DOES HUMOR WORK? The influence of humor on cognitive executive function

Abstract

Contrasting predictions have been made about the impact of positive affect and humor on cognitive processing. It has been argued that positive mood is likely to improve some cogni-tive processes, but there is also evidence that claims the opposite. To investigate the influence of humor on cognitive performance and executive functioning in particular, we designed an experiment with two independent groups. There were 26 participants in each group assigned to either of two conditions: exposure to humorous stimuli or mundane (control). In the humor-ous condition, subjects viewed a five-minute-long stand up comedy clip and they did the Stroop task thereafter. In the mundane condition they only did the stroop task. The dependent variable we measured was the time it took for each participant to complete the task. Overall, the humor group performed better than the control group. The results support the hypothesis that exposure to humorous stimuli would facilitate cognitive performance and executive func-tioning in particular. This suggests that humor is beneficial to cognitive executive functioning and may have some sort of priming effect on it.