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Correlational studies have suggested that self-directed humor (SDH) has positive and negative dimensions, namely deleterious and benign SDH, that have opposite functions on psychological well-being. Therefore, this study conducts two vignette experiments to test the causal relationships between deleterious SDH and increased state anxiety and between benign SDH and decreased state anxiety in stressful situations involving exclusion by others. In Experiment 1, college students were instructed to imagine they used deleterious or benign SDH after being ostracized by others. Participants in the control condition only imagined that they had been excluded by others. As a result, participants in the benign SDH condition reported lower levels of state anxiety than participants in the control condition. This result was replicated in Experiment 2 for working adults. Overall, the experimental results support a causal model indicating that benign SDH positively affects psychological well-being, supporting and extending the results of correlational studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three types of expressions of humor and five motives for expressing humor were used to investigate the relationships between humor and psychosocial health. e results indicated that aggressive humor was positively and negatively related to psychosocial health, depending on the motive. Furthermore, self-disparaging humor (considered to be negatively related to psychosocial health) and playful humor (considered to be positively related) might be unrelated to psychosocial health depending on the motives. These results suggest that it is important to analyze the motives for the expression of humor when considering the relationship between types of humor and psychosocial health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the efficacy of three-dimensional porous ferric-ion-cross-linked alginate (Fe-alginate) gels as cell scaffolds, in comparison with calcium-ion-cross-linked alginate (Ca-alginate) gels. In a previous study, we had demonstrated that two-dimensional Fe-alginate film was an efficient material for use as a scaffold, allowing good cell adhesion and proliferation, unlike Ca-alginate film. In the present study, we fabricated three-dimensional porous Fe- and Ca-alginate gels by freeze-drying and evaluated their effects on cultured cells. The Fe-alginate gels showed higher protein adsorption ability than Ca-alginate gels. Cells formed multicellular spheroids in both types of alginate scaffold, but the number of cultured cells increased with culture time on Fe-alginate porous gels, whereas those on Ca-alginate gels did not. Moreover, it was revealed that the cells on Fe-alginate scaffolds were still viable inside the multicellular spheroids even after cultivation for 14 days. These results suggest that Fe-alginate provides a superior porous scaffold suitable for three-dimensional culture of cells. Our findings may be useful for extending the application of Fe-alginate to diverse biomedical fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]