My dear friend, even though I do not write for Cosmo magazine, my advice truly could reignite passion and connection in your relationship. In my five years of post-divorce dating, I have gathered valuable information …

For years, I have seen men roll their eyes and exclaim, “Women! I’ll never understand them!” I have always been at a loss for how to respond to this outburst, since I have always found …

Looking back on my sessions with clients, I notice that I find humor and laughter refreshing and it helps strengthen the bond I feel with my clients. Recently after an intake with a new client, my supervisor said, “I heard a lot of laughter in your office. Must have been a good session.” Sometimes my clients bring humor into the session, lightly poking fun at themselves. Other times, I use gentle humor to help bring awareness to issues with which they’ve been struggling. Humor can be useful in therapy in two ways – as an assessment tool and as a therapeutic tool. … There are many ways to use humor in counseling without needing to be a comedian. [...]

Something happens to many people when they hit adulthood. Life becomes serious. It loses that lightness and freedom it had during childhood. It is a choice (conscious or unconscious) that adults make based on how they interpret what happens to them and the actions they take.

Laughter is a powerful way to bring that lightness of being back into one’s life.

Cruised any politics related web sites recently? Seen any angry, sarcastic, personal attacks wrapped in "humor"?

I suspect that, for many participants, both readers and bloggers, there are very real consequences.

What to do? I have two suggestions, one from my political experience and one from that great political philosopher, Walt Disney. [...]

In a study we conducted with high school freshmen and seniors from the Midwest, we found that humor and playfulness, along with curiosity and humility, were predictors of pleasure as a pathway to happiness. We also found that humor was highly endorsed by students. But humor can have a dark side. Several years ago, one of my students, Jason, was dismissed from an athletic team for showing disrespect to other players and the head coach with constant, sarcastic humor. [...]

If I wanted one indicator of the health of a workplace, it would be how much people laugh. In addition to smoke detectors, we need to invent laugh-o-meters so we can celebrate laughter and realize when we are starting to take ourselves too seriously. …

Each month, we have an optional theme, and our authors translate research in this domain into articles, or authors can write on a new topic.  For those articles on June’s optional theme, the theme is …

I watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart religiously. Instead of CNN, Fox or MSNBC, my news source of choice is Comedy Central.

Why, you may ask? Don’t I want to be a well-informed citizen? Shouldn’t I be reading the New York Times and taking things seriously. Maybe. But in today’s environment, I desperately need a laugh. [...]

What is a good amount of eustress in a flourishing person? Eustress helps us increase our skills and confidence and gives us the frisson of adrenalin as we set ourselves goals that we feel mildly terrified by. But there’s a fine line between eustress and distress. In fact, physiologically the body knows no difference between the two, but psychologically there is a world of difference. One is relished challenge. The other is being overwhelmed. Jung’s theory is that when we go through major stress, our dominant personality type gets subverted so we present a shadow side to the world, a state of being in-the-grip [...]