yoga has been considered as one of influential factors in reducing stress and psychological disease in many countries all over the world. in iran, yoga has received much attention from iranian women recently and this trend is accelerating. this study aimed to explore the main reasons of their interest. since family life is considered as the most important private sphere of women’s lives, this s...

A technique to synthesize laughter based on time-domain behavior of real instances of human laughter is presented. In the speech synthesis community, interest in improving the expressive quality of synthetic speech has grown considerably. While the focus has been on the linguistic aspects, such as precise control of speech intonation to achieve desired expressiveness, inclusion of nonlinguistic...

That laughter could be used as a medical therapeutic intervention was highly popularized by the story of Norman Cousins, initially published as a case history in JAMA and then later as a biographical book, Anatomy of an Illness.1 Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review and one of America’s best known intellectuals, treated his own his own ankylosing spondylitis using Marx Brothers–induced laught...

Laughter facilitates the adaptive response to stress by increasing the psychological distance from distress and by enhancing social relations. To test these hypotheses, the authors related measures of bereaved adults' laughter and smiling 6 months postloss to measures of their (a) subjective emotion and dissociation from distress, (b) social relations, and (c) responses they evoked in others. D...

BACKGROUND Mind-body practices such as yoga have been studied for their generally positive effects on health-related quality of life (HRQOL). The association between how a person practices yoga and the person's HRQOL is not known. MATERIALS AND METHODS Yoga practitioners were sent invitations to participate in an online survey via email. Yoga characteristics, HRQOL, and other sociodemographic...

CONTEXT Yoga teachers and students often report that yoga has an uplifting effect on their moods, but scientific research on yoga and depression is limited. OBJECTIVE To examine the effects of a short-term Iyengar yoga course on mood in mildly depressed young adults. DESIGN Young adults pre-screened for mild levels of depression were randomly assigned to a yoga course or wait-list control g...

BACKGROUND Yoga is thought to be effective for health conditions. The article aims to assess the current clinical evidence of yoga for Essential hypertension (EH). STRATEGY MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) in the Cochrane Library were searched until June, 2013. We included randomized clinical trials testing yoga against conventional therapy, yo...

BACKGROUND Yoga is a behavioral practice that uses physical movement, breathing, and meditation to improve health and promote personal transformation. Ancient yoga philosophy proposed that an individual's confidence about yoga, a concept similar to self-efficacy, will affect the likelihood of improved health from yoga practice. The purpose of this study was to develop and examine the psychometr...

BACKGROUND The characteristics of yoga practitioners and factors motivating people to practice yoga have been studied in the US and in Australia. This study aimed to determine the characteristics of yoga users in India, the factors that motivate them to practice yoga, and the yoga techniques of choice. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study was a one-time, cross-sectional survey based on convenience...

BACKGROUND Although hatha yoga has frequently been recommended for patients with bipolar disorder (BD) and there is preliminary evidence that it alleviates depression, there are no published data on the benefits-and potential risks-of yoga for patients with BD. Thus, the goal of this study was to assess the risks and benefits of yoga in individuals with BD. METHODS We recruited self-identifie...