Abstract

The elderly could feel a variety of stress, anxiety and depression as a result of sharp growth in the number of elderly and dramatic extension of life span. This study is to evaluate the effects of laughter program in elderly and to suggest that the practice is an effective nursing intervention to reduce the stress and anxiety, depression in the elderly. The research design was pretest-posttest design with nonequivalent control group. The forty-six subjects in G city participated in this study. The 46 research subjects were assigned to experimental (n=23) and control (n=23) groups. The laughter program was administered by one time for one day on the experimental group. In order to evaluate the effects of the laughter program, stress and anxiety, depression were measured before and after the treatment and used by visual analogue scale. There was significant increment in the level of stress, anxiety, depression at the experimental group. The results proved that laughter program was an effective nursing intervention to get rid of stress, to relieve anxiety and depression. (Korean J Str Res 2009;17:255∼263)

• Keywords: Laughter, Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Elderly;