Abstract
The brain-based ability to direct attention away from interfering negative information may co-determine to which degree one may benefit from humour as a source of positive emotional experiences. This should be particularly relevant when it comes to humour that implicates a target the joke makes fun of, which inherently entails rivalry between positive and negative emotional representations. One hundred healthy individuals completed a pictorial negative affective priming task and a nonverbal humour processing task. In line with the notion that during the elaborative processing of malicious jokes, interference from negative emotional representations hampers the experience of amusement, participants took more time to judge their amusement evoked by malicious compared to benign jokes. Lesser ability to distract attention from interfering negative emotional representations was associated with slower judgements of amusement following the processing of malicious jokes, as well as with lower amusement ratings. The time it took participants to comprehend the punch-lines was not affected, neither was the immediate, short-lived pleasure after having comprehended the humour, measured by characteristic transient cardiac activation. The findings suggest that the effective use of humour as a source of positive emotional experiences requires the ability to overcome the dark side of typical humour.
Highlights
Positive emotional experiences in one’s daily life seem to serve various beneficial purposes beyond hedonic pleasure
For testing the main research questions, a general linear model was used with the response latency to the amusement rating in the humour processing task as the dependent variable, type of cartoon as within-subjects factor and the negative affective priming (NAP) scores for sad (NAPsad) and happy (NAP-happy) targets as two continuous between-subjects factors
The interaction effect is the crucial effect for evaluating the primary research question whether in the case of exposure to typical humour implicating a target the joke makes fun of, poorer control of interfering negative emotional information may slow down the judgement of amusement (2nd hypothesis)
Summary
Positive emotional experiences in one’s daily life seem to serve various beneficial purposes beyond hedonic pleasure. There is some preliminary evidence from previous research that used a similar humour task as in the present study, showing that individuals with greater difficulties to control negative information took more time to rate their amusement elicited by the humour In one of these studies, a neurophysiological indicator for poorer ability to down-modulate negative social-emotional perceptual input was associated with slower responses to the amusement ratings[32]. Another study showed that individuals with poorer self-reported regulation of negative emotions in everyday life, which captured basic automatic processes including inhibitory processes as well as volitional emotion regulation efforts, took more time to deliver the amusement ratings[33] This was true for cartoons implying a social situation, in which most of the punch-lines were at the expense of one of the protagonists in the cartoon (i.e., of which most implied a classic victim). The activation of reward areas by humour was moderated by neuroticism, which is related to increased sensitivity to negative information[37]
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