened or injured by it. Humor aimed at situations is also generally appreciated by others, since it, too, has a target other than another person or group of people. Humor aimed at other individuals or groups may be harmful and not well received as it often is used to put down, insult, or degrade another.
If humor aimed at situations is generally safe, then what is it that causes some humor in crisis situations to be experienced negatively by those in crisis? The answer lies in the psychology of the human response to crisis. Psychologically during a crisis those individuals closest to the crisis are likely to integrate the crisis into their internal emotional being. That is to say, psychologically, they merge the crisis experience with their own inner emotional state. Essentially, they are unable to separate their inner emotional self from the emotional experience of the crisis. On the other hand, individuals with some distance from the crisis are less likely to experience this merging of self and crisis. Those with some distance, therefore, may be aided by humor because it reinforces perspective and creates a safe distance from the crisis. Those immersed in the crisis experience humor aimed at the crisis as directed at themselves and therefore, as insensitive.
As time passes and distance from the crisis is achieved, those who were once close to the crisis may be aided by humor. How many times have we heard the expression, "It wasn´t funny at the time." It wasn´t funny because the individual was too close to the difficult situation. Later as some distance is gained a humorous perspective is accepted and even appreciated.
We use humor in crisis situations to provide perspective and help us deal with the emotional turmoil. The individual who is immersed in the crisis is unable to emotionally differentiate the feelings about the crisis from internal feelings of personal identity. The individual is aware, cognitively, that he/she is distinct from the crisis, but emotionally the individual feels blended with the crisis. It is this emotional blending that inhibits the individual´s ability to appreciate humor in the crisis situation. Individuals experiencing this level of crisis are unaware of the emotional blending of their inner emotional state (their individuality) with their emotional state related to the crisis (the situation). They are likely to be unaware of their heightened vulnerability to humor which is directed at the crisis situation, and therefore, using humor aimed at a crisis situation with someone closely experiencing the crisis must be carefully considered since the humor may be experienced as an attack or insensitive to the individual´s plight.
One factor that influences an individual´s receptivity to humor about a crisis situation is distance. As a rule of thumb, the greater the distance between the individual and the crisis the more likely humor will be therapeutic and not experienced as insensitive.
Distance from the crisis experience may be proximal, emotional, or temporal. Proximal distance may be illustrated by the experience of being on the outer edges of the crisis but not immersed in it. Individuals who are not in the "proximity" of the crisis are more likely to be receptive to crisis humor. For example, people who felt an earthquake but did not sustain damage to self or property or who were not inconvenienced by the subsequent damage, will be more likely to be receptive to humor about the earthquake than individuals who lost property, were greatly inconvenienced, or were physically harmed.
Emotional distance may be embedded in how individuals view or place meaning on the crisis situation. The emotional reaction to any situation will be influenced more by the meaning an individual places on the situation than on the situation itself. All those in a crisis are likely to feel pain, however, some will also suffer excessively based on the meaning they place on the crisis. For example, two individuals who lost their homes in a flood may each respond differently to this catastrophe based on the meaning they place on their loss. That is, both individuals are likely to view their situation as difficult and painful, however, the individual who perceives the loss as devastating and permanently damaging will be less receptive to humor than the individual who sees the loss as temporary and as an opportunity for change and therefore growth.
Therefore, when using humor in crisis situations it is important to note that individuals sharing the same crisis (e.g. a natural disaster) are likely to react differently depending on meaning each one places on the emotional experience of the crisis. Identical humor about the crisis might be helpful to one individual and harmful to another.
As an individual in crisis gathers new information about the impact of the crisis on his/her life he/she begins to change the meaning of the crisis for his/her life. Early devastating thoughts are replaced with more realistic ones. As this process progresses the meaning of the crisis to the individual´s life changes, and therefore, the emotional impact changes. As the emotional impact lessons the individual becomes more receptive to humor about the crisis.
Temporal distance is illustrated by the passage of time. We all know that crisis situations become less potent as they become more distant in our past. The expression, "Time heals all wounds" illustrates this point. As the crisis fades more and more into one´s past, its potency is diminished, and the individual separates the emotions connected with the crisis from their inner emotional being.
Humor helps place crisis in perspective and helps to make the crisis more manageable. However, the timing of humor for those who are immersed in the crisis must be chosen carefully. As humor promoters, we must be sensitive to the inner emotional struggle of the individual with whom we choose to share our humor. For those of us outside the crisis, humor helps us to internally say, "Thank goodness it didn´t happen to me." At the same time we must be sensitive to those to whom it did happen. Humor about the crisis, for those in the crisis, can be a welcome diversion and stress reducer, or it can alienate, antagonize, and hurt the individual in crisis. As we choose to share humor with those in crisis, we must be sensitive and attempt to use humor about the crisis when we believe the individual experiencing the crisis is receptive to our humor interventions. Then at those times when our humor is received negatively, it is our responsibility to sensitively "repair" the interpersonal damage that may result. One way to repair the damage is to listen carefully to the upsets and pain of the person in crisis, and demonstrate to that person that we, do indeed, understand his or her pain.
In summary, humor can be both healthful and harmful when offered to those in crisis situations. As humor distributors, we must be sensitive to the potential benefit and harm of our humor. We must also be prepared to repair any emotional damage that may result from our attempts to relieve another´s pain through the use of humor.
As you heal from the deep pain and sadness of tragic events and when you are ready to laugh, perhaps the words of George Bernard Shaw may offer some comfort:
Life does not cease to be funny when someone dies, anymore than it ceases to be serious when someone laughs. While the following quote if often attributed to Mark Twain, it appears that he never actually said it.
Humor is tragedy plus time.
http://www.humormatters.com/bio.htm
By Steven M. Sultanoff, Ph.D.
Originally published in Therapeutic Humor,
Publication of the American Association for Therapeutic Humor,
Summer, 1995, Vol. IX, 3, p. 1-2
Copyright, 1995
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