Using humour as an extrinsic source of emotion regulation in young and older adults

Abstract

It has been suggested that intrinsic abilities for regulating emotions remain stable or improve with ageing, but, to date, no studies have examined age-related differences in extrinsic emotion regulation. Since humour has been found to be an effective form of emotion regulation, we used a paradigm similar to that of Strick and colleagues (2009) with two objectives: to compare extrinsic humorous emotion regulation in young and older adults and to test whether the potential beneficial effect of humour on negative emotion is better explained by the cognitive distraction hypothesis or by the positive affect elicitation hypothesis. To this end, neutral, moderately, and strongly negative pictures followed by humorous, simply positive, or weird cartoons, controlled for both their funniness and cognitive demands, were presented to 26 young and 25 older adults with the instruction to report their negative feelings. When induced to feel moderately negative emotions, both young and older adults reported a lower negative feeling after viewing the humorous cartoons than after the other ones. This indicates that the extrinsic humorous emotion regulation skill remains stable with ageing and suggests that the beneficial effect of humour on emotional feeling cannot be seen as a purely cognitive distraction.

Keywords:

• Extrinsic emotion regulation
• Humour
• Ageing
• Cognitive distraction

We are grateful to Alejandra Rodriguez Velasquez for her proofreading of the manuscript.

Notes

¹The IAPS pictures have been widely used in ageing-oriented research on emotion, given evidence that the intentional unpleasant emotional state was successful elicited in different age groups (e.g., Opitz et al., 2012; Winecoff et al., 2010)

²Significant Age Group × Cartoon Version interactions were found on both funniness ratings, F(2, 76) = 21.42, p < .001, , and on weirdness ratings, F(2, 78) = 9.21, p < .001, . Post hoc Bonferroni test comparisons did not show significant pairwise differences between age group depending on the cartoon version.

³Pilot Study 1 gave evidence that 12 s is enough to fully understand cartoons in both age groups.