psychology of laughter

Laughter is a pleasant topic to discuss. We laugh without knowing why we do it. The greatest advantage of laughter is that it binds people together.
One research showed that only 10-20% of our laughter is suited with jokes. Many times a stimulus for laughter is a person, not a joke. And even if it is a joke, people can't give particular reasons why it awakened their laughter. We send laughter as a signal to others and it disappears when there is no audience.
Gender differences in laughter are great. Females laugh more than males. Men seem to be the instigators of laughter through all the cultures and times. Try to remember who was the funniest person in your class or working place. Perhaps he was a male, Maybe that's why there are more male comedians. Women seek the men who make them laugh and men are eager to fulfil this request.
Some say that laughter is the best medicine. This develops from the fact that laughter unites people and social support improves our mental and physical health. Also pain reduction is one things that laughter can guarantee. People who laughed during some procedures tolerated more discomfort than those that didn't laugh. The same is with patients - the ones who watched funny videos requested less aspirin than those who didn't watch.
Laughter involves a collection of 17 muscles around the mouth and the eyes. Just an interesting fact =)
Another advantages of laughter are that it makes us less stressed, lowers our blood pressure, reduces anxiety (it's because laughter stimulates endorphines, tha netural painkillers). That's the way Freud saw laughter - it converts agression to something more acceptable. This explains why people laugh when they are nervous or sudddenly relieved.
Laughter helps to think us more creatively, it loosens up the mental gears and encourages us to think about things not in ordinary ways.
An intriguing thing is that people laugh more if their boss tells a joke rather than a simple colleague. Moreover, it funny whne someone slips over on a banana skin, but how funny it is when it happens to a policeman or politician?
Usually people laugh about 18 times as day but of course the spectrum varies. Some of the laughter is related to mood but there are some areas in the brain which explain why some people laugh more. It is also related with personality. People who laugh more cope with stress easier in their daily life, they live longer and healthier.
By the way, the arrival of a good clown to a village does more for its health than 20 boxed laden with drugs =)

.: Psychology of conflicts :.

We all know that a conflict is a natural disagreement which comes as a result from individual differences in values, opinions, needs and beliefs. Conflicts are quite damaging. That’s because usually they don’t begin if everything is right and correct. Because of their differences people might lose temper, get anxious, get into bad mood and so on. But also conflicts may be light and creating. It’s when people calmly come to a compromise, decide something together and sometimes this brings wonderful results and new ideas.

A conflict consist of needs, perception, values, power, feelings and emotions. A need is something essential to our well-being, we shouldn’t mix it with desires. So a conflict arises when we ignore our own or other people’s needs. The next thing is that people perceive causes and consequences of problems in various ways. The kinds and quantity of conflicts depend on the way people use and define their power. It also has much to do in solving the conflict. Conflict may occur because people can try to make others do something or behave in a particular way. Our values are the beliefs that we consider to be very important. A conflict may arise when two sides disagree on each others values or don’t accept different values than their.

Conflict managing is like riding a bicycle – at first we need some support and then when we catch how to do it there’s nothing more to do but practice. Most of us want to be able to manage conflicts really successfully but sadly it can’t happen without practicing. If we want to solve a conflict we have to analyze it, what caused it and so on. Many things depend on the type of relationships between people. If the relationship was based on trust and cooperation, the loss of these things caused by some previous actions is not easily forgotten. Moreover, denying those causes can lead to insecurity and fear of one side. There are some tips which help to manage a conflict with the least harm: first, watch your body language, tone and glances, these things really affect people. Then listen carefully, sometimes people don’t hear everything that the other party is saying (especially if we don’t want to hear those things). Also deal only with the present situation, don’t try to take points from the past. A tiny but important detail is to remove such words like “never and always” from your language, because they really don’t help in managing conflicts. It may happen that the case of conflict can be too difficult or unpleasant for people to solve it themselves. Then a therapist can help by suspecting some signals of unrecognized misunderstanding. He can help each side to paraphrase the other sides’ opinion - this process can help to understand each others point of view and come up to one opinion or action.

As we live in a technological world, what about online conflicts? They are heightened here for sure. It happens so because we don’t see the body language, facial expressions and don’t hear the voice of the people we speak to. To it’s up to our imagination and mood to understand in what way a person said one thing or another. Besides, people are more opened when they place and express their thoughts online and not face to face. But the internet is a perfect place to practice conflicts. You may not respond immediately, so in this way you can overthink the way you would like to respond and avoid the conflict.