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Sense of Humour |
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Humor can increase
hope, research shows
Laughter might be the best medicine for transforming the
faintest of glimmers of hope into an eternal spring, reveals research at
Texas A&M University that shows humor may significantly increase a person's
level of hope.
Science Blog
04/11/2005
The experience of humor can positively influence a person's state of
hopefulness, says Texas A&M psychologist David H. Rosen who, along with
colleagues Alexander P. Vilaythong, Randolph C. Arnau and Nathan Mascaro,
studied nearly 200 subjects ranging in age from 18-42.
As part of the study, which appeared in the International Journal of Humor
Research, select participants viewed a 15-minute comedy video. Those that
viewed the video had statistically significant increases in their scores for
hopefulness after watching it as compared with those that did not view the
video, Rosen notes.
The finding, he says, is important because it underscores how humor can be a
legitimate strategy for relieving stress and maintaining a general sense of
well-being while increasing a person's hope. Previous studies have found
that as high as 94 percent of people deem lightheartedness as a necessary
factor in dealing with difficulties associated with stressful life events,
he says.
Rosen says humor may competitively inhibit negative thoughts with positive
ones, and in so doing, foster hope in people. Positive emotions, such as
those arising from experiencing humor, can stimulate thought and prompt
people to discard automatic behavioral responses and pursue more creative
paths of thought and action, he explains.
Such a process, Rosen says, could lead to a person experiencing a greater
sense of self-worth when dealing with specific problems or stressful events.
He says these positive emotions could, in turn, lead to an increase in a
person's ability to develop a "plan of attack" for a specific problem as
well as increase a person's perceived ability to overcome obstacles in
dealing with that problem - two aspects that psychologists believe comprise
hope.
During the course of the study, Rosen found that there was little or no
relationship between hope and the number of stressors experienced throughout
the past month, but did find a relationship between severity of the
stressors and a decrease in hope. This suggests that the accumulated
severity of recent stressors seem to have more of am impact on hope than the
actual number of stressors, he says.
In the study, sense of humor was not only represented as the tendency to
display laughter, smiles and other similar responses, but was measured
across four factors - humor production, humor as a coping strategy,
attitudes toward humorous people and attitudes about humor.
From Texas A&M [1]
Links
[1] http://www.tamu.edu
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