Humor in rehabilitation professions: a scoping review

Abstract

Purpose

Studying humor in the rehabilitation professions is important given its positive effects on health and well-being. We conducted a scoping review to understand how the use of humor has been explored in the existing literature in four rehabilitation professions. The rehabilitation professions included audiology, speech-language pathology, physical therapy, and occupational therapy.

Materials and methods

The five-stage method identified by Arksey and O’Malley was used to conduct this review. Six databases were searched. We included 57 articles in our final review, summarized in a narrative synthesis.

Results

We generated seven themes in our analysis: (1) humour as a management strategy in therapy; (2) humour as a power establisher vs. equalizer; (3) humour as a coping mechanism in rehabilitation; (4) conceptualizations of non-verbal humor cues in therapy; (5) Is humour trainable? (6) Humor used to foster group cohesion; and (7) Attitudes and beliefs surrounding humor practice.

Conclusions

Our findings emphasize the importance of using humor in the rehabilitation professions, and the ways in which humor is conceptualized in a multitude of ways for both clinician and client. Future work is needed to further understand the presence and use of humor in rehabilitation professions.

IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION

• In a scoping review of the literature, this study showed that humor was used mainly positively in rehabilitation by the included professions of audiology, speech-language pathology, physical therapy, and occupational therapy and contributed to a sense of belonging.

• Humor may be an effective way to improve management of client/clinician relations as well as improving group cohesion in rehabilitation settings.

• In the rehabilitation professions of audiology, speech-language pathology, physical therapy, and occupational therapy, non-verbal humor cues were used in instances where communication was difficult or impaired for clients.

Keywords:

• Humor
• therapeutic relationship
• occupational therapy
• speech-language pathology
• audiology
• physical therapy

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge research and scholarly communications librarian at Western University, Marisa Tippett, for her assistance in guiding the search strategy and collection of search terms used to conduct this review.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).