Is Laughter Therapy Useful in a Health CRISIS?: Meta-Analysis of Laughter Therapy

Purpose: This study was to identify the trends of laughter therapy and to analyze the effect size of laughter therapy Method: KISS, KMDB, KERIS and the National Assembly Library was searched for relevant journals by using the following key words ‘laughter treatment’, ‘laughter intervention’ and ‘laughter therapy’. 48 journals were included in this study. Data were analyzed using CMA ver. 2.0 and effect size was calculated by ‘the standar-dized mean difference Results: The major findings of this study were as follows. 1)The overall effect size of laughter therapy was 0.668. 2)The sub-group effect size were social(0.863), psycho-somatic(0.836), emotional(0.775), psychologi-cal(0.679), physiological(0.464), physical(0.653) by each. 3)As the laughter therapy program, the effect size of only laughing therapy was larger than parallel therapy and the effect size of 4 step program was larger than 3 step program. More program in a week was larger effect size of laughter therapy. Conclusion: It might be useful for this study to review systematic research on laughter therapy in Korean journals. Laughter therapy was also effective therapy for people and develop program based on knowledge from laughter therapy research.