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Amusement

Amusement is a positive emotional state characterized by feelings of enjoyment, lighthearted pleasure, and often laughter, typically arising from humorous, entertaining, or playful stimuli. It encompasses both the subjective experience of being entertained and the various activities, such as games, shows, or diversions, designed to evoke this response in individuals.^[1]^[2]^[3] In psychological research, amusement functions as a key positive emotion that promotes psychological well-being by reducing stress, elevating mood, and facilitating social bonding through shared laughter and smiles. Physiologically, it triggers elevated levels of smiling behavior, somatic activity, and skin conductance, contributing to overall health benefits like decreased anxiety and improved cardiovascular recovery.^[4]^[5]^[6] Theories of humor, such as the incongruity theory, explain amusement as arising from the perception of benign violations or unexpected resolutions, distinguishing it from mere pleasure by its cognitive and emotional detachment.^[7]^[8] Philosophically, amusement has been examined since antiquity, with Aristotle arguing in the Nicomachean Ethics that while it provides necessary relaxation and leisure, excessive indulgence in amusements can detract from the pursuit of eudaimonia, or human flourishing, which prioritizes virtuous activities over mere diversion. Modern ethical discussions highlight amusement's dual potential: it can foster resistance to oppression and enhance moral resilience, yet it risks becoming a tool for harm if it reinforces stereotypes or shaming. Historically, the term evolved in the 17th century to denote pastimes that divert attention from duty, reflecting cultural shifts toward valuing entertainment in leisure time.^[9]^[10]^[11]

Definition and Overview

Core Definition

Amusement is a positive emotion defined as a psychological state characterized by the positive feeling of mirth and a tendency to laugh, typically arising from the simultaneous appraisal of a situation as a violation—such as an incongruity, norm breach, or absurdity—and as benign, posing no genuine threat.^[12] This benign violation framework posits that amusement involves a sudden, playful recognition of such incongruities, fostering a sense of lightness and enjoyment without underlying distress.^[13] In phenomenological terms, the subjective experience centers on an effortless shift to a humorous perspective, distinguishing it experientially from broader pleasures like contentment or sensual delight.^[14] Key triggers of amusement include unexpected twists in narratives or events, verbal wordplay like puns, and absurd or mismatched situations that resolve harmlessly, such as a cartoonish mishap or ironic juxtaposition.^[12] These elicitors rely on the perceiver's cognitive evaluation that the anomaly is non-threatening, allowing the violation to evoke amusement rather than alarm or disapproval. Humor serves as a primary elicitor, though amusement can emerge independently from playful social interactions or whimsical observations.^[13] The term "amusement" derives from the French amusement in the late 17th century, originally denoting a diversion of attention or pastime, evolving from the Old French amuser meaning "to divert" or "cause to muse," rooted in a blend of idleness and contemplation.^[11] By the 1690s, its meaning shifted to the modern sense of pleasurable diversion, and in 20th-century psychology, it solidified as a distinct affective state, separate from undifferentiated pleasure, emphasizing its episodic and cognitively mediated nature.^[15] At its core, amusement comprises a cognitive appraisal of non-seriousness in the triggering event, a hedonic tone of joyful lightness, and a motivational orientation toward broadened engagement with the environment or relaxed social bonding. This appraisal process highlights the event's triviality or playfulness, enabling the positive valence, while the resulting motivation encourages playful exploration rather than goal-directed action.^[14] Amusement is often confused with other positive emotions due to overlapping expressions like smiling, but psychological research delineates it through distinct cognitive appraisals and elicitors. Unlike joy, which emerges from profound, object-directed events such as personal successes or intimate connections and sustains a motivational urge toward play or affiliation, amusement is triggered by benign incongruities—such as verbal puns, slapstick errors, or ironic twists—that resolve without deep personal investment.^[14]^[16] This brevity in amusement contrasts with joy's more enduring intensity, where appraisals emphasize high goal relevance and motive consistency tied to achievement or bonding.^[17] Happiness, as a broader evaluative state, further highlights amusement's episodic nature; it reflects an overarching sense of life satisfaction and well-being, integrating elements of contentment and positive valence across contexts, rather than reacting to isolated absurdities.^[14] Amusement, by comparison, lacks this holistic fulfillment, arising instead from low-effort, low-stakes novelty that entertains without altering one's global outlook.^[17] In appraisal terms, happiness involves diffuse, sustained pleasantness without the specific expectation violation central to amusement.^[18] A sharper contrast appears with schadenfreude, where pleasure stems from others' misfortunes appraised through lenses of rivalry, justice, or superiority, often carrying a subtle malice absent in amusement.^[14] Amusement, conversely, centers on self-referential or collectively shared mishaps that are harmless and playful, such as a friend's minor blunder, emphasizing benign violations over harm to others.^[16] These distinctions extend to temporal dynamics: amusement peaks swiftly upon incongruity resolution and fades rapidly, embodying a transient spark rather than the lingering, present-oriented diffusion of contentment.^[14] Within appraisal theories, this underscores amusement's reliance on low-stakes novelty and certainty—events appraised as undemanding and predictable in outcome—differentiating it from achievement-driven emotions (e.g., pride) or those rooted in affiliation (e.g., love).^[17]^[16] The play-mirth framework, for instance, posits amusement as arising from a "playful turn" in cognition, where seriousness shifts to mirth without high personal stakes, ensuring its separation from more consequential positive states.^[16]

