Is laughter really the best medicine–or has Reader’s Digest been lying to us all these years?
Inquiring minds want to know, and so this week I set out to see what recent research into the place of humor in human mental and physical health I might be able to turn up.
It looks like Reader’s Digest can rest easy.
Just last week, researchers at Texas A&M University (itself the butt of many jokes, I can tell you as a former Texan) released a study indicating that humor significantly increases a person’s level of hope.
The researchers, led by psychologist David H. Rosen, studied nearly 200 subjects aged 18 to 42. Some viewed a 15-minute comedy video. In subsequent tests of levels of hopefulness, those who viewed the video scored significantly higher than those who had not.
Humor, Rosen suggests, may replace negative thoughts and emotions with positive ones, which can stimulate more creative approaches to tackling problems. That contributes to a sense of hopefulness because two of the factors involved in feeling hope about a particular problem are an ability to develop a plan of attack for the problem and a belief that one can successfully overcome any obstacles that might arise in dealing with it.
“Humor makes you feel more hopeful?” I imagine I hear you scoff. “Is that all you’ve got?”
Nope. There’s more!
Humor may make us less fearful of people of other races. A new study by University of Michigan researchers Kareem Johnson and Barbara Fredrickson indicates that positive emotions like joy and humor can virtually eliminate the built-in own-race bias that makes many people think members of other races “all look alike.”
The scientists asked a group of 89 students to watch either a video of a comic (to induce joy and laughter), a horror video (to induce anxiety) or a neutral video (designed not to affect emotions), then flashed 28 head-and-shoulders shots of college-aged people in random order in front of the students, with each image visible for about half a second.
In the testing phase, more images were shown to the students, some of them repeating from the first batch. The students were asked to push buttons to indicate whether they’d seen the pictures before. Those who had not seen the comic video recognized previously viewed members of their own race 75 percent of the time, but members of other races only 65 percent of the time. That gap vanished among those who had seen the comic video: they recognized previously-viewed members of other races as well as they recognized members of their own.
“But that’s all squishy state-of-mind stuff,” my imaginary heckler shouts (he’s very rude). “What about actual physical well-being?”
I thought you’d never ask. It so happens a 2000 study by cardiologists at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore compared the humor responses of 150 people who had suffered a heart attack or undergone coronary artery bypass surgery with 150 people who were healthy, about the same age, and did not have heart disease. They found that people with heart disease were 40 percent less likely to laugh in a variety of situations compared to people of the same age without heart disease. The heart patients were less likely to recognize humor or to use it to get out of uncomfortable situations, laughed less in positive situations and displayed more anger and hostility.
The mechanism isn’t know for sure, but it probably comes back down to stress (you know, that squishy state-of-mind stuff). Mental stress can result in damage to the lining of our blood vessels, which can lead to inflammatory reactions that can lead to fat and cholesterol build-up in the coronary arteries.
So is laughter the best medicine? Well, maybe not the best–I’d rather have an antibiotic for a bacterial infection, thanks very much–but it’s a pretty good one.
Finally, one other humor-related study I came across, this one from that bastion of humor, Hamilton, Ontario: Eric Bressler, a graduate student at McMaster University studying the role of humor in personal attraction, discovered in a survey of 150 students that men and women define “sense of humor” differently:
To a woman, someone with a good sense of humor is someone who makes her laugh.
To a man, someone with a good sense of humor is someone who laughs at his jokes.
My wife, oddly enough, was not surprised by this finding.
