Yoga is part of mainstream culture today, with major medical centers, community healthcare centers, and neighborhood yoga studios offering yoga as a mind-body practice to support health and healing. In the US, over 20 million individuals now practice yoga, with studios found in nearly every state. Although yoga has existed in various forms for around 2500 years, the phenomenon of “yoga for heal...

This is the final article in a four part series reviewing the influence of humor and laughter on physiological and psychological well-being. This final article reviews the evidence for the effect of sense of humor, exposure to a humor stimulus and laughter on various immune system components, with a focus on the effects of laughter on natural killer cell cytotoxicity.

The burst of laughter that is evoked by tickling is a primitive form of vocalization. It evolves during an early phase of postnatal life and appears to be independent of higher cortical circuits. Clinicopathological observations have led to suspicions that the hypothalamus is directly involved in the production of laughter. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation, healthy pa...

A 69-year-old man had been suffering from recurrent syncope induced by laughter since the age of 58. His syncope was reproduced by head-up tilt testing with isoproterenol infusion and we concluded that his laughter-induced syncope was one type of neurally mediated syndrome (NMS). His daughter also had NMS and her syncope was treated with propranolol. Propranolol and midodrine hydrochloride, an ...

I n this issue of Global Advances in Health and Medicine, Cheung et al report their findings from a mixed-methods study of adherence to yoga practice for older women with knee osteoarthritis. 1 These women completed an 8-week yoga intervention for osteoarthritis 6 months prior to completing a survey, face-to-face interviews, and vid-eotaping of their practice. Adherence at 6 months was analyzed...

Purpose Young adults are increasingly practicing yoga (Barnes et al., 2008) and yoga interventions have been shown to decrease stress and anxiety. However, little is known about the characteristics of young adults who engage in yoga or the correlates of yoga practice outside of clinical contexts. Our objective was to characterize students who practice yoga and to examine correlates of recent yo...

Laughter as a vocal expressive-communicative signal is one of the least understood and most frequently overlooked human behaviors. The chapter provides an overview of what we know about laughter in terms of respiration, vocalization, facial action, and body movement and attempts to illustrate the mechanisms of laughter and to define its elements. The importance of discriminating between spontan...

Hurling in Cornwall, la soule in Britanny, Shrovetide football in England: Popular games have normally been treated as forerunners of modern sport, sport having regulated the space and the time of the game, the (non-) violence of behaviour, the control of results, the planning, strategy, tactics, techniques and evaluation of the competitive action. This is told as a story of social improvement ...

Recent work has identified the physical features of smiles that accomplish three tasks fundamental to human social living: rewarding behavior, establishing and managing affiliative bonds, and negotiating social status. The current work extends the social functional account to laughter. Participants (N = 762) rated the degree to which reward, affiliation, or dominance (between-subjects) was conv...

objectives: multiple sclerosis (ms) is a disease of the central nervous system that results in many symptoms including mobility limitation, fatigue, cognitive dysfunction and redacted quality of life. the purpose of this study was to determine the effect of 8-weeks aerobic and yoga training on depression, anxiety and quality of life in individuals with ms. methods: 31 women with ms (mean of age...