background: aging and its social-biological process naturally impair the functions of different body organs and cause progressive disabilities in managing personal affairs and performing social roles. laughter therapy is an important strategy which has been recommended by experts for increasing health promotion in older adults. therefore, we aimed to investigate the effect of laughter therapy p...

Background: Old age is associated with the physical and psychological problems that affect the Quality of Life (QoL). Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the effect of laughter therapy on the QoL of elderly people in nursing homes. Materials & Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study with‌ pretest-posttest along with control and experimental group and one-month follow-up conducted...

Discussion The mind, emotions and attention play an important role in the experience of pain. In patients with chronic pain, stress, fear and depression can amplify the perception of pain. Mind-body approaches act to change a person’s mental or emotional state or utilise physical movement to train attention or produce mental relaxation. They are occasionally used as a sole treatment, but more c...

were first studied by Zotterman in cats and suggested that knismesis is carried in part by pain fibers (21). C-fibers, unmyelinated afferents, are putatively involved in pleasurable touch in rodents (22). Central mechanisms of tickling were investigated by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in human brains (9); that study, which used tickling stimuli evoking knismesis and observedsoma...

Laughter is highly relevant for social interaction in human beings and non-human primates. In humans as well as in non-human primates laughter can be induced by tickling. Human laughter, however, has further diversified and encompasses emotional laughter types with various communicative functions, e.g. joyful and taunting laughter. Here, it was evaluated if this evolutionary diversification of ...

Studies on laughter in dialogue have proposed resolving what laughter is about by looking at what laughter follows. This paper investigates the sequential relation between the laughter and the laughable. We propose a semantic/pragmatic account treating laughter as a gestural event anaphor referring to a laughable. Data from a French and Chinese dialogue corpus suggest a rather free time alignme...