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Laughter yoga (Hasyayoga) is a practice involving prolonged voluntary laughter. Laughter yoga is based on the belief that voluntary laughter provides the same physiological and psychological benefits as spontaneous laughter. Laughter yoga is done in groups, with eye contact and playfulness between participants. Forced laughter soon turns into real and contagious laughter. Wikipedia
There are social laughter clubs around the world and a laughter club on Skype.
[Madan] Kataria likes to cite William James, who, in 1884, made the case that emotions were not manifested in the body but, rather, created by it. In an essay titled “What Is an Emotion?,” James offered the following thought experiment: imagine a strong emotional response to some event in your life, and then try to erase from it “its characteristic bodily symptoms”—for instance, fear without a rush of adrenaline and the physical impulse to run, or sadness without flushness and tears. In such cases, James argued, “We find we have nothing left behind, no ‘mind stuff ’ out of which the emotion can be constituted.” James was so convinced that the body was the source of our feelings that he argued that people could undo a particular emotion by “cold-bloodedly” acting out its opposite. Recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have explored this insight. It seems that people lean forward while thinking about the future, and are more ready to judge a personality to be warm if they are holding a hot cup of coffee instead of a cold drink. Botox injections, which immobilize parts of the face, may limit one’s ability not only to express emotions but also to feel them. In 2002, Charles Schaefer, a psychologist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, studied how forced laughter affected the state of mind of students. He noted that “adults who act happy (broad smile; hearty laugh) for a minute a day are likely to elevate their mood.” The New Yorker
Kinda hard to disagree with this. "Why, that's ridiculous, bwa ha haaaa" is hardly a refutation.
There are social laughter clubs around the world and a laughter club on Skype.
[Madan] Kataria likes to cite William James, who, in 1884, made the case that emotions were not manifested in the body but, rather, created by it. In an essay titled “What Is an Emotion?,” James offered the following thought experiment: imagine a strong emotional response to some event in your life, and then try to erase from it “its characteristic bodily symptoms”—for instance, fear without a rush of adrenaline and the physical impulse to run, or sadness without flushness and tears. In such cases, James argued, “We find we have nothing left behind, no ‘mind stuff ’ out of which the emotion can be constituted.” James was so convinced that the body was the source of our feelings that he argued that people could undo a particular emotion by “cold-bloodedly” acting out its opposite. Recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have explored this insight. It seems that people lean forward while thinking about the future, and are more ready to judge a personality to be warm if they are holding a hot cup of coffee instead of a cold drink. Botox injections, which immobilize parts of the face, may limit one’s ability not only to express emotions but also to feel them. In 2002, Charles Schaefer, a psychologist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, studied how forced laughter affected the state of mind of students. He noted that “adults who act happy (broad smile; hearty laugh) for a minute a day are likely to elevate their mood.” The New Yorker
Kinda hard to disagree with this. "Why, that's ridiculous, bwa ha haaaa" is hardly a refutation.
