Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS), a common chronic pain condition, is often incompletely treated by conventional medical therapies. It can cause disability, psychological distress, work-related absenteeism, increased use of healthcare resources, and result in the inability to carry out the tasks of daily living. The purpose of this quantitative, correlational study was to investigate the potential influence of laughter on affect and pain in individuals with FMS. Laughter produces beneficial effects on acute pain and on chronic pain in general and has been found to improve temporary affective states, but there have been no studies testing the effects of laughter on the pain and affect of fibromyalgia patients. Informing this study were the gate control and neuromatrix theories of pain, as well as the dynamic model of affect theory. The research questions addressed whether laughter frequency is associated with affect and or with perceived chronic pain levels in these individuals. Forty-one adult fibromyalgia patients documented all laughter episodes daily and assessed their pain and affective states 3 times per day for 14 days. Hierarchical regressions revealed that increased overall laughter frequency was significantly associated with decreases in overall pain and increases in overall positive affect but was not associated with measures of negative affect. Also, morning laughter frequency was predictive of increased afternoon and evening positive affect ratings, as well as with decreased afternoon pain ratings, but was not significantly associated with evening pain ratings. The knowledge gained from these results may have positive social change implications at the individual level, within those individuals' larger social networks, and within the research and medical communities.

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This thesis offers the first critical examination of the sound of laughter in Romantic poetry. Part one locates laughter in the history of ideas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and explores the interplay between laughter and key intellectual, aesthetic, ethical, and social issues in the Romantic period. I chart a development in thinking about laughter from its primary association with ridicule and the passions up to the early decades of the eighteenth century, to its emerging symbiosis with politeness and aesthetic judgement, before a reassertion of laughter's signification of passion and naturalness by the end of the eighteenth century. Laughter provides an innovative means of mapping cultural markers, and I argue that it highlights shifts in standards and questions of taste. Informed by this analysis, part two offers a series of historically aware close readings of Romantic poetry that identify both an indebtedness to, and refutation of, earlier and contemporaneous ideas about laughter. Rather than having humour or comedy as its central concerns, this thesis identifies the pervasive and capricious influence of the sound of the laugh in the writing of Robert Burns, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats. I detect the heterogeneous representations of laughter in their work that runs across a diverse range of genres, poetic forms, themes, and contexts. As such, I argue against the serious versus the humorous binary which prevails in literary criticism of Romanticism, and suggest that laughter articulates the interplay between the elegiac and the comic, the sublime and the ridiculous, the solitary and the communal. Moreover, I detect a double-naturedness to the sound of laughter in Romantic poetry that registers the subject's capacity to signify both consensus and dispute. This inherent polarity creates a tension in the poems as laughter ironically challenges what it also affirms. Never singularly fixed, the sound of laughter reveals the protean nature of Romantic verse.

The differences among certain physiological changes occurring in response to mirthful laughter, directed relaxation, and verbal speech were investigated. These changes included amount of muscle tension, as measured with surface electromyography, in the forehead and in the upper body as recorded from the forearms bilaterally, peripheral surface skin temperature, heart rate, and respiration rate. The study sought to determine whether the net effect of laughter, as measured on these five variables after a three-minute refractory period, is a more relaxed state than existed before the laughter. Determination of the similarity between the changes following laughter and the changes following directed relaxation was made in comparison with the changes following verbal speech. Factors of prior anxiety, pre- and post-self-esteem levels, humor level, and laughter intensity were examined. Historical and theoretical perspectives were reviewed, as well as the known information on physiological responses to laughter.

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Le rire est un comportement humain indiscutablement universel. Abondamment traité par la psychologie et les neurosciences, il demeure néanmoins le laissé-pour-compte de l’anthropologie. Si les connaissances empiriques accumulées à ce jour ont permis de bien le caractériser à des niveaux proximaux d’analyse, la question de son origine évolutionniste est, en contrepartie, souvent évacuée. Or, toute tentative sérieuse de comprendre ce comportement requiert une investigation de sa fonction adaptative et de sa phylogénèse. Le projet entrepris ici consiste en une analyse de cinq hypothèses ultimes sur le rire et l’humour, desquelles sont extraites des prédictions qui sont confrontées à des données empiriques provenant de disciplines diverses. En guise de conclusion, il est tenté de formuler un scénario évolutif qui concilie les différentes hypothèses abordées. / Laughter is a universal and ubiquitous human behavior. Widely investigated by psychology and neuroscience, it is still largely ignored by anthropology. While humor and laughter are well caracterised at proximate levels of explanation, the question of their evolutionary origins remains relatively unexplored. A number of recent hypotheses have yet attempted to shed light on the potential adaptive significance and phylogeny of these behaviors. This project consists of an analysis of five of these ultimate explanations, by confronting their predictions to empirical data from a large array of disciplines. In the end, I propose an evolutionary framework that synthesizes and reconciles these hypotheses.

This research focuses on the art of clowning as a tool and method of psychosocial support in situations of crisis. As this topic is notably under-addressed in scholarly research, this research aims to deepen knowledge on humanitarian clowns in the contemporary humanitarian world. By analyzing the humanitarian clown from the perspective of members of the organization ‘Clowns Without Borders’ (CWB), this research asks: What is the position, practice and function of humanitarian clowns in the humanitarian world? Besides a wider pool of data based on relevant literature, the empirical material for the analysis was collected by conducting a total of five semi-structured in-depth interviews with the representatives of the Clowns Without Borders, as well as artists working within it. In addition, secondary data has primarily been gathered from the CWB USA blog. Analysis of this data demonstrated that clowning in humanitarian settings can serve several functions. The results indicate that the humanitarian clown is a complex being and that clowns perceive their position in humanitarian world as defined by the unique human connection they establish with the people they work for. They among others can have the effect to bring about joy, happiness, self-reflection, physiological and psychosocial relief, hope, trust and community and can be perceived as an undervalued method of promoting psychosocial wellbeing in settings of humanitarian crisis.

Este trabalho tem o objetivo de estudar alguns aspectos do gênero cômico na novela exemplar El coloquio de los perros de Miguel de Cervantes. Com este propósito, foram escolhidos os quatro primeiros episódios da obra: o matadouro de Sevilha, Berganza como cão pastor, o rico comerciante e o oficial de justiça, tendo como ponto de partida o estudo analítico da comicidade, levando em conta a maneira como se constitui no corpus selecionado, seja por intermédio do elemento burlesco, seja pelo satírico, com a perspectiva de promover o entretenimento, o riso. Para realizar tal análise observou-se como essas formas discursivas se constituem no interior da narrativa/diálogo, destacando o que as distingue em cada episódio selecionado, a fim de desvendar de que maneira esse diálogo cômico-filosófico nos remete a uma censura sócio-moral, um dos temas centrais dessa obra de Cervantes. / This work aims to study some aspects of the comic genre in the exemplary novel El coloquio de los perros by Miguel de Cervantes. For this purpose the first four episodes of the work were selected: Slaughterhouse of Seville, Berganza as shepherd dog, the wealthy merchant and the bailiff. The chosen starting point was the analytical study of the comicality, taking into account the way it is constituted in the selected corpus, either through the burlesque element, or by the satirical one, with the perspective to promote entertainment, laughter. For such analysis, it was observed how these discursive forms are constituted within this narrative/dialogue, highlighting what distinguishes each one in the selected episodes, in order to unravel how this comical-philosophical dialogue leads us to a socio-moral censure, one of the central themes of this work of Cervantes.