Harm Jonathan, Vieillard Sandrine, Didierjean André
a Department of Psychology , University of Franche-Comté , Besançon , France.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2014 Oct;67(10):1895-909. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2013.873474. Epub 2014 Mar 3.
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.
有人认为，调节情绪的内在能力会随着年龄增长保持稳定或有所提升，但迄今为止，尚无研究探讨外在情绪调节方面与年龄相关的差异。由于幽默已被发现是一种有效的情绪调节形式，我们采用了一种与斯特里克及其同事（2009年）类似的范式，目的有两个：比较年轻人和老年人的外在幽默情绪调节能力，并检验幽默对负面情绪的潜在有益影响，是由认知分散假说还是积极情绪引发假说能更好地解释。为此，我们向26名年轻人和25名老年人展示了中性、中度和强烈负面的图片，随后展示幽默、单纯积极或怪异的卡通图片，并控制了它们的趣味性和认知需求，同时要求他们报告自己的负面情绪。当诱发产生中度负面情绪时，年轻人和老年人在观看幽默卡通图片后报告的负面情绪都低于观看其他图片后的负面情绪。这表明外在幽默情绪调节能力会随着年龄增长保持稳定，并且表明幽默对情绪感受的有益影响不能被视为纯粹的认知分散。
