Today humor's in the air. I was reading What Are You Laughing At?: A Comprehensive Guide to the Comedic Event, and then Scientific American's Mind & Brain online newsletter arrived with a link to an article titled "Good-Natured Jokes Ease Pain." Intrigued by the research described in the article, I decided to read the study. I always enjoy reading research by James Gross, guru of emotion regulation, and this one did not disappoint. (Click to read a post from a few year's ago about Gross and how work.) Before reading the article and the study, I had not thought specifically about humor as a method of emotion regulation in conflict resolution.
Funny that I had not, since I have given many presentations over the years about the value of humor and have written some articles, including "Don't Deck the Clown: Inviting Humor into the Law Firm." But today I am looking at the utility of humor anew, with fresh research to consider.
Here's the abstract from that study "Humour as emotion regulation: The differential consequences of negative versus positive humour" (Cognition and Emotion):
Humour is often seen as an adaptive coping strategy; however, the empirical literature is inconclusive. One possible explanation is that different types of humour have different adaptive consequences. In the present research, we predicted that positive (good-natured) humour would be more effective at regulating negative emotions than negative (mean-spirited) humour. In Study 1, participants were shown negative pictures two times. First, they simply viewed the pictures and rated their levels of positive and negative emotions. Second, they were instructed to: (a) view; (b) use positive humour; or (c) use negative humour, and then rate their reactions. Compared to negative humour, positive humour was more successful at down-regulating negative and up-regulating positive emotion. In Study 2, we replicated these findings and showed that these effects cannot be explained by differences in difficulty between the two humour conditions, participants’ expectations, or social desirability. Taken together, these findings suggest that positive (but not negative) humour may be an effective form of emotion regulation.
And from the General Discussion:
We assume that the mechanisms of positive and negative humour differ: one possibility is that positive humour is closely related to reappraisal of the situation, whereas negative humour may help more to create an emotional distance from the negative event without being able to look on the bright side of the negative event. However, as our study does not allow us to infer conclusions about mechanisms, we suggest that future studies need to be conducted in order to determine which mechanisms underlie positive and negative types of humour*or humour in general.
As we know, any findings in a lab situation may or may not translate
- Remind you that humor, when used appropriately, can be a tool to regulate emotion
- Call to your attention that the use of humor can be tricky, situational, and idiosyncratic
- Because of all the limitations of the study, motivate you to carefully make your own observations about the use of humor in both your personal and professional conflicts. What's helpful in defusing? What's not?
When do you use humor? Is it positive or negative, or both? Do you think it is a useful tool for regulating emotions?
Note: Some more articles:
- "The Bonds of Laughter: A Multidisciplinary Inquiry into the Information Processes of Human Laughter" cited in
- "Why We Laugh and What We Laugh At" (Big Think)
- "The Science of Expectation: Using Humor To Understand Creativity" (Big Think)
- A related blog post: "Cartoon Counsel: Try this for improving your ability to hold various points of view in conflict, making a decision, or puzzling out a problem" (idealawg)
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