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Harm that does not hurt: Humour in coping with self-threat

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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.

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Notes

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. All statistical analyses without the three male participants yielded the same results.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

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Correspondence to Fay C. M. Geisler.

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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

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