Theoretical Foundations

Evolutionary Perspectives

Charles Darwin observed that amusement, manifested through laughter and smiling, serves as an extension of play behaviors in primates, where it signals non-threatening intentions and promotes social cohesion within groups. In his analysis, these expressions in monkeys and apes during playful interactions mirror human joy, suggesting a shared evolutionary heritage that facilitates safe social engagement without aggression.^[19] Ethological studies provide evidence for amusement's deep roots, with laughter-like vocalizations observed in great apes such as chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans during rough-and-tumble play, indicating that these signals evolved to mark playful, non-serious contexts and prevent escalation into conflict. These vocalizations, characterized by breathy pants, are phylogenetically conserved among great apes, pointing to an origin approximately 10-16 million years ago, coinciding with the divergence of the great ape lineage from other primates.^[20] Robert Provine's research highlights laughter's evolutionary foundations in primate play vocalizations, proposing that human laughter derives from these ancestral signals, which functioned similarly to vocal grooming by enhancing social bonds at a distance in larger groups. This perspective underscores amusement's role in fostering alliances through shared laughter, which synchronizes group emotions and reinforces cooperative ties essential for survival in social species.^[21] From an adaptive standpoint, amusement aids in processing incongruities—unexpected mismatches between expectation and reality—allowing individuals to reduce stress by reframing potential threats as benign, thereby mitigating fear responses without physical risk. This mechanism enhances learning by enabling error recognition and cognitive flexibility in safe contexts, as playful reinterpretation of mistakes promotes problem-solving skills vital for environmental adaptation. Additionally, shared amusement strengthens social alliances, as contagious laughter builds trust and reciprocity, crucial for group hunting, defense, and resource sharing in ancestral environments.^[22]^[23] In modern evolutionary psychology, amusement contributes to resilience by playfully reframing threats, transforming anxiety-inducing situations into opportunities for emotional regulation and psychological fortitude. It also supports deception detection, as the ability to spot and humorously resolve social incongruities sharpens vigilance against misleading cues in interpersonal interactions. Furthermore, wit and humor production signal cognitive intelligence, playing a key role in mate selection by attracting partners who value mental acuity as an indicator of genetic fitness and provisioning ability.^[24]^[23]^[25]

