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That’s not funny! – But it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory

Previous research has shown that humorous reappraisal can reduce elicited negative emotions, suggesting that humor may be a functional strategy to cope with emotionally negative situations. However, the effect of humorous reappraisal on later memory about the emotion-eliciting situation is currently...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Kugler, Lisa, Kuhbandner, Christof
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4551820/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26379608
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01296
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author Kugler, Lisa
Kuhbandner, Christof
author_facet Kugler, Lisa
Kuhbandner, Christof
author_sort Kugler, Lisa
collection PubMed
description Previous research has shown that humorous reappraisal can reduce elicited negative emotions, suggesting that humor may be a functional strategy to cope with emotionally negative situations. However, the effect of humorous reappraisal on later memory about the emotion-eliciting situation is currently unknown, although this is crucial for more adaptive responding in future situations. To address this issue, we examined the effects of humorous reappraisal on both emotional experience and memory, compared to non-humorous rational reappraisal and a non-reappraisal control condition. Replicating previous findings, humorous reappraisal reduced evoked negative valence and arousal levels very effectively, and the down-regulation of experienced negative emotions was even more pronounced after humorous compared to rational reappraisal. Regarding later memory for emotion-eliciting stimuli, both humorous and rational reappraisal reduced free recall, but recognition memory was unaffected, with memory strength being stronger after humorous than after rational reappraisal. These results indicate that humor seems to be indeed an optimal strategy to cope with negative situations because humor can help us to feel better when confronted with negative stimuli, but still allows us to retrieve stimulus information later when afforded to do so by the presence of appropriate contextual features.
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spelling pubmed-45518202015-09-14 That’s not funny! – But it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory Kugler, Lisa Kuhbandner, Christof Front Psychol Psychology Previous research has shown that humorous reappraisal can reduce elicited negative emotions, suggesting that humor may be a functional strategy to cope with emotionally negative situations. However, the effect of humorous reappraisal on later memory about the emotion-eliciting situation is currently unknown, although this is crucial for more adaptive responding in future situations. To address this issue, we examined the effects of humorous reappraisal on both emotional experience and memory, compared to non-humorous rational reappraisal and a non-reappraisal control condition. Replicating previous findings, humorous reappraisal reduced evoked negative valence and arousal levels very effectively, and the down-regulation of experienced negative emotions was even more pronounced after humorous compared to rational reappraisal. Regarding later memory for emotion-eliciting stimuli, both humorous and rational reappraisal reduced free recall, but recognition memory was unaffected, with memory strength being stronger after humorous than after rational reappraisal. These results indicate that humor seems to be indeed an optimal strategy to cope with negative situations because humor can help us to feel better when confronted with negative stimuli, but still allows us to retrieve stimulus information later when afforded to do so by the presence of appropriate contextual features. Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-08-28 /pmc/articles/PMC4551820/ /pubmed/26379608 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01296 Text en Copyright © 2015 Kugler and Kuhbandner. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Kugler, Lisa
Kuhbandner, Christof
That’s not funny! – But it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory
title That’s not funny! – But it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory
title_full That’s not funny! – But it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory
title_fullStr That’s not funny! – But it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory
title_full_unstemmed That’s not funny! – But it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory
title_short That’s not funny! – But it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory
title_sort that’s not funny! – but it should be: effects of humorous emotion regulation on emotional experience and memory
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4551820/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26379608
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01296
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