【哈佛积极心理学笔记】第20课 幸福与幽默

第20课 幸福与幽默

The vanguard of the positive psychology revolution:
Our brain is basically a single processor, capable of consciouly choosing to devote resources either to the pain and suffering on one side, or viewing the world that lens of something like optimism or mindfulness.
So too I think humor is exactly in this the facet. I think that humor iteself is the option, the mindful option of choosing between viewing the world throught the lens of suffering, of pain, of injustice, or viewing the world through the lens of something of adaptive and powerful.

So I defined humor today as a mindful lens, through which we can view the world as a way of mindfully perceiving the world analogous to optimism where an individual heightens awarenss of potentials whitin a situation.

Humor is difficult to define.

there giants in the field of psychological research on humor.

1. Sigmund Freud - Jokes and Their relationship to the Unconscious

model consciousness:

While the inside you have the id, the id contains the sexual and physical and the violent impulses that we all have.
Outside of that is the ego which makes the descision about the id as the permeable barrier between the id impulses and the society.
And the outside layer is super-ego. The super-ego is the moral constraints, the societal constraints that is placed upon us.
We get frustrated because those id impulses are there but we have no way of getting those impulses out into the world. And so we become repressed. The more you get repressed. I think something’s about exploding in the end.

Humor is a socially acceptable envelope for couching those desires. It’s a way, a socially acceptable way
of getting those id impulses out into society, which explains why humor is sexual or aggressive in nature.

that humor as psychological safety valut.

So humor is actually one of the ways we can get that out there. The humor itself using words is the way that we can allow for id impulse to come out. Because those words don’t violate very many of our social constructions.
Supposelly the words don’t actually harm us. So it’s socially acceptable.

2. Henri Bergson
   Humor as a social “corrective”
   Humans are under developmental trajectory toward self-actualization or achieving our potential. And what Bergson argues is that hunor is the point in which we correct somebody when we slip or fall off this developmental trajectory, when we do something that doesn’t allow us to self-actualize as fast as we could.

3. humor as a corrective

4. humor as a psychology release
   both wrong

Humor is a mindful lens through which we view the world.
We can see that humor iteself is the cognitive lens through which we view actions that come into our environment.

Alpha press and Beta press
Alpha: objective constraints of reality.
Beta: subjective construal of reality

Their way of viewing the world absolutely has an effect upon how you view that alpha press.
Beta press is acutally malleable and as a result have an extreme amount of changes in our adaptive behavior.
Humor is the one of the most powerful ways that we can actually change the Beta press by changing the way that we actually view our environment so it’s actually adaptive for us.

cognitive afterimage

When they look at the newspaper, when they see something that seems to be neutral or even sad or tragic, they start to change the shape. They rotate the shape in their mind. As a result, they are looking for patterns all the time. They are looking for multiple potentials whitin a status quo, instead of just see newspaper, they see the possibility of humor that can come out of that.

cognitive afterimage can be a detriment sometimes as well.

When we laugh at something, Peter Berger that we get a momentary suspension of reality.
So humor provides a way of being actually more mindful.

Ellen Langer defines mindfulness as “being present in the situation” so that you can be aware of the potentials in that environment.
When you are really present in the situation and when you view the world through a specific pattern, what you are doing is you actually parsing the world in a way that acutally shows more potentials than that environment.

Maslow argues that we have these peak experiences where for momentarily we put on the cloak of self-actualization. we momentarily gain and see and glimpse the potentials we actually have.
So too I think the humor is in the same vein.
we are provide the reality in which the consequences for actions don’t have a negative effect upon us, where we see life giving reality and happiness even in the situation that seems dry and sad to other people. The ordinary becomes extraordinary.

sympathetic nervous system: boost up
parasympathetic nervous system: cool down
humor, just like mindfulness and meditation. activate the parasympathetic system
laugh is also a form of exercise

Humor will do something like this the chemical level, actually making us better defended against reality.
increase our immune system
also increase pain tolerance
decrease the stress and increases remission rates in term of cancer

mirror neurons
we are actually literally hardwired for empathy for other people.
As a result of that, humor is extremely contagious.

people seem to absolutely favor this
humor is a signal of cognitive fitness

humor actually allows us to be able to transform things that we thought were negative or bad or upsetting in the past.

Six ways increase your humor levels:

1. journal your positive experience
   go thruogh your day write down something that happened during your day, then play around with it, change the shape of it, keep orienting it until you can find something humorous about it.
   As a result of that, your brain actually gets in the pattern of looking for things that are funny in your life.
2. watch funny people
3. TQP (Two question process)
   why am I so funny? why don’t other people recognize this
   keep repeating, builds your self-esteem
4. permission to be subhuman
5. Variety and breaking patterns
   The more you can break a pattern, the more you are able to see potentialities with a situation.
   Our brain are hardwired for variety
6. Tetris effect