M.Phil. / Everybody wants to experience happiness, prosperity and good health. Today's demands and pressures make it very difficult to experience well-being in our work environment and personal life. Symptoms like stress, negative attitude, depression, aggression and low productivity are visible. All these symptoms have an influence on the human body and emotions. Psychosomatic illnesses like depression, stress, heart disease, high blood pressure, asthma and back and shoulder pains are common phenomena. The question is what can a person do, in spite of the circumstances, to achieve personal well-being and healthiness. The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of some emotions on personal well-being, specifically the influence of stress as an unhealthy emotion and laughter and humor as healthy emotions. The specific research questions are: 1. What is the effect of stress, as an unhealthy emotion, on a human's wellbeing? 2. What is the effect of laughter and humor, as healthy emotions, on a human's well-being? 3. What are the benefits that laughter and humor, as healthy emotions, have for personal wellbeing and healthiness? The research programme entails the following: Chapter one gives a general orientation of the study. The second chapter focuses on the influence of stress as an unhealthy emotion on personal well-being while chapter three deals with the influence of laughter and humor as healthy emotions on personal well-being. In chapter four the characteristics of a personal and professional leader as well as the main life domains are investigated. Chapter five concludes the research with a summary, findings and conclusion. 2. METHOD OF APPROACH A descriptive research strategy was followed in this study. A descriptive research study is a systematic, accurate and factual description of something, in this case the influence of some emotions on personal well-being, for the sake of better understanding, insight and informativeness (Smith, 1993:35). The prevalent research methods used were studies of existing literature available in this field as well as concept and phenomena analyses. 3. RESEARCH FINDINGS The research findings are as follows: Stress has a physiological and a psychological influence on the human body and has been shown to affect almost all body systems, resulting in cardiovascular disease, neuromuscular disorders (including migraine and chronic back pain}, respiratory and allergic disorders, immunologic disorders, gastrointestinal disturbances (including peptic ulcer disease, irritable bowel syndrome, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea), skin disease, dental problems, and a host of other disorders (Hafen, 1996:44). Laughter and humor have, because of the physiological changes that take place, a big impact in terms of physical benefits (including respiratory activity, oxygen exchange, heartrate, and toning the cardiovascular system), pain relief, (arthritis, gout, back and shoulder pain), immunity-enhancing and psychological benefits (stress relieve, bestowing a sense of power, giving new perspective). By applying specific suggestions how to use laughter and humor as healthy emotions from a Personal and Professional Perspective it is possible to achieve personal well-being and healthiness.

This project traces the wide and varied uses of patriotic (and, at times, jingoistic and xenophobic) humor within the Victorian novel. a culture’s humor, perhaps more than any other cultural markers (food, dress, etc.), provides invaluable insight into that nation’s values and perceptions—not only how they view others, but also how they view themselves. in fact, humor provides such a unique cultural thumbprint as to make most jokes notoriously untranslatable. Victorian humor is certainly not a new topic of critical discussion; neither is English ethno-cultural identity during this era lacking scholarly attention. However, the intersection of these concerns has been seemingly ignored; thus, my research investigates the enmeshed relationship between these two areas of study. Not only do patriotic sentiment and humor frequently overlap, they often form a causational relationship wherein a writer’s rhetorical invocation of shared cultural experiences creates humorous self-awareness while “inside” jokes which reference unique Anglo-specific behaviors or collective memories promote a positive identity with the culture in question. Drawing on and extending the work of James Kincaid’s Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Harold Nicolson’s “The English Sense of Humor,” and Bergson’s and Freud’s theories of humor as a social construct, I question how this reciprocated relationship of English ethnic identity and humor functions within Victorian novels by examining the various ways in which nineteenth-century authors used humor to encourage affirmative patriotic sentiment within their readers.

The purpose of this study is to define what melancholy meant during the English Renaissance, to throw some light on the origins and types of melancholy which became dominant in the thought and literary expression of the period, and to examine the various melancholy types among Shakespeare's characters.

The problem of this thesis is the question of whether appreciation of humor is characteristic of adult creatives. Also, can the humor factor be a significant factor in the prediction of creative individuals? As a consequence of the theory and experimental evidence associated with the relationship between humor and creativity, the following hypothesis is formulated for further study: there is a significantly positive relationship between humor appreciation and creative ability.

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