Savage BM, Lujan HL, Thipparthi RR, DiCarlo SE. Humor, laughter, learning, and health! A brief review. Adv Physiol Educ 41: 341–347, 2017; doi:10.1152/advan.00030.2017.—Human emotions, such as anxiety, depression, fear, joy, and laughter, profoundly affect psychological and physiological processes. These emotions form a set of basic, evolved functions that are shared by all humans. Laughter is ...

Sense of humor is potentially relevant to social functioning in dementias, but has been little studied in these diseases. We designed a semi-structured informant questionnaire to assess humor behavior and preferences in patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD; n = 15), semantic dementia (SD; n = 7), progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA; n = 10), and Alzheimer's disease (A...

This work presents a first step to a general implementation of the Semantic-Script Theory of Humor (SSTH). Of the scarce amount of research in computational humor, no research had focused on humor generation beyond simple puns and punning riddles. We propose an algorithm for mining simple humorous scripts from a semantic network (ConceptNet) by specifically searching for dual scripts that joint...

This study investigated the association of teacher stress with sense of humor and emotional intelligence (EI) among 108 EFL teachers from 5 private language institutes in Tehran. It was also checked that whether sense of humor and EI could predict teacher stress. The participants were administered Fimian’s (1984) Teacher Stress Inventory (TSI), Thorson and Powell’s (1993) Multidimensional Sense...

This article reports the first behavioral genetic study of relationships between alexithymia and four styles of humor: affiliative, self-enhancing, self-defeating, and aggressive. A total of 509 MZ pairs and 264 DZ pairs of twins completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (TAS-20) and the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). Consistent with our predictions, alexithymia correlated negatively with a...

There is increasing recognition of the stress and burnout suffered by critical care workers. Physicians have a responsibility to teach learners the skills required not only to treat patients, but to cope with the demands of a stressful profession. Humor has been neglected as a strategy to help learners develop into virtuous and resilient physicians. Humor can be used to reduce stress, address f...

The present study investigated the extent to which individual differences in humor styles are attributable to genetic and/or environmental factors in an Australian sample. Participants were 934 same-sex pairs of adult twins from the Australian Twin Registry (546 monozygotic pairs, 388 dizygotic pairs) who completed the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). The HSQ measures four distinct styles of h...

BACKGROUND Humor therapy is a non-pharmacological intervention with potential to improve mood and quality of life for institutionalized older persons, including those with dementia. The primary aims of the Sydney Multisite Intervention of LaughterBosses and ElderClowns (SMILE) are to examine the effects of humor therapy on residents' mood, quality of life, social engagement, and agitation. ME...

Much has been written about humor and even sarcasm automatic recognition on Twitter. The task of classifying humorous tweets according to the type of humor has not been confronted so far, as far as we know. This research is aimed at applying classification and other NLP algorithms to the challenging task of automatically identifying the type and topic of humorous messages on Twitter. To achieve...

PURPOSE To detect the presence of somatostatin (SOM) in normal aqueous humor and to characterize its immunosuppressive activity. METHODS Fresh rabbit aqueous humor was assayed for SOM by competitive ELISA. Primed T cells stimulated through their T-cell receptor (TCR) were treated with SOM at concentrations that ranged the level of SOM found in normal aqueous humor. The T cells were assayed fo...