Constructed Emotion Theory

The theory of constructed emotion, proposed by Lisa Feldman Barrett, posits that emotions are not pre-programmed responses but dynamic mental constructions that emerge from the brain's predictive processing of sensory inputs. In this framework, the brain anticipates and interprets affective states by integrating interoceptive signals from the body with exteroceptive information from the environment, drawing on past experiences and learned cultural concepts to categorize experiences as specific emotions, such as happiness or amusement.^[26] This process allows for the resolution of ambiguity and achievement of allostasis, or predictive regulation of bodily needs.^[26] At its core, the mechanism of emotion construction involves the interplay of interoceptive predictions, such as sensations of relaxed arousal or mild physiological excitement, with exteroceptive cues like verbal incongruities or social play. These elements are not fixed but assembled on-the-fly through the brain's hierarchical generative models, which minimize prediction errors by simulating expected outcomes and adjusting based on real-time feedback.^[26] This process highlights emotions as context-dependent, varying across situations and individuals rather than triggering a universal, innate circuit.^[27] Neuroimaging studies on humor appreciation provide evidence consistent with this constructionist view, demonstrating distributed activation in brain regions like the medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala during the resolution of incongruities, such as in joke comprehension, with patterns showing high inter-individual variability rather than consistent "fingerprints" for the response. For example, functional MRI research reveals parametric increases in medial prefrontal cortex activity correlating with subjective funniness ratings, alongside amygdala engagement for emotional salience, underscoring the role of flexible neural integration over modular processing.^[28]^[29] These findings align with meta-analyses indicating that emotion-related brain activity, including for positive affects, relies on degenerate networks that reuse regions across categories, supporting construction rather than dedicated modules.^[30] Barrett's theory critiques basic emotion models, such as those positing emotions as hardwired, universal responses akin to fear or anger, by arguing that their expressions and intensity are profoundly shaped by learning and cultural variability, not evolutionarily fixed neural modules. Unlike basic emotions presumed to have dedicated circuits, positive emotions lack consistent physiological or neural signatures across contexts, emerging instead from learned categorizations that influence how affect is interpreted and expressed. This challenges the universality assumed in basic emotion paradigms, emphasizing instead how social and experiential factors mold emotional subjective and behavioral manifestations.^[26] Developmentally, emotions like amusement emerge in childhood through social learning processes, where children internalize concepts of "funny" via interactions with caregivers and peers, leading to variability in humor appreciation based on cultural and familial influences. Basic laughter appears around 3-4 months in response to tickling, with humor appreciation developing from simple incongruities by 12 months to more complex forms by 36 months, refining predictive models through exposure to playful social cues. The sophistication of these concepts grows with linguistic and perspective-taking skills, illustrating how amusement is not innate but built through iterative social experiences that shape emotional granularity.^[31]

Physiological and Expressive Manifestations

Facial and Bodily Expressions

Facial expressions of amusement are prominently characterized by the Duchenne smile, which involves the simultaneous contraction of the zygomatic major muscle, pulling the lip corners upward (Action Unit 12, or AU12 in the Facial Action Coding System), and the orbicularis oculi muscle, raising the cheeks and producing crow's feet wrinkles around the eyes (AU6).^[32] This configuration serves as a key marker of genuine amusement, distinguishing it from polite or social smiles that typically lack the AU6 component and may reflect social obligation rather than authentic positive affect.^[33] The Duchenne smile's eye involvement reflects involuntary muscle activation tied to felt enjoyment, as opposed to controlled, lower-face-only movements in non-genuine displays.^[34] Bodily indicators of amusement often include a relaxed, open posture, such as slightly expanded chest and shoulders, signaling positive affect and approach orientation.^[35] Head tilting backward or to the side may accompany intense laughter, enhancing the display of engagement and mirth.^[36] In some cultures, such as those in East Asia, individuals may cover their mouth with a hand during amusement to adhere to display rules emphasizing modesty and restraint in emotional expression. Physiologically, amusement is associated with increased heart rate variability, particularly higher root mean square of successive differences (RMSSD), indicating enhanced parasympathetic nervous system activity and adaptive positive arousal compared to neutral or negative states.^[37] Neurologically, amusement expressions involve activation of the facial nerve (cranial nerve VII), which innervates the muscles responsible for smiling and contributes to the somatic feedback that amplifies emotional experience.^[38] Observing others' amusement engages mirror neuron systems in sensorimotor regions, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and ventral primary somatosensory cortex, facilitating empathic inference of genuine mirth from dynamic smiles.^[39] The Facial Action Coding System (FACS), developed by Ekman and Friesen, provides a standardized tool for measuring these expressions by decomposing facial movements into action units; for amusement, the combination of AU6 and AU12 is diagnostic of authentic displays, with intensity levels (A-E) quantifying the degree of muscle engagement.^[32] Individual differences in the intensity of amusement expressions are influenced by personality traits, with extraverts exhibiting more pronounced and frequent Duchenne smiles due to their heightened responsiveness to positive stimuli.^[40] This variation aligns with extraversion's association with amplified behavioral indicators of positive affect, such as quicker and stronger facial muscle activation during humorous contexts.^[41]

