Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Laughter

It is therapeutic to laugh. Humour is therapeutic.

Laughter can be practiced deliberately, and it is probably very healthy to do so.

Humour is important in psychotherapy as well. Psychotherapy need not always be serious, grave, or have an air of hard work or formality. But of course, it would be important for any humour initiated by a therapist to be gentle, sensitive, careful, and not excessive.

Here are a few links to references about laughter & humour in health & psychotherapy:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17464660

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8307702
Here's a link to the website for the "Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor"--it contains a lot of links to other interesting and funny sites (the fact that there is an association with this title is itself funny to me):
http://www.aath.org/ezine/index.html

Another relevant link:
http://www.helpguide.org/life/humor_laughter_health.htm

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