The Laughter Prescription: A Tool for Lifestyle Medicine

Digital temperance: adapting an ancient virtue for a technological age

In technological societies where excessive screen use and internet addiction are becoming constant temptations, the valuable yet intoxicating pleasures of digital technology suggest a need to recover and repurpose temperance, a virtue emphasized by ancient and medieval philosophers. This article reconstructs this virtue for our technological age by reclaiming the most relevant features of Aristotle's and Aquinas's accounts and suggesting five critical revisions needed to adapt the virtue for a contemporary context. The article then draws on this critical interpretation, along with empirical research analyzing the value and dangers of digital technology, to construct a normative account of digital temperance, a virtue that finds a mean between "digital insensibility," the vice of deficiency, and "digital overindulgence," the vice of excess. We conclude by showing how this virtue of digital temperance can help to promote human flourishing in a world saturated with tempting technology.

COVID-19 humor in Jordanian social media: A socio-semiotic approach

The Coronavirus has wrapped the whole universe with a mood of fear, depression, anxiety and loss of hope. It has made countries of the world, west and east, rich and poor, advanced and underdeveloped, all engaged in a common task: facing one ‘invisible’ enemy; the pandemic. The consequences are conditions that, the UN states, have not been experienced since the horrific conditions of World War II resulting into heavy toils in the number of victims.

The normal course of life has now changed. The pressing demand is the adaptation to various new measures including curfews and the restrictions on mass mobility. These conditions managed to alter the long-established rhythm of daily course of life.

This paper focuses on how Jordanian social media is contributing in overcoming Pandemic anxiety burdens and offering relief. For this purpose, the study undertakes a two-track task. A survey is compiled to elicit social media users' opinions concerning the effect of humor on people's well-being. Participants were given questions on humor and were also asked to give their impressions on a selection of 20 humorous figures attached as a link within the survey. 1274 participants responded. Likert's five-point scale was adapted to analyze the data. Second, the paper examined these twenty selected memes and caricatures extracted from Jordanian social media websites. The study applied Kress and Leeuween's approach of social semiotics. The objective is to identify and analyze specific semiotic patterns in COVID-19 related caricatures and memes in Jordanian social media in order to demonstrate how humor can be used as means of softening the grim mood created by the Pandemic through examining the data from a social-semiotic perspective.

PCaLiStDB: a lifestyle database for precision prevention of prostate cancer

The interaction between genes, lifestyles and environmental factors makes the genesis and progress of prostate cancer (PCa) very heterogeneous. Positive lifestyle is important to the prevention and controlling of PCa. To investigate the relationship between PCa and lifestyle at systems level, we established a PCa related lifestyle database (PCaLiStDB) and collected the PCa-related lifestyles including foods, nutrients, life habits and social and environmental factors as well as associated genes and physiological and biochemical indexes together with the disease phenotypes and drugs. Data format standardization was implemented for the future Lifestyle-Wide Association Studies of PCa (PCa_LWAS). Currently, 2290 single-factor lifestyles and 856 joint effects of two or more lifestyles were collected. Among these, 394 are protective factors, 556 are risk factors, 45 are no-influencing factors, 52 are factors with contradictory views and 1977 factors are lacking effective literatures support. PCaLiStDB is expected to facilitate the prevention and control of PCa, as well as the promotion of mechanistic study of lifestyles on PCa. Database URL: http://www.sysbio.org.cn/pcalistdb/.