The Potential of Frequent Laughter to Reduce the Stress of Daily Life

Written by Joyce Smith, BS. Researchers found that the frequency, but not the intensity of laughter weakened the association between stressful events and their subsequent stress symptoms.

Existing evidence points to an association between the experience of feeling pleasure and a positive effect. When we are in a positive effect state, we feel happy, joyful, enthusiastic, calm, and satisfied ¹. A positive effect is also positively association with a purpose in life ², positive health behaviors ³, and improved sleep ⁴ and longevity ⁵. Worthy of mention is the significant role of positive effects in the alleviation of stress ⁶. Humor can trigger increased pain tolerance for experimentally induced pain, while a keen sense of humor can be a coping mechanism for chronic pain conditions ⁷. Laughter, when viewed from the perspective of a “physiological expression of positive effect” lends credence to the assumption that the frequency or intensity of laughter is a reflection of the level of experienced  pleasure ⁸. Individuals laugh an estimated 18 times per day in their interaction with others ⁹, with women generally smiling more than men ¹⁰, and with smiling frequency varying among different cultures ¹¹.

The current prospective longitudinal study ¹² explores in a real life setting the possibility that frequency and intensity of laughter can attenuate the association between experiencing a stressful event in daily life and its subsequent experience of stress symptoms. The study collected completed smartphone app data over a 3-month period, March to May of 2018, from university students in their real-life settings. Participants consisted of 41 psychology students (33 were women) with a mean age of 21.6 years. Each students received a mobile phone with an inserted app. An acoustic signal from the app prompted participants to answer questions pertaining to their stress levels at randomized time intervals (eight times daily between 8 am and 9:30 pm) for 14 consecutive days. Answered questions relating to the frequency and intensity of laughter and the stressful events and subsequent stress symptoms experienced as well as completed demographic questionnaires were collected and analyzed. Students were thanked and given course credits for their participation.

Overall, of the 5008 prompted question, a median of 96.7% were answered. Researchers found that the association between stressful events and subsequent stress symptoms was moderated by the frequency of laughter experienced at the time of the stressful event; however, the intensity of laughter had no significant effect. The more frequently students laughed close to the time of experiencing stressful events, the weaker the association between stressful events and stress symptoms became. (When frequency of laughter increased by one standard deviation, the association between a previously experienced stress event and its subsequent experience of stress symptoms decreased by 0.048 [95% CI: -0.077 to-0.020; standardized coefficient: -0.052; 95% CI = -0.082 to -0.021]). When laughter frequency was greater than a student’s mean frequency, the association between experiences of stressful events and self-reported stress symptoms decreased. This laughter frequency effect applied to both measures of global stress symptoms and combined measures of stress symptoms.

Study limitations include an inability to prove causation, the absence of physiological measures of stress, a potential bias of self-evaluations, and a predominantly female study population that disallowed generalization to other populations. Future studies involving both male and female participants are needed to investigate potential gender differences in response to laugher frequency and its stress response effect.

Source: Zander-Schellenberg, Thea, Isabella Mutschler Collins, Marcel Miché, Camille Guttmann, Roselind Lieb, and Karina Wahl. “Does laughing have a stress-buffering effect in daily life? An intensive longitudinal study.” Plos one 15, no. 7 (2020): e0235851.

© 2020 Zander-Schellenberg et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Posted August 26, 2020.

Joyce Smith, BS, is a degreed laboratory technologist. She received her bachelor of arts with a major in Chemistry and a minor in Biology from  the University of Saskatchewan and her internship through the University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine and the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She currently resides in Bloomingdale, IL.

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