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Article: Laughter helps patients communicate emotion in therapy sessions.
- Article from:
- Mental Health Weekly Digest
- Article date:
- November 1, 2004
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2004 NOV 1 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Laughter may be the best medicine, but the role laughter plays in psychotherapy has been disputed since the days of Freud.
Some early therapists believed that laughter could have a harmful effect, while more recent thinking has held that, if used nonjudgmentally, laughter can help support the therapeutic partnership. But none of those theories have been based on objective data.
In the October 2004 issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the first physiologic evidence of the role of laughter during psychotherapy. The researchers found that ...