Joking in the face of death: A terror management approach to humor production
-
Christopher R. Long
Christopher R. Long is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Ouachita Baptist University.
und
Dara N. Greenwood
Dara Greenwood is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Vassar College.
Abstract
Terror management theory has spawned a body of experimental research documenting a multitude of defensive responses to mortality salience manipulations (e.g., rigid adherence to dominant cultural values, self-esteem bolstering). Another substantive body of work suggests that humor functions as a natural and often effective means of down-regulating stressful or traumatic experiences. Integrating a terror management paradigm with a cartoon captioning task, the present study finds that participants subliminally primed with death wrote funnier captions than those primed with pain, as judged by outside raters. Interestingly, a reverse pattern was obtained for participants' own ratings of their captions; explicitly death-primed participants rated themselves more successful at generating humorous captions than their pain-primed counterparts, while no significant difference emerged between the two subliminal priming conditions. Findings contribute new insights to recent research suggesting that death reminders may sometimes facilitate creativity and open-mindedness.
About the authors
Christopher R. Long is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Ouachita Baptist University.
Dara Greenwood is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Vassar College.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Joking in the face of death: A terror management approach to humor production
- Getting dirty with humor: Co-constructing workplace identities through performative scripts
- The sacred comedy: The problems and possibilities of Peter Berger's Theory of Humor
- Affinity for political humor: An assessment of internal factor structure, reliability, and validity
- How adaptive and maladaptive humor influence well-being at work: A diary study
- Humor styles, risk perceptions, and risky behavioral choices in college students
- The impact of gelotophobia, gelotophilia and katagelasticism on creativity
- An existentialist account of the role of humor against oppression
- >Book review
- Book review
- Book review
- Book review
- Book review
- Book review
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Joking in the face of death: A terror management approach to humor production
- Getting dirty with humor: Co-constructing workplace identities through performative scripts
- The sacred comedy: The problems and possibilities of Peter Berger's Theory of Humor
- Affinity for political humor: An assessment of internal factor structure, reliability, and validity
- How adaptive and maladaptive humor influence well-being at work: A diary study
- Humor styles, risk perceptions, and risky behavioral choices in college students
- The impact of gelotophobia, gelotophilia and katagelasticism on creativity
- An existentialist account of the role of humor against oppression
- >Book review
- Book review
- Book review
- Book review
- Book review
- Book review
