Sahaja Yoga: An ancient path to modern mental health? by Adam Morgan The present study looks to evaluate the effectiveness of the meditative practice of Sahaja Yoga as a treatment for the symptoms of anxiety and depression. Whilst there is a small research literature that has investigated the efficacy of meditation (usually based upon the Buddhist Vipassana tradition) for the treatment of such ...

Purpose Post-deployment health care for military veterans presents challenges to existing treatment models. Currently, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) sees numerous veterans with chronic, difficult to treat, and medically unexplained symptoms including, but not limited to, fatigue, chronic pain, headaches, gastrointestinal distress, concentration difficulties, disturbed sleep, anxiety, ...

In any endeavor, there may be highs and lows and usually mixes. Strengths are needed and summoned in a way to assuage the difficulties. We have enjoyed an auspicious beginning. Volume 4 has enjoyed a good year, continuous exposure to international audiences, enthusiasm expressed by authors and observers and most importantly the publication of our first Supplement devoted to the Vinci Symposium ...

There are several beneficial efforts attributed to humor and laughter, including improved immune function, increased pain tolerance, and decreased stress response. Humor therapy, laughter therapy, laughter meditation,and laughter clubs all have unique implications as group programs and as self-management techniques. For practitioners to implement credible programs and effectively teach self-man...

CONTEXT Humor therapy and the related mirthful laughter are suggested to have preventive and healing effects. Although these effects may be mediated by neuroendocrine/neuroimmune modulation, specific neuroimmune parameters have not been fully investigated. OBJECTIVE To determine the efficacy of mirthful laughter to modulate neuroimmune parameters in normal subjects. DESIGN A series of 5 sep...

OBJECTIVE To review the beneficial and harmful effects of laughter. DESIGN Narrative synthesis. DATA SOURCES AND REVIEW METHODS We searched Medline (1946 to June 2013) and Embase (1974 to June 2013) for reports of benefits or harms from laughter in humans, and counted the number of papers in each category. RESULTS Benefits of laughter include reduced anger, anxiety, depression, and stress...

This study investigates the facial features of different laughter types in historic illustrations. Several conceptually different types of laughter were proposed in the historic literature, but only four types were represented in visual and verbal illustrations by four or more historic illustrators (joyful, intense, schadenfreude laughter, grinning). Study 1 examined the encoding of facial feat...

In contrast to the well-established scientific evidence linking negative emotional states (e.g., depression, anxiety, or anger) to increased risk for cardiovascular disease, much less is known about the association between positive emotional states (e.g., laughter, happiness) and cardiovascular health. We determined the effects of mirthful laughter, elicited by watching comic movies, on endothe...

Although laughter is important in human social interaction, its role as a communicative signal is poorly understood. Because laughter is expressed in various emotional contexts, the question arises as to whether different emotions are communicated. In the present study, participants had to appraise 4 types of laughter sounds (joy, tickling, taunting, schadenfreude) either by classifying them ac...

Joyful laughter is the only laughter type that has received sufficient validation in terms of morphology (i.e., face, voice). Still, it is unclear whether joyful laughter involves one prototypical facial-morphological configuration (Duchenne Display and mouth opening) to be decoded as such, or whether qualitatively distinct facial markers occur at different stages of laughter intensity. It was ...