Recently, there have been a number of studies generating humor-related training for participants to increase their humor abilities and aim to mitigate their depression. Specifically, when the participants were clinically depressed or had high levels of depressive symptoms, the results showed that humor-based interventions can decrease depression and increase happiness (John & Tungol, 2017), decrease state seriousness and increase life satisfaction (Konradt et al. 2012), increase the ability to use humor as a coping mechanism (Falkenberg et al., 2011), and improve self-esteem (Rudnick et al., 2014). Therefore, the aim of this review is to examine humor-based interventions and to provide recommendations for how the use of humor to build social relationships and/or gain social support can also be included to further improve mental health and further develop into a new type of treatment.
