OBJECTIVE Humor has been shown to decrease the use of pain medicine, improve mood, and decrease stress. However, the timing and setting for using humor can be perceived differently depending on the patient and the context. Our objective was to better understand how patients with recurrent ovarian cancer experience humor to gain insight into the feasibility of using humor as a therapeutic adjunc...

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...