Abstract
We examined the affective and cognitive impact of humour on coping with self-threat. Research was based on an incongruity concept of humour that specifies humour as a state resulting from appraising an aversive incident as both harmful and as acceptable. An appraisal related procedural priming paradigm was used to induce humour. In Study 1 (N = 41 female students) the impact of humour on positive and negative affect following self-threat was examined. In Study 2 (N = 52 students; 94% women) we investigated the consequences of humour for a self-serving interpretation of failure, the awareness of harm, and subsequent performance. Relative to the control condition, humour increased positive affect, while not exclusively affecting negative affect, and increased the tendency for an external attribution of failure, while harm was clearly recognized. However, humour led to poorer subsequent performance, suggesting that humour may also have its costs.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The positive and negative affect words were taken from a pool consisting of synonyms of items of the German PANAS (Krohne et al. 1996). Words were selected by asking eight psychology students to categorize the words as positive, neutral, or negative. A word was included in the implicit affect test if at least seven judges ascribed the same valence. The neutral words were taken from Hangarter and Schmitt (2001) and Klapprott (1994). The pre and post implicit affect measurement consisted of different words.
The humour group (M = 86.2 words, SD = 41.32) and the control group (M = 85 words, SD = 44.19) did not significantly differ in number of words written, t(39) = .09, p = .93.
All statistical analyses without the three male participants yielded the same results.
The humour group (M = 82.81 words, SD = 33.19) wrote significantly fewer words than the control group (M = 112.15 words, SD = 43.58), F(1, 49) = 7.54, p < .01.
All correlations between post-perspective-manipulation affect, pre-post affect change, attribution, awareness of harm, and the two performance indices were not significant (neither for the whole sample nor for the failure group), all ps < .16.
References
Abel, M. (2002). Humour, stress, and coping strategies. Humour, 15, 365–381.
Apter, M. J. (2001). Motivational styles in everyday life: A guide to reversal theory. Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Assoc.
Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230–244.
Britt, T. W. (2005). The effects of identity-relevance and task difficulty on task motivation, stress, and performance. Motivation & Emotion, 29, 189–202.
Brunstein, J. C. (2000). Motivation and performance following failure: The effortful pursuit of self-defining goals. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 49, 340–357.
Cann, A., Norman, M. A., Welbourne, J. L., & Calhoun, L. G. (2008). Attachment styles, conflict styles and humour styles: Interrelationships and associations with relationship satisfaction. European Journal of Personality, 22, 131–146.
Cramer, P. (2000). Defense mechanisms in psychology today: Further processes for adaptation. American Psychologist, 55, 637–646.
Duval, T. S., & Lalwani, N. (1999). Objective self-awareness and causal attributions for self-standard discrepancies: Changing self or changing standards of correctness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1220–1229.
Egloff, B., Weck, F., & Schmukle, S. C. (2008). Thinking about anxiety moderates the relationship between implicit and explicit anxiety measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 771–778.
Ford, T. E., Ferguson, M. A., Brooks, J. L., & Hagadone, K. M. (2004). Coping sense of humor reduces effects of stereotype threat on women’s math performance. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 643–653.
Francis, L., Monahan, K., & Berger, C. (1999). A laughing matter? The uses of humor in medical interactions. Motivation & Emotion, 23, 155–174.
Freud, S. (1928). Humour. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 9, 1–6.
Garnefski, N., & Kraaij, V. (2007). The cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire: Psychometric features and prospective relationships with depression and anxiety in adults. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 23, 141–149.
Geisler, F. C. M., & Kubiak, T. (2009). Heart rate variability predicts self-control in goal pursuit. European Journal of Personality, 23, 623–633.
Geisler, F. C. M., Wiedig-Allison, M., & Weber, H. (2009). What coping tells about personality. European Journal of Personality, 23, 289–306.
Goeleven, E., De Raedt, R., & Koster, E. H. W. (2007). The influence of induced mood on the inhibition of emotional information. Motivation & Emotion, 31, 208–218.
Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T. A., & Solomon, S. (1982). The self-serving attributional bias: Beyond self-presentation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18, 56–67.
Greenwald, A. G., & Banaij, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological Review, 102, 4–27.
Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2, 271–299.
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 348–362.
Gross, J. J., & Thompson, R. A. (2007). Emotion regulation: Conceptual foundations. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (pp. 3–24). New York: Guilford Press.
Hangarter, M., & Schmitt, M. (2001). Sensibilität für beobachtete ungerechtigkeit als disposition: Überprüfung der konstruktvalidität mittels eines modifizierten stroop-test [sensibility for observed injustice as a disposition: Examining construct validity by means of a modified stroop-test] (Rep. No. 137). Germany: University of Trier, Department of Psychology.
Harris, C. R., & Alvarado, N. (2005). Facial expressions, smile types, and self-report during humour, tickle, and pain. Cognition & Emotion, 19, 655–669.
Hass, R. G., Katz, I., Rizzo, N., Bailey, J., & Moore, L. (1992). When racial ambivalence evokes negative affect, using a disguised measure of mood. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18, 786–797.
Hodgins, H., Yacko, H., & Gottlieb, E. (2006). Autonomy and nondefensiveness. Motivation & Emotion, 30, 283–293.
Humke, C., & Schaefer, C. E. (1996). Sense of humour and creativity. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 82, 544–546.
