The Use of Humor in Serious Mental Illness: A Review

The study aims at evaluating health-generating function of humor therapy in a hospital ward hosting children suffering from respiratory pathologies. The main scope of this study is to investigate possible positive effects of the presence of a clown on both the clinical evolution of the on-going disease, and on some physiological and pain parameters. Forty-three children with respiratory pathologies participated in the study: 21 of them belonged to the experimental group (EG) and 22 children to the control group (CG). During their hospitalization, the children of the EG interacted with two clowns who were experienced in the field of pediatric intervention. All participants were evaluated with respect to clinical progress and to a series of physiological and pain measures both before and after the clown interaction. When compared with the CG, EG children showed an earlier disappearance of the pathological symptoms. Moreover, the interaction of the clown with the children led to a statistically significant lowering of diastolic blood pressure, respiratory frequency and temperature in the EG as compared with the control group. The other two parameters of systolic pressure and heart frequency yielded results in the same direction, without reaching statistical significance. A similar health-inducing effect of clown presence was observed on pain parameters, both by self evaluation and assessment by nurses. Taken together, our data indicate that the presence of clowns in the ward has a possible health-inducing effect. Thus, humor can be seen as an easy-to-use, inexpensive and natural therapeutic modality to be used within different therapeutic settings.

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“…The mechanisms underlying these effects are not yet fully understood and additional research is needed in this regard [18]. …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clowns Benefit Children Hospitalized for Respiratory Pathologies

Bertini

Isola

Paolone

et al. 2011

Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine

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“…Laughter has been widely explored as a therapeutic method to prevent and to treat major medical diseases-the positive effect of laughter and humor in pain relief, autoimmune pathologies, surgical recuperations, psychotherapy interventions, patient empowerment, general resilience, mental wellbeing, etc., is well authenticated [7,[21][22][23][24]. In mental pathologies, however, very few works have been addressed that explore the discriminative potential that laughter might contain.…”

Section: Biomedical Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Entropy of Laughter: Discriminative Power of Laughter’s Entropy in the Diagnosis of Depression

Navarro

Moral

Cuesta-Álvaro

et al. 2016

Entropy

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Abstract:Laughter is increasingly present in biomedical literature, both in analytical neurological aspects and in applied therapeutic fields. The present paper, bridging between the analytical and the applied, explores the potential of a relevant variable of laughter's acoustic signature-entropy-in the detection of a widespread mental disorder, depression, as well as in gauging the severity of its diagnostic. In laughter, the Shannon-Wiener entropy of the distribution of sound frequencies, which is one of the key features distinguishing its acoustic signal from the utterances of spoken language, has not been a specific focus of research yet, although the studies of human language and of animal communication have pointed out that entropy is a very important factor regarding the vocal/acoustic expression of emotions. As the experimental survey of laughter in depression herein undertaken shows, it was possible to discriminate between patients and controls with an 82.1% accuracy just by using laughter's entropy and by applying the decision tree procedure. These experimental results, discussed in the light of the current research on laughter, point to the relevance of entropy in the spontaneous bona fide extroversion of mental states toward other individuals, as the signal of laughter seems to imply. This is in line with recent theoretical approaches that rely on the optimization of a neuro-informational free energy (and associated entropy) as the main "stuff" of brain processing.

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“…Ironic comments are often intended to be funny [8, 11, 16]. Patients with schizophrenia showed aberrant ratings for the jocularity of stimuli in previous investigations [51–55]; however, to our knowledge, no research has addressed the funniness of ironic comments in schizophrenia.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Irony and Proverb Comprehension in Schizophrenia: Do Female Patients “Dislike” Ironic Remarks?

Rapp

Langohr

Mutschler

et al. 2014

Schizophrenia Research and Treatment

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Difficulties in understanding irony and sarcasm are part of the social cognition deficits in patients with schizophrenia. A number of studies have reported higher error rates during comprehension in patients with schizophrenia. However, the relationships of these impairments to schizotypal personality traits and other language deficits, such as the comprehension of proverbs, are unclear. We investigated irony and proverb comprehension in an all-female sample of 20 schizophrenia patients and 27 matched controls. Subjects indicated if a statement was intended to be ironic, literal, or meaningless and furthermore rated the meanness and funniness of the stimuli and certainty of their decision. Patients made significantly more errors than controls did. Globally, there were no overall differences in the ratings. However, patients rated the subgroup of stimuli with answers given incorrectly as having significantly less meanness and in case of an error indicated a significantly higher certainty than controls. Across all of the study participants, performances in irony (r = −0.51) and proverb (r = 0.56) comprehension were significantly correlated with schizotypal personality traits, suggesting a continuum of nonliteral language understanding. Because irony is so frequent in everyday conversations, this makes irony an especially promising candidate for social cognition training in schizophrenia.

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The Use of Humor in Serious Mental Illness: A Review

Cited by 115 publications

References 62 publications

Clowns Benefit Children Hospitalized for Respiratory Pathologies

Clowns Benefit Children Hospitalized for Respiratory Pathologies

The Entropy of Laughter: Discriminative Power of Laughter’s Entropy in the Diagnosis of Depression

Irony and Proverb Comprehension in Schizophrenia: Do Female Patients “Dislike” Ironic Remarks?

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