Shifting Perspectives
JEST DO IT: Stress Management through Humor
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ronald Dolon
The use of humor is a way to promote mental and physical health. Hans Selye, a noted expert on stress, has written that a person’s interpretation of stress is not dependent only on the external event, but is also affected by that person’s perception and meaning of the event. Humor is a matter of perspective and perception. Humor has been viewed as a way of looking at a situation from a different point of view, diffusing a crisis and providing an opportunity for increased insight. A sense of humor is a powerful stress coping behavior. Humor can enrich our lives, help psychologically, and stir us physically. Research indicates that how we deal with stress influences our lives and relationships to health. Stress has been connected to heart disease, chronic fatigue and low self-esteem. Humor produces the opposite psychological response to stress. With stress, you have a rapid pulse, muscles are tight, and blood pressure is up. After laughing, all these signs are down. Research out of the Department of Clinical Immunology at Loma Linda University School of Medicine suggests that laughter stimulates the Immune system offsetting the effects of stress. Humor is a stress reliever that requires no prescription and has no side effects. Understanding factors which foster humor will provide an approach to creating humor.
Anti-Vaccination Movements: A Morphogenetic Perspective
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tomasz Burzynski
The paper assumes a broader sociological perspective in order to reflect upon contemporary anti-vaccination movements as collective agents employed in the elaboration and perpetuation of structures and systems typical of (bio)medicalized societies. Typically, anti-vaccination movements are perceived in overtly axio-normative terms as vehicles of public distrust vested in the modern system of biomedicine. This paper wishes to expand the aforementioned conceptualization by placing anti-vaccination movements in a more sociologically diversified field of considerations, which involves refering to ideal, normative, interactive and opportunity structures (the INIO model of social structure). In this essentially morphogenetic context, anti-vaccination movements could be perceived as both consequences of modernization tendencies implicit in the system of biomedicine and agents that subvert values, norms and institutions (e.g. patient empowerment, self-tracking practices, alternative medicine) in-built in the system of (bio)medicalization characterizing contemporary societies.
An Alternative Way to Aesthetic Standard of Society Today: A Case of Aesthetic Medical Service
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Damhui Kim, Jinoh Park, Traci Rider
Today, the aesthetic standard is a matter of not just appearances but also personal successes (Widdows, 2018). So, the standard has led that people desire to complement to their appearances, and the beauty industry has developed (Britton, 2012). Especially, Korea succeeds in the global beauty industry with a term “Korean beauty” (Ko, Chun, & Lee, 2011), but it got a dishonored title “The world capital of plastic surgery” (Marx, 2015). Except for side effects of plastic surgery, the matters of it are irrevocable treatment and unnatural according to aging (Brubach, 2000). This research focuses on how to create a healthier aesthetic standard internally and externally comparing to the current unrealistic aesthetic standard through not only medical intervention but also breeding individuals. To suggest the alternative way to the social aesthetic standard, this research investigates an aesthetic medical service in Korea which is not only a non-surgical intervention but also breeding individual aesthetic standards of patients. This research as a case study (Groat & Wang, 2013), which is based on program theories (Rossi, Lipsey, & Freeman, 2004), analyzes the system, process, and outcomes of the medical service through a logic model (W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 2004). This research is conducted by documentation analysis, interviews, and surveys. As the result, this research illustrates a structure of the service, its implementations, and the impact of its outcomes.