Vocal and Auditory Expressions

Laughter serves as the primary vocal and auditory expression of amusement, manifesting as a series of rapid, rhythmic vocalizations produced during exhalation. This sound-based response is distinct from other emotional vocalizations due to its repetitive, breathy structure, which signals positive affect and facilitates social coordination. In genuine amusement, laughter often accompanies an internal sense of mirth, though it can also occur in social settings without strong humorous stimuli. Laughter can be categorized into spontaneous, or Duchenne, laughter and social laughter. Duchenne laughter is an involuntary, stimulus-driven response tied to authentic amusement, characterized by relaxed, unforced vocalizations that reflect genuine emotional valence.^[42] In contrast, social laughter functions more as a voluntary signal to affirm rapport or agreement, often lacking the depth of emotional engagement found in spontaneous forms.^[42] Acoustically, laughter features irregular bursts of voiced sound, typically consisting of short, vowel-like notes repeated in sequences. These bursts exhibit pitch rises, particularly toward the end of each note, contributing to the dynamic, ascending quality of the vocalization; fundamental frequency often averages around 400-600 Hz in women and 200-400 Hz in men, with notable variability. The sound has a breathy quality due to partial vocal fold vibration and airflow, distinguishing it from clearer speech tones. An average laughter bout lasts 1-2 seconds, encompassing multiple bursts, though individual notes are briefer, around 0.2-0.75 seconds each.^[43] From an evolutionary perspective, laughter likely originated as exaggerated vocal bursts during play, serving as signals to indicate non-serious intent and ensure the safety of interactive behaviors. These play signals, homologous to those in other primates, promote extended social engagement by communicating that aggressive cues are mock and harmless, thereby enhancing cooperation and bonding in group settings.^[22] Recording studies of natural conversations reveal that laughter predominantly occurs in social contexts rather than as a direct response to humor. Analysis by Provine of over 1,200 instances showed that 80-90% of laughter follows non-humorous statements, such as casual remarks or affirmations, underscoring its role as a social punctuation rather than a humor-specific reaction.^[44] Certain neurological disorders produce laughter-like vocalizations without accompanying amusement, highlighting the dissociation between auditory output and emotional state. Gelastic seizures, often linked to hypothalamic hamartomas, trigger sudden, uncontrollable bursts of laughter that sound mechanical and lack any sense of joy or mirth, mimicking amusement auditorily but arising from epileptic activity.^[45]

