Laughter as Medicine Studies

Laughter is the Best Medicine? A 2099 University of Maryland study of individuals with heart disease yielded the striking finding that there is scientific evidence that the act of laughing does have health-promoting effects. A study of 300 participants compared the responses of multiple-choice questionnaires designed to measure how much the subjects laughed in certain situations and general responses to anger and hostility.

Half the subjects were known to have had heart disease and the other half did not and the individuals who had not suffered from heart disease had significantly more humorous responses to everyday situations than the experimental group (Murray 2009). In this quantitative study, the design was purely correlational rather than causative.

It could be argued that participants who responded with what the researchers considered to be more positive, lighthearted choices could have better had healthcare, not have been a part of historically discriminated-against groups and have had a sense of humor more in line with the researchers, or even simply have been younger. In other words, other factors which made them less likely to have suffered from heart disease could be linked to their positive responses on the questionnaires.

Although this experiment had a hypothesis, namely that laughter had heart-protective qualities, a lack of evaluation of the demographics of the population as well as previous health conditions does not sufficiently isolate enough variables to establish a causal link. Another study with a more limited demographic [PARTICIPANTS] also established the healing benefits of laughter. A study by Loma Linda University studied 20 subjects in the 60s and 70s, with no existing health problems, "measuring their stress levels and short-term memory.

One group was asked to sit silently, not talking, reading, or using their cellphones, while the other group watched funny videos" and after twenty minutes the subjects were studied for their physiological responses in the form of a saliva sample as well as a memory test (Shah 2014). "While both groups performed better after the break than before, the 'humor group' performed significantly better when it came to memory recall. Participants who viewed the funny videos had much higher improvement in recall abilities, 43.6%, compared with 20.3% in the non-humor group" (Shah 2014).

The advantage of using this group in this experiment to study the benefits of humor was that it isolated more variables (subjects were of the same demographic and health status) and used objective physiological and psychological instruments versus more subjective methods of measuring one's sense of humor like the Maryland study. The main problem with this more recent study was its relatively small size. [AREAS TO DEVELOP] A comparison of these studies suggests the challenges of measuring a concept such as the medicinal benefits of humor.

Humor is such a subjective concept that what one person finds to be funny another person might find quite serious. Yet this does not necessarily mean that the test subject that does not laugh or rates something as not humorous entirely lacks a sense of humor, since he or she might find something else quite funny that the researcher designer does not. Humor is culturally contextual as.