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The puzzle of joking: Disentangling the cognitive and affective components of humorous distraction
Author(s) -
Strick Madelijn,
Holland Rob W.,
van Baaren Rick B.,
van Knippenberg Ad
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
european journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.609
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1099-0992
pISSN - 0046-2772
DOI - 10.1002/ejsp.720
Subject(s) - distraction , psychology , cognition , affect (linguistics) , cognitive psychology , stimulus (psychology) , social psychology , humor research , communication , neuroscience
Studies in cognitive psychology, marketing, and education indicate that humor distracts attention from non‐humorous information presented at the same time. Two experiments investigated why humor distracts attention. The two basic components of humor comprise (1) incongruency resolution, which poses cognitive demands and (2) positive affect. We disentangled the contributions of cognitive demands and positive affect on distraction based on the notions that (a) both components are possible sources of distraction, and (b) the components were always confounded in previous research. In an evaluative conditioning paradigm, novel products were consistently paired with humorous stimuli, whereas other products were paired with stimuli that were either (1) equally demanding but neutral, (2) equally positive but undemanding, and (3) undemanding and neutral. The results showed that cognitively demanding stimuli distracted attention, irrespective of stimulus positivity. These findings suggest that the cognitive demands of humor, not the positive affect it evokes, underlie the distraction effect. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.