Cross-Cultural Variations

Amusement manifests differently across cultures, with variations in what triggers it, how it is expressed, and its social acceptability shaped by societal values and norms. In Western cultures, satire and taboo humor often serve as vehicles for amusement, challenging authority and social conventions through irony and exaggeration, as seen in media like political cartoons or stand-up comedy that mock taboos to provoke laughter. However, in collectivist societies such as those influenced by Confucianism in East Asia, where harmony and face-saving are prioritized, such humor can offend rather than amuse, leading to preferences for affiliative, non-aggressive forms that avoid disrupting group cohesion. This contrast highlights how cultural emphasis on individualism versus collectivism influences the boundaries of amusing content, with Western satire frequently viewed as liberating while equivalent expressions in harmony-focused societies risk social discord.^[46] Norms for expressing amusement through laughter also vary significantly, reflecting deeper cultural attitudes toward emotional display. In Japan, overt laughter is often suppressed in public or formal settings to maintain politeness and group harmony, with individuals—particularly women—frequently covering their mouths with a hand or producing softer, more controlled vocalizations like "kusukusu" (giggle) or subtle laughs, as this restraint aligns with values of modesty and deference.^[47] In contrast, Mediterranean cultures, such as those in Italy or Spain, encourage more expressive and animated laughter, often accompanied by gestures and higher arousal vocalizations, which signal warmth and social connection without the same fear of imposition. These differences underscore how East Asian restraint in amusement expression preserves interpersonal balance, while Mediterranean overtness fosters communal exuberance.^[48] Historical contexts further illustrate shifts in amusement patterns within cultures. During the Victorian era in Britain, etiquette demanded restrained amusement, with loud laughter deemed vulgar and unladylike; guides advised quiet, modest deportment at social gatherings, avoiding boisterous expressions to uphold dignity and moral propriety.^[49] In contemporary digital culture, particularly through internet memes, this has evolved toward amplification of absurdity, where surreal, unpredictable formats—such as referential inside jokes or shocking visuals—escalate humor's illogical elements to combat saturation and maintain novelty in online sharing. This transition from Victorian suppression to modern meme-driven excess reflects broader societal moves from rigid decorum to fragmented, ironic digital expression.^[50]^[51] Anthropological studies of Inuit communities reveal how amusement integrates into storytelling to reinforce social values. Traditional Inuit tales, often shared in informal gatherings, blend entertainment with education through narratives featuring clever animals outwitting humans, evoking amusement while imparting lessons on humility and communal resilience in Arctic conditions. These stories serve dual purposes: amusing listeners to build rapport and underscoring shared cultural norms, like cooperation, thereby strengthening group identity without direct moralizing.^[52] Globalization has reshaped local amusement patterns by disseminating Western comedy formats since the early 20th century. American exports, including sitcoms and viral internet jokes, have influenced global humor, promoting absurd and satirical styles that Americanize local expressions, as evidenced by the widespread adoption of meme templates in non-Western media. This spread, accelerated by Hollywood's overseas revenues surpassing domestic ones by the late 20th century (roughly half from abroad by 1999), prompts hybrid adaptations—such as Bollywood's incorporation of slapstick—but often dilutes indigenous forms in favor of individualistic, irony-heavy narratives.^[53]^[54] Amusement serves as a key bonding mechanism in social interactions, where shared experiences of laughter trigger the release of endorphins, thereby enhancing trust and cooperation within groups. Experimental evidence demonstrates that social laughter elevates pain thresholds, a physiological indicator of endorphin activation, which correlates with increased feelings of closeness among participants. This endorphin-mediated effect fosters group cohesion, allowing individuals to form stronger interpersonal connections more efficiently than through physical grooming alone.^[55]^[42] As a communication tool, amusement signals affiliation and helps diffuse tension during conflicts by enabling humorous deflection of sensitive issues. Laughter in group settings promotes a sense of mutual understanding and reduces psychological stress responses, as shown in studies where brief humorous interventions lowered self-reported stress levels and cortisol concentrations prior to challenging tasks. This function allows individuals to navigate disagreements with less hostility, reinforcing social ties through shared positivity rather than confrontation.^[56] In developmental contexts, play-induced amusement plays a vital role in building empathy and social skills among children. Sociodramatic and rough-and-tumble play, often accompanied by laughter, teaches negotiation, cooperation, and emotional regulation by encouraging children to interpret others' perspectives and adjust behaviors to avoid harm. Neuroimaging studies further reveal that such pretend play activates brain regions like the posterior superior temporal sulcus, associated with social information processing and empathy development, even during solitary activities.^[57]^[58] Amusement is frequently employed strategically in negotiations and power dynamics, where it enhances likability and influences interpersonal outcomes, particularly along gender lines. Research indicates that humorous expressions can improve perceptions of competence and warmth in professional interactions, with women potentially gaining greater relative benefits in likability compared to men, challenging traditional stereotypes about humor's gendered risks.^[59] Empirical support for these functions draws from Robin Dunbar's vocal grooming hypothesis, which posits that laughter evolved as a vocal substitute for physical grooming in large human groups, enabling broader social bonding through endorphin release. Dunbar's analysis shows that laughter occurs in small clusters (average group size of 2.7), making it three times more efficient than grooming for maintaining relationships, with evidence from pain threshold experiments confirming its role in endorphin upregulation and group cohesion.^[60]

