Humor and Death: You’ve Got to Be Kidding

July 11, 2011 - PRLog -- New research from the University of Kent has revealed that humor is one of the most effective coping strategies for those dealing with failures. The other two strategies are positive reframing and acceptance.

In a paper published by the international journal Anxiety, Stress & Coping, Dr. Joachim Stoeber and Dr. Dirk Janssen from the University's School of Psychology 149 students completed daily diary reports for 3 to 14 days, reporting the most bothersome failure they experienced during the day, what strategies they used to cope with the failure, and how satisfied they felt at the end of the day.

Dr. Stoeber, a leading authority on perfectionism, motivation and performance, recommends that anyone trying to cope with a trying situation reframe things in a more positive way; for example, by focusing on what has been achieved, rather than on what has not been achieved. “It's no use ruminating about small failures and setbacks and drag yourself further down,” he said. “Instead it is more helpful to try to accept what happened,
look for positive aspects and…have a laugh about it.”

Allen Klein, a pioneer in the therapeutic value of humor, author of The Healing Power of Humor, and a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Association of Applied and Therapeutic Humor, agrees with Dr. Stoeber. Although Klein takes Stoeber’s research about laughing at failures a bit further and thinks we can also laugh at more major events, like the many losses in our life.

In his latest book, Learning to Laugh When You Feel Like Crying, Klein uses encouraging quotes and stories to inspire readers to embrace life after loss. He does that in five stages: losing, learning, letting go, living and laughing.

Klein knows that loss is often difficult, and that loss hurts. His wife died of a rare liver disease when she was 34-years-old. But he also knows that  it can be our greatest teacher in enriching out life, if we begin to let go of the loss, start to take back out life, and find something to laugh about.

Other recent researchers, has corroborated what Klein has been speaking and writing about for over twenty-years—that humor is an important coping mechanism not only in every day setbacks and failures but in death, dying, and grieving situations as well.

Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and George Bonanno, professor of education and psychology at Columbia University in New York City, for example, interviewed forty-five adults who had watched their spouses die six months earlier. Keltner and Bonanno wanted to determine which emotions predicted a healthy adjustment to loss in these survivors. They found the widows and widowers who smiled and laughed when they talked about their deceased spouses during the initial interviews experienced less grief six, fourteen and twenty-five months later.

So, with more research emerging about the coping benefits of humor and laughter, perhaps we need to rethink the question, “How can you laugh at a time like this?”

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Contact information: Allen Klein, www.allenklein.com

Learning to Laugh When You Feel Like Crying available on Amazon:
(http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_43?url=search-al...),