WHAT IF THERE WAS A FREE MAGIC PILL that could reduce your students’stress, anxiety, and tension while increasing their self-esteem, alertness, creativity, learning, and memory? Would you prescribe it? Finding a treatment that is free and without side effects and helps to improve learning and memory would seem to be an improbable task. However, based on numerous scientific studies conducted ove...

Although the web security community now has a variety of techniques that could help web developers to defend against common attacks such as cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery, this work is not in a form suitable for general use. What is needed is a web standard that unites these techniques using syntax and semantics that are easy for web developers to learn and straightforward ...

purpose: to ascertain whether the use of nested-pcr (nested polymerase chain reaction) technique leads to more rapid and accurate diagnosis of bacterial endophthalmitis. methods: the aqueous humor and vitreous samples of 24 eyes of 24 patients with bacterial endophthalmitis were evaluated by microscopy, diagnostic aerobic culture, and nested- pcr to detect the infectious agent. results: aerobic...

This article considers how humor may fit within a resiliency perspective. Following a brief overview of resiliency approaches, including selected work on positive psychology, several lines of research that provide initial support for resiliency effects of humor on stress and trauma are highlighted. This work ranges from anecdotal case report descriptions of facilitative humor use in extremely t...

The present study examines the cross-national stability ofafactor analytically derived taxonomy ofjokes and cartoons. A sample oflOOfemale and 48 male Italian adults responded to Italian translations ofthe 3 WD humor test (Ruch 1983) which is aimed at measuring funniness and aversiveness of incongruity-resolution, nonsense, and sexual humor. The results were compared with that of a German sampl...

Two experiments concerning humor in teaching and learning in higher education are presented. The first study used relevant humor in a one-semester statistics course in an experimental group and no humor in a control group. One hundred sixty-one students participated, and the results showed significant differences between the two groups in favor of the group learning with humor. No significant s...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To describe patients' perspectives concerning the use of humor in their care and recovery. DESIGN Descriptive. SETTING Community-based. SAMPLE Nine women with a diagnosis of breast cancer. METHODS Open-ended interviews were conducted with participants to identify their use of humor, its influence on spirituality, and their perceptions of how nurses use humor in caring...

The appreciation of humor is a universal phenomenon and a key aspect of cognition. It has been studied in the context of jokes, where the incongruity in expected and observed context results in the perception of humor. The present study examines how the humor appreciation of single words relates to the humor of the whole joke – is a joke simply a sum of its parts? Using a novel dataset of singl...

Humor seems to manifest differently in Western and Eastern cultures, although little is known about how culture shapes humor perceptions. The authors suggest that Westerners regard humor as a common and positive disposition; the Chinese regard humor as a special disposition particular to humorists, with controversial aspects. In Study 1, Hong Kong participants primed with Western culture evalua...

Humor and mental health are interconnected as is evidenced by a large number of studies. However, associations are only small and inconsistent as the operationalization of humor poses a methodological challenge. The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) differentiates four humor styles that might be beneficial or harmful to mental health. The aim of the present study was to meta-analytically aggrega...