Applications in Health and Well-Being

Therapeutic Uses

Laughter therapy, a clinical application of amusement, originated in the 1970s through the work of Dr. Hunter "Patch" Adams, who founded the Gesundheit! Institute in 1971 to integrate humor and compassion into medical care.^[61] Adams pioneered the use of simulated laughter—initially through clowning and playful interactions—to trigger genuine amusement and emotional relief in patients, particularly those with severe illnesses like cancer or chronic conditions.^[62] This approach emphasized non-pharmacological interventions, where caregivers in clown attire engaged patients in lighthearted activities to foster joy and reduce suffering.^[61] Therapeutic protocols typically involve structured group sessions lasting 15-30 minutes of active exercises, often extending to a full hour including warm-up and relaxation phases.^[63] These sessions incorporate elements of clowning, such as exaggerated gestures and role-playing, alongside laughter yoga techniques like hearty laughter exercises (deep belly laughs with arm movements), lion laughter (roaring with tongue extended), and gradient laughter (building from smiles to full outbursts).^[63] Participants engage in eye contact, clapping, and breathing to simulate and sustain laughter, promoting a communal environment that transitions simulated amusement into authentic emotional responses.^[64] Laughter therapy is applied to treat conditions including depression, anxiety, and chronic pain, with meta-analyses indicating significant reductions in cortisol levels following interventions.^[65] For instance, systematic reviews of multiple studies have shown that laughter-inducing activities decrease depressive symptoms and perceived pain intensity, enhancing overall mood and stress resilience in clinical populations.^[66] In randomized controlled trials from the 2010s, such as a 2015 study on postpartum women, participants exposed to laughter therapy exhibited increased levels of secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA), a key marker of immune function, suggesting improved mucosal immunity and reduced infection risk.^[67] These findings support laughter therapy's role in bolstering physiological responses to stress and illness. Despite its benefits, laughter therapy has contraindications, particularly for individuals with acute psychosis or those in post-surgical recovery, due to the potential physical strain and emotional overstimulation.^[68] In cases of major psychiatric disorders like acute psychosis, the intense group dynamics may exacerbate symptoms or disrupt fragile mental states.^[69] Similarly, recent surgery (within three months) poses risks from increased intra-abdominal pressure during laughter, which could impair wound healing or cause complications.^[69] Practitioners recommend medical clearance before participation to ensure safety.^[70]

Emotion Regulation and Resilience

Amusement serves as a cognitive reappraisal strategy within Gross's process model of emotion regulation, where individuals reinterpret potentially stressful situations by identifying incongruities, thereby transforming negative emotional responses into positive affect.^[4] This reappraisal leverages humor's structure, such as incongruity-resolution, to create emotional distance from adversity and elicit amusement, effectively downshifting from distress to lighter, adaptive feelings.^[71] For instance, viewing a workplace setback through an absurd lens reduces its threat value, aligning with the model's emphasis on antecedent-focused regulation to alter emotional trajectories before full expression.^[72] Frequent experiences of amusement are associated with enhanced psychological resilience, particularly in coping with trauma. Individuals can self-induce amusement through everyday techniques like engaging with memes or recalling humorous events, which cultivate cognitive flexibility by encouraging perspective shifts and emotional detachment.^[73] Memes, for example, facilitate this by allowing users to reframe negative experiences humorously during personal reflection, enhancing recall and motivation while reducing emotional intensity.^[73] Similarly, deliberately recalling amusing incidents decreases negative emotions more effectively than spontaneous regulation, fostering flexibility via increased psychological distance from stressors.^[74] These intrapersonal practices promote daily emotion management, distinct from structured therapeutic applications. Recent 2020s empirical research highlights amusement's buffering effect against burnout in high-stress professions such as healthcare, where self-enhancing humor correlates with lower emotional exhaustion and depersonalization among nurses.^[75] In a 2024 cross-sectional study of 244 Chinese nurses, adaptive humor styles predicted reduced burnout symptoms, illustrating amusement's practical role in mitigating occupational stress without formal therapy.^[75] These findings emphasize amusement's value in fostering resilience amid demanding environments like pandemics or chronic patient care.

