SLIPPERY ROCK — While she has seen dozens of professional development workshops come and go as Slippery Rock University's director of campus recreations, Karen Perry signed up her staff of seven to attend the one offered Nov. 15 by professor Colleen Cooke, and she didn't even ask if they wanted to attend.

Perry and her staff thoroughly enjoyed “Laughter: It Really is the Best Medicine,” which is taught by Cooke, a professor of parks, conservation and recreational therapy at the university and admitted extrovert.

“I try to find humor in the everyday and it helps me to live a happy and really good quality life,” Cooke said Friday.

She explained that she is a certified laugh leader with the World Laughter Tour and when she completes her classes in April, she will be a humor therapist through the Association of Applied and Therapeutic Humor.

In addition to the professional development workshop at SRU, Cooke also uses laugh exercises in her classes and in a research project with men incarcerated who are schizophrenic or have other serious mental illnesses.

The exercises she includes are a laughter circle, a structured laughter event in which participants engage in mirthful role playing that gets the entire circle laughing, and laugh yoga, which focuses on breathing and exercising the lungs through laughter.

One laughter circle exercise, Cooke said, is to have the participants sit on the floor in a row as if in the cars of a roller coaster.

The group makes the rhythmic clicking noise as the coaster ascends the first hill, then everyone screams and throws their hands in the air as the coaster rockets down the other side.

Another is to have the laughter circle participants make the noises of a lawn mower starting up. Yet another is to have the participants greet one another with “Aloha-ha-ha-ha-ha.”

Cooke helps laughter circle participants warm up before the exercises and cool down afterward.

“It's all about getting us to inhale and exhale to exercise our breathing system,” Cooke said. “It's just helping people feel better and experience a better quality of life.”

She said no politics, religion or other controversial matters are permitted to be discussed, and there is no judgment among participants because there is no one laugh that is more successful than another.

“We want to create peace and harmony with laughter,” Cooke said.

Another exercise is “ants in your pants,” in which Cooke shows the participants how to simulate a situation in which they are standing over an active anthill.

“I'm screaming and jumping around and slapping my butt,” Cooke said, “and they will look at me like, 'who is this woman? I'm not doing that.'”

But she said 95 percent of participants learn and enjoy the program, while 5 percent are so introverted that they cannot bring themselves to participate.

“There are so many benefits physiologically and socially,” Cooke said. “If they make a practice of laughing, they will feel better.”

Cooke said negative emotions disappear when a group is laughing.

“It's hard to be angry or sad or nervous when you're laughing,” she said.

Cooke uses humor therapy in her classes as well, including the senior recreational therapy intervention class.

“(The students are) used to laughing in my classes,” she said. “I think it helps them learn and it's a great stress reliever.”

Perry said her staff learned from Cooke that not all laughter is the same. For example, laughing at someone is not acceptable.

The group also participated in a number of humor exercises.

“It gave us all an opportunity to just laugh and learn together,” Perry said. “We just let our guard down a little and had fun.”