Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Developmental Disorders Program, Center for Health and Biological Sciences, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Soc Neurosci. 2022 Aug;17(4):329-338. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2022.2095019. Epub 2022 Jul 5.
Previous studies demonstrated that exposure to humor has beneficial effects on psychological well-being. In the present work, we investigated the behavioral and psychophysiological effects of different types of humor on psychological well-being and on the performance during the execution of a stressful cognitive task. To this aim, we examined the behavioral and psychophysiological effects of ToM humorous and Slapstick humorous comic strips before and after executing a stressful cognitive task. We hypothesized that only slapstick humor could reduce the level of anxiety, increase positive affect and improve performance on the cognitive task. Our findings revealed that, at a specific point in time, exposure to ToM Humor and No Humor strips were associated with lower IBI (higher HR, increase in cardiac recruitment) than slapstick humor. This result suggests that humor involving ToM abilities and No Humor strips elicited a greater cognitive engagement level than slapstick humor. Moreover, in an exploratory analysis we found a positive correlation between cardiac deactivation during the exposure to slapstick Humor and individual empathy scores, suggesting that the empathy skills might influence cardiac recruitment and the level of cognitive engagement during the exposure to humorous material.
先前的研究表明，接触幽默对心理健康有有益的影响。在本工作中，我们研究了不同类型的幽默对心理健康和执行压力认知任务时的表现的行为和心理生理影响。为此，我们在执行一项压力认知任务之前和之后检查了心理理论幽默和闹剧幽默漫画的行为和心理生理影响。我们假设只有闹剧幽默才能降低焦虑水平，增加积极的影响，提高认知任务的表现。我们的发现表明，在特定的时间点，与闹剧幽默相比，暴露于心理理论幽默和无幽默漫画与较低的 IBI（较高的 HR，心脏募集增加）相关。这一结果表明，涉及心理理论能力和无幽默漫画的幽默比闹剧幽默引起了更高的认知参与水平。此外，在一项探索性分析中，我们发现暴露于闹剧幽默时心脏去激活与个体同理心分数之间存在正相关，这表明同理心技能可能影响在暴露于幽默材料时的心脏募集和认知参与水平。