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A short humorous intervention protects against subsequent ... - Nature
Mar 31, 2021 · Presentation of humor simultaneously with a stressful event has been shown to dampen the psychological and physiological responses of stress ...Introduction · Results · Discussion
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The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in ...
Sep 1, 2018 · Social skills, which are part of playful learning, enable children to listen to directions, pay attention, solve disputes with words, and focus ...Missing: amusement | Show results with:amusement
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Research: Being Funny Can Pay Off More for Women Than Men
Apr 14, 2023 · Our recent research suggests that funny women may in fact be perceived more positively than pop culture stereotypes often suggest.
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Laughter and its role in the evolution of human social bonding
Sep 21, 2022 · Laughter, a form of chorusing, evolved to increase social bonding by triggering the endorphin system, likely with early Homo, when group size ...Missing: adaptive amusement
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Humor in medicine: Can laughter help in healing? - PMC - NIH
Hunter D. “Patch” Adams. For over 45 years, he has been donning a clown costume to entertain and raise the spirits of severely ill patients, especially children ...
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History of humor and health - MSU Extension
Jun 20, 2014 · Dr. Hunter “Patch” Adams established the Gesundheit Institute in 1972, which is a hospital dedicated to spreading humor, fun, friendship and joy ...
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[PDF] Your Laughter Yoga Guide
Normally, a session lasts for an hour in which we do laughter, breathing and stretching exercises for 30 minutes followed by Laughter Meditation and Guided.
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8 Best Laughter Yoga Therapy Exercises for Your Classes
Feb 22, 2022 · Laughter yoga involves gentle stretching, chanting, clapping, eye contact, and body movements. Breathing exercises prepare the lungs for a good bout of ...Missing: protocols 15-30
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Laughter as medicine: A systematic review and meta-analysis of ...
May 23, 2023 · Current evidence demonstrates that spontaneous laughter is associated with greater reduction in cortisol levels as compared with usual activities.
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Laughter-inducing therapies: Systematic review and meta-analysis
Improvements such as decreased depression, pain, and stress hormones, and improved mood and life satisfaction, were reported and will be discussed briefly.
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Effects of Laughter Therapy on Immune Responses in Postpartum ...
Objective: To examine the effects of laughter therapy on secretory IgA (sIgA) in postpartum women. Methods: The study used a nonequivalent control group with ...
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Contraindications of Laughter Yoga
Major psychiatric disorders; Severe backache; Having undergone surgery within the last 3 months; First or third trimester of pregnancy, and before 8 weeks ...
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[PDF] No laughing matter: Laughter is good psychiatric medicine
And are there ad- verse effects or contraindications to laughter in psychiatry? ... Humor and laughter are underutilized and underreported in therapy, in part ...
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Contraindictions - Feelgood Communities CIC
People who have undergone bypass surgery can also do Laughter Yoga after their stress test is normal. Pregnancy is also a relative contraindication. Women with ...
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[PDF] Emotion Regulation: Current Status and Future Prospects
One commonly used framework for studying emo- tion regulation strategies is the process model of emo- tion regulation (Gross, 1998b). This information-.
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[PDF] The Association Between Sense of Humour and Trauma-Related ...
The following studies will investigate the association between humour styles, posttraumatic growth, negative change following adversity, posttraumatic stress ...<|control11|><|separator|>
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[PDF] MEMEories: Internet Memes as Means for Daily Journaling
Jul 2, 2021 · When reflecting on daily events, the contained emotional and often humorous connotation of memes helped participants view negative events as ...
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Reappraisal-related downregulation of amygdala BOLD activation ...
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