This study was conducted to examine the effect of a laughter therapy on employment-stress and subjective happiness of nursing students. The study was designed using a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design. The participants consisted of 4...
This study was conducted to examine the effect of a laughter therapy on employment-stress and subjective happiness of nursing students. The study was designed using a nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design. The participants consisted of 48 fourth year nursing students in K College and D College of D City who were assigned to an experimental group (n=24) or a control group (n=24). experiment was conducted for the period from June 1 till 30, 2017.
In the experimental group, the laughter therapy was conducted a total of eight times, once every 60 minutes, twice a week, no such program was conducted with the control group. Collected data was conducted before and after the intervention, and the effect of the program was investigated on stress, salivary cortisol, subjective happiness questionnaire, and physiological stress. The collected data was analyzed through χ²-test, fisher’s exact test, and independent t-test, using SPSS/WIN 23.0 program.
The results do the study, the experimental groups to which laughter therapy was applied, showed better psychological stress(t=-8.50, p<.001), saliva cortisol level(t=-6.53, p<.001), subjective happiness(t=5.32, p<.001), which were statistically significant.
Therefore, this study suggests actively use the laughter therapy for the nursing college students as an effective evidence based intervention method to reduce employment-stress and improve subjective happiness.