earticle

영어

Teenagers usually experience high levels of stress and depression owing to various reasons. Sometimes the stress and depression brings maladjustment in school life and some students commit a suicide. The previous study revealed that laughing is negatively correlated to stress and depression. Therefore, it is meaningful to see if laughing exercise which is a big issue in Korean society has an positive impact on the decrease of teenagers' stress and depression. The study was conducted with experimental group and controlled group. The subjects are all middle school students in south Korea. After conducting pretest for two groups, the laughing exercise was done for only experimental group for a month, 8 hours in total. The result showed that the laughing exercise was effective for teenagers' stress(p<.05) and depression(p<.01). More specifically, the laughing exercise had a effect on the negative attitude(p<.01) and difficulty in performance(p<.05) which are all sub-factors of depression. However, the effect of laughing exercise was different across the sub-factors of stress. The laughing exercise had a positive effect on the decrease of stress which comes from the family life(p<.001) and interpersonal relationships(p<.05). On the contrary, the laughing exercise had no effect on stress in school life(p<.25) and self-originated stress(p<.27).