Keith-Spiegel, P. C. (1972). Early conceptions of humour: Varieties and issues. In J. H. Goldstein & P. E. McGhee (Eds.), The psychology of humour. Theoretical perspectives and empirical issues (pp. 3–39). New York: Academic Press.
Klapprott, J. (1994). Erwünschtheit und bedeutung von 338 alltagspsychologischen eigenschaftsbegriffen [desirability and meaning of 338 everyday psychological trait names]. In W. Hager & M. Hasselhorn (Eds.), Handbuch deutschsprachiger wortnormen [handbook of German word norms] (pp. 293–309). Göttingen, DE: Hogrefe.
Koole, S. L., Smeets, K., van Knippenberg, A., & Dijksterhuis, A. (1999). The cessation of rumination through self-affirmation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 111–125.
Krohne, H. W., Egloff, B., Kohlmann, C. W., & Tausch, A. (1996). Untersuchung mit einer deutschen version der “Positive and Negative Affect Schedule” (PANAS) [studies on a German version of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)]. Diagnostica, 42, 139–156.
Kuiper, N. A., McKenzie, S. D., & Belanger, K. A. (1995). Cognitive appraisals and individual differences in sense of humour. Motivational and affective implications. Personality and Individual Differences, 19, 359–372.
Langens, T. (2007). Emotional and motivational reactions to failure: The role of illusions of control and explicitness of feedback. Motivation & Emotion, 31, 105–114.
Leary, M. R. (2007). Motivational and emotional aspects of the self. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 317–344.
Leary, M. R., Terry, M. L., Allen, A. B., & Tate, E. B. (2009). The concept of ego threat in social and personality psychology: Is ego threat a viable scientific construct? Personality and Social Psychology Review, 13, 151–164.
Lefcourt, H. M. (2002). Humour. In C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (Eds.), Handbook of positive psychology (pp. 619–631). New York: Oxford University Press.
Martin, R. (2007). The psychology of humour: An integrative approach. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Martin, R. A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir, K. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humour and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the humour styles questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 48–75.
Mussweiler, T. (2002). The malleability of anchoring effects. Experimental Psychology, 49, 67–72.
Neumann, R. (2000). The causal influences of attributions on emotions: A procedural priming approach. Psychological Science, 11, 179–182.
Newman, M. G., & Stone, A. (1996). Does humour moderate the effects of experimentally- induced stress? Annals of Behavioural Medicine, 18, 101–109.
Ochsner, K. N., & Gross, J. J. (2008). Cognitive emotion regulation: Insights from social cognitive and affective neuroscience. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 53–158.
Ochsner, K. N., Ray, R. D., Cooper, J. C., Robertson, E. R., Chopra, S., Gabrieli, J. D. E., et al. (2004). For better or for worse: Neural systems supporting the cognitive down- and up-regulation of negative emotion. Neuroimage, 23, 483–499.
Robinson, M. D., & Neighbours, C. (2006). Catching the mind in action: Implicit methods in personality research and assessment. In M. Eid & E. Diener (Eds.), Handbook of multimethod measurement in psychology (pp. 115–125). Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association.
Ruch, W. (1998). The sense of humor. Explorations of a personality characteristic. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Smith, E. R. (1994). Procedural knowledge and processing strategies in social cognition. In R. S. Wyer & T. K. Srull (Eds.), Handbook of social cognition (pp. 99–151). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Smith, R. E., Ascough, J. C., Ettinger, R. F., & Nelson, D. A. (1971). Humour, anxiety, and task performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 19, 243–246.
Sternberg, R., & O’Hara, L. A. (2000). Intelligence and creativity. In R. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of intelligence (pp. 609–628). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stucke, T. S., & Sporer, S. L. (2002). When a grandiose self-image is threatened: Narcissism and self-concept clarity as predictors of negative emotions and aggression following ego-threat. Journal of Personality, 70, 509–532.
Suls, J. M. (1972). A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons. In J. H. Goldstein & P. E. McGhee (Eds.), The psychology of humour. Theoretical perspectives and empirical issues (pp. 81–100). New York: Academic Press.
Uekermann, J., Daum, I., & Channon, S. (2007). Toward a cognitive and social neuroscience of humour processing. Social Cognition, 25, 553–572.
Vaillant, G. E. (2000). Adaptive mental mechanisms: Their role in a positive psychology. American Psychologist, 55, 89–98.
Veatch, T. C. (1998). A theory of humour. Humour, 11, 161–215.
Walker, S. S., & Schimmack, U. (2008). Validity of a happiness implicit association test as a measure of subjective well-being. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 490–497.
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of a brief measure of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063–1070.
Weber, H., & Wiedig-Allison, M. (2007). Sex differences in anger-related behaviour: Comparing expectancies to actual behaviour. Cognition and Emotion, 21, 1669–1698.
Westen, D., & Blagov, P. (2007). A clinical-empirical model of emotion regulation: From defense and motivated reasoning to emotional constraint satisfaction. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (pp. 373–392). New York: Guilford Press.
Wilson, E., MacLeod, C., & Campbell, L. (2007). The information-processing approach to emotion research. In J. A. Coan & J. J. B. Allen (Eds.), Handbook of emotion elicitation and assessment (pp. 184–202). New York: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Geisler, F.C.M., Weber, H. Harm that does not hurt: Humour in coping with self-threat. Motiv Emot 34, 446–456 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-010-9185-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-010-9185-6