When people lose hope they typically find it hard to see a way around obstacles and to make a plan to deal with the problem.
Watching a 15-minute funny video makes people feel more hopeful about the future.
Humour helps to relieve stress and increase people’s general sense of wellbeing.
When people lose hope they typically find it hard to see a way around obstacles and to make a plan to deal with the problem.
The positive emotions that humour generates, though, helps people to think more broadly and avoid automatic responses to a situation.
Happy thoughts help people find new, creative paths to take.
So, humour may help people to see a way around obstacles and form a plan.
For the study, 180 people watched a short comedy video or one on a neutral topic.
The authors explain the results:
“Viewing a 15-minute comedy video resulted in a statistically significant increase in state hope scores relative to a control group viewing an affectively neutral video.
Thus, the present study provides some support for the hypothesis that the experience of humor can positively influence state hopefulness.”
The more serious stressors people had faced recently, the lower their hope was, the study also showed.
It is no surprise that almost everyone says humour is necessary for getting over life’s more difficult moments.
The authors write:
“…as a coping mechanism, humor may competitively inhibit negative thoughts with positive ones, thereby fostering hope in individuals.
Hence, humor and hope are potentially significant factors to one’s overall sense of psychological and physical well-being.”
Incidentally, reading this study I came across the most pessimistic definition of hope I have ever read:
“Stotland (1969) defined hope as a perceived probability of goal attainment that is greater than zero.”
The study was published in the International Journal of Humor Research (Vilaythong et al., 2003).
