Review of Humour Interventions to Reduce Stress, Anxiety, and Depression in Adults

Abstract

Humour interventions can be utilized for improving health status or as complementary therapy for physical, emotional, cognitive, social, or spiritual illnesses. The aim of this review is to identify the effectiveness of humour interventions on depression, anxiety, and stress in adults. Articles published from 2015 to 2020 were searched from various databases. The PRISMA strategy was utilized to identify articles that met the inclusion criteria. The search resulted in 1701 studies, although only sixteen studies were eligible for final review. Humour interventions are safe, inexpensive, and easy to use, and contribute greatly to reducing stress, anxiety, and depression in the adult population. The types of humour intervention are indirect humour, direct humour, social humour, and self-humiliating humour. All humour interventions were of planned humour. Planned humour was the most usable in all studies. It is recommended that more high-quality studies and follow-up assessments should be carried out for future research.