Laughter medicine
The sense of humor is the human strength that we have to use more frequently to make critical situations, help us find appropriate solutions, activate our creative area and provide us with the balance to overcome obstacles. It will help us to live with more intensity, enjoy each moment and find a way to our well-being. It is this ability to perceive things taking distance from them, everything without letting ourselves be dragged by the problem that affects or worries us.
People with a sense of humor and positive humor have in common an intelligent attitude to life, which is why it is one of the pillars of emotional intelligence.
Between the characteristics that they would present / display would be: the affable character, the amiability, the joy of living, the optimism, the frequent smile, etc. The humor falls in love, impacts, and surprises, excites, excites, and distributes joy. It provides physical, psychic and emotional benefits.
Regular humor
We must enhance the sense of humor because fortunately, we have a culture that values it. It should be one of the foundations of the teaching of all children, adolescents, young people and adults of any country, since it favors learning, solving problems, creativity, channeling our energies towards emotional health.
To understand the status of humor
In these different realities of laughter makes it necessary to define their various semantic fields in advance and to return to their restricted and more precise meaning.
The humor has an important place in our lives. We look for it at any age and in any culture, whether listening to a humorous column in the morning, exchanging a thoughtful tweet or joking with a co-worker. Historically, humor was viewed in a negative light by psychologists, who saw it as contempt, a mark of the superiority of the individual, or a defense mechanism designed to mask his real feelings.
The Art Of Joke
But appreciating humor requires doing some mental operations. Psychologists describe the understanding of a joke in three steps:
- first, we must imagine the situation of the joke,
- then seize an incongruity,
- Finally, manage to evacuate the initial explanation which is not funny to perceive the humor of the fall.
Humor, synonymous with joie de vivre and good cognitive abilities
Sometimes we do not like humor for several reasons. First, the joke can have a racist or sexist connotation. Then, to understand the humor requires to be able to inhibit its initial non-funny representation. For example, in violent cartoons, where Coyote suffers atrocities, one must be able to forget the cruelty to the animal to appreciate the humor.
In the elderly, because of cognitive decline due to age, humor may not be as well perceived as in younger people.
Humor has therapeutic virtues and can help the individual to get better. As such, describes the recent work of her team in which she analyzed student scores on different scales to measure their humor. Preliminary results show that people with a high sense of humor tend to focus on the positive aspects of their lives.
