Is Laughter The Best Medicine?

KEY POINTS

• In positive psychology, humour is a character strength.
• Negative humour increases pathological worry and decreases wellbeing.
• Positive humour decreases pathological worry and increases wellbeing.
• Mental illness could be exacerbated by the absence, or the overuse, of character strengths.

Positive psychology puts a lot of emphasis on character strengths. These are a series of positive attributes that make up a person’s character, with the idea being that if you play to yours, you can enhance your mood and sense of wellbeing at both an individual and a community level.

There are 24 strengths all told, including creativity, love of learning, bravery, persistence, kindness, love, fairness, forgiveness, modesty, and humour. But you must use them wisely.

When it comes to humour and its effects upon our mental health and wellbeing, a study, Humour and anxiety: The relationship between comic styles, worry and general wellbeing, published at the end of last year in Personality and Individual Differences, found that people who use humour to arouse sympathy for human imperfections or act silly to make others laugh tend to experience less pathological worry. 1

However, Dionigi and his fellow authors also discovered a dark side to humour. Those that use negative comedy (such as cynicism) tended to report higher levels of pathological worry, and lower levels of psychological wellbeing.

Other types of humour (such as wit, irony, sarcasm, and nonsense) appeared to be mostly unrelated to worry and wellbeing.

“Humour is not a unitary concept,” said one of the paper’s authors, Alberto Dionigi. “It may have both positive and negative facets.”

Dionigi (who is a member of the International Society of Humour Studies) is a cognitive behaviour therapist (CBT) with a keen interest in the use of humour.

The 254 participants in his study completed a scientific questionnaire known as Comic Style Markers, which records the use of both positive and negative styles of humour. They also completed an assessment of pathological worry and a World Health Organisation (WHO) wellbeing index.

Previous studies have found that the use of positive humour is associated with increased optimism and lower anxiety and depression.

“In this research,” Dionigi said, “we were able to identify which type of humour is associated with reduced worry and which type is positively correlated with wellbeing. So, using humour to spread a good mood and good companionship (fun) and discover humorous discrepancies in everyday experiences (benevolent humour) are associated with lower worry and higher wellbeing. In contrast, cynicism (aimed at devaluing commonly recognised values) can lead to poor wellbeing and to increased worry.”

These findings also tie in with studies on character strengths and mental health, which suggest that mental illness could be the result of the opposite, absence, or overuse of your character strengths. The psychologist Chris Peterson, who was a founder of positive psychology, was working on this very topic before his untimely death.

Play to your strengths properly and you flourish, but underuse them or use them incorrectly, and you flounder, you become prone to disorders such as anxiety and depression. Peterson argued that, instead of looking at a person as their mental health diagnosis, you should look at their character strengths instead. Bring these into balance and you might correct their mood disorder.

Take humour for instance. If this is one of your strengths and you are acting in the opposite, you could become dour. With its absence (perhaps you are in an environment that frowns upon it) then you are humourless. Your mood and wellbeing could suffer. Overuse humour, however, and you could be considered a clown and a buffoon; people might not take you seriously. You could feel misunderstood and become angry or depressed and, even, bitter, and cynical. Becoming cynical, as the Dionigi study suggests, could negatively impact upon your wellbeing.

Like Dionigi, I have a keen interest in humour.

When I took the Character Strengths test at the VIA Institute on Character myself, it came out as my number one strength. This did not surprise me as it has been a valuable aid for me my whole life. In fact, I wrote my MSc dissertation on the use of humour in psychotherapy and use it in my practice to good effect.2

“Humour is one of the most effective forms of communication that humans employ, and it is of interest in the case of applied research into mental and physical health, said Dionigi.

“Humour may have plenty of positive effects, such as serving as emotion regulation; a coping strategy and a distraction technique: in these ways, humour may attenuate negative emotions and improve positive ones,” he said.

And like Dionigi, I also practice CBT. The form of CBT that I use is called rational emotive behaviour therapy (REBT). The late Albert Ellis, who developed it, considered humour to be as essential an element to the process of therapy as empathy, congruence, and positive regard.

In therapy, these three elements are known as ‘core conditions.’ Developed by the psychologist Carl Rogers, these core conditions are considered necessary and sufficient, i.e., they are things the client needs for therapy to work. Ellis considered humour to be a fourth core condition.

But you need a reason to use it, there needs to be a therapeutic point to your humour. Use it in the therapy room in an inappropriate way and you could break rapport with your client, leave them feeling insulted, or have them not take the work you are doing seriously.

“He who laughs lasts longest,” as the saying goes; but this could depend not only on what you’re laughing at but also on how your laughter is manifest.