Targeting humor to cope with an unpleasant emotion: Disgust

Rooted both in cognitive and emotional aspects, humor has generally been assumed to function to facilitate coping with a variety of social, emotional, and cognitive challenges and threats. Humor is intricately linked as a function of distancing one from negative stimuli, but can also foster changing one’s perspective on negative stimuli through reappraisal. The current study explored the mechanisms underlying the relationship between humor and negative stimuli. Disgusting things often evoke amusement along with revulsion in a unique mixed emotional state. It was predicted that when participants connect a humorous experience with disgusting situations, they would better be able to handle that disgusting situation. One hundred and twenty undergraduates were presented with video stimuli to evoke emotions of amusement, disgust, a combination of both amusement and disgust, or no emotion, and then rated their willingness to respond to a matching disgusting situation. Supporting our predictions, disgust-evoking videos produced lower willingness and amusement-evoking videos produced higher willingness. However, our main hypothesis was not supported because the combined amusement-disgust video did not increase willingness significantly beyond that of the disgust-only condition. A secondary post hoc analysis based on actual emotional responses to the videos regardless of assigned condition, supported the finding that amusement increased willingness to respond to the disgust situation, but did not support the main hypothesis. Difficulties in carrying out the study in a precise manner and future directions are discussed.