{"id":6542,"date":"2022-04-27T17:25:50","date_gmt":"2022-04-27T21:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=6542"},"modified":"2022-05-15T22:23:07","modified_gmt":"2022-05-16T02:23:07","slug":"__trashed-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2022\/04\/27\/__trashed-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Drink Up! Laughter is the Best Medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You walk into your friend\u2019s room and find them crying, and so you desperately try to cheer them up. Give them a hug? No, they look like they want their space. Tell them it\u2019ll all work out? No, they won\u2019t believe you. Ok, how about you crack a light-hearted joke? Yes! They\u2019re smiling so you add a little more humor. Suddenly, your friend begins to laugh so hard that the tears disappear. Who knew you were so funny that you could cure stress! Well, actually, quite a few cognitive researchers could\u2019ve told you that. Turns out laughter really is the best medicine\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Laughter is the best medicine!
Picture from bing.com<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Why is it that humor improves our negative feelings such as sadness and stress? Well, for starters, it\u2019s a distraction. Humor takes our attention away from all of the bad things happening in our lives, and instead makes us focus on something that feels good. If you\u2019ve ever been stressed, you probably spent a pretty significant amount of time concentrating on whatever it was that made you feel that way. Humor and laughter can break this strong focus and direct our attention elsewhere. You are therefore prevented from putting all of your attention and focus on stressful topics. This is important because our attention is very limited. If we\u2019re using up all our attention thinking about how stressed we are, how will we possibly get anything done? In all, because it is a positive interruption, humor stops you from being completely overwhelmed and run down with stress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Humor diverts our attention<\/a> because we are biased toward anything funny or that makes us laugh. Something funny will capture our attention for much longer than something that is not. In fact, when tracking someone\u2019s eye movements, it has been shown that people spend more time looking at something that is considered humorous than a neutral piece of information (Strick et al., 2009). The amount of time someone spends looking at one thing, or going back to look at it again, tells us whether they are paying attention to it. By showing that someone is looking at something for a long time, we can conclude that they are paying close attention to it. They are more focused on that stimuli. If their eyes glance over a stimuli we can thus conclude that they have not paid attention to it. This is also important because the more we pay attention to something, the easier it is to later remember it. What this means is that our memory is also biased toward humorous ideas and concepts. Humor captivates both our attention and our memory! The implications of this in relation to stress are that it is therefore easy for our attention to be redirected from feeling stressed out, to laughing at a funny joke. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even just paying a brief amount of attention to humor can act as a safety blanket to make revisiting any negative emotions a little bit easier (Martin et al., 2012). This is because humor makes you feel more at ease, and less stressed, so the negative feelings won\u2019t be as strong. You can revisit the feelings with a more level-headed mind. This means that you might start to feel overwhelmed again, but after calming yourself down and reducing that stress, it\u2019ll be a little bit easier. Humor is thus both a distraction, and a defense mechanism against stress and negative emotions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Using humor as a coping mechanism
picture from: https:\/\/newfastuff.com\/meme-generator\/why-do-you-always-wear-that-mask\/<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Humor can be used as a coping mechanism in all sorts of situations. Picture it like this; it\u2019s a Friday night and you\u2019re feeling down because your friends didn\u2019t invite you to a party. Naturally, you\u2019re pretty upset and the feeling of loneliness and stress of being excluded will start to feel pretty heavy. In fact, you\u2019re not paying attention to anything except how stressed you are, which does not feel good. So, you grab your phone and turn to TikTok, a platform that has made the world of comedy easily accessible (Galer, 2020). Sure enough, the videos are funny, and you\u2019re laughing (maybe even out loud). In fact, they\u2019re funny enough that you\u2019re not even thinking about the party anymore. Your stressful feelings are momentarily relieved, and that feels pretty great. Until, of course, you eventually exit out of the app after incessive scrolling. Without the distraction, you\u2019re once again reminded of how stressed you feel and therefore the negative emotions begin flooding back into focus. But here’s some good news! All of the humor you just experienced built up a shield to prevent those feelings from hitting quite as hard as they did before. Humor protects you from the full force of stress. What this should tell you is that humor truly is a coping mechanism\u2026 and a good one too!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Humor is a shield that protects you from negative emotions
Picture from: www.dreamstime.com<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sure, something funny might make you feel better by decreasing your stress levels, but how does this affect your daily life \/ actions? Well, by calming you down, humor can actually improve your performance and lead to future success. After exposure to some type of comedy, you will be able to do things that you could not accomplish before. This is because when you\u2019re extremely stressed, you get overwhelmed. It\u2019s hard to do well, or want<\/em> to do well, on anything when you\u2019re too busy worrying (Conner et al., 2010). So, you need to decrease your stress and negative feelings in order to be more focused and productive. This is why humor is so important. If humor can decrease our high stress levels, in effect it can also help us do better on tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a scenario that shows humor\u2019s effect on our performance; test-taking. Tests often induce stressful feelings in students. Imagine we have two students: Emma and James. They\u2019re both hard-working students who get the same grades on quizzes and even have an equivalent GPA. They studied<\/a> the same amount for an upcoming math test. On the day of the test, they sit in their seats and anxiously watch the test papers get distributed around the room. Some side effects of their stress include frustration, being overwhelmed, and having a difficult time quieting down their minds in order to focus (Marks, 2021). They can\u2019t stop wondering if they studied enough, or if they will remember everything. How are they supposed to do well on a test with so many negative feelings bouncing around? But then, moments before the exam, Emma gets a text from her mother. It\u2019s a short, funny comic strip. She quickly reads it, giggles to herself, and then turns off her phone. When the exam gets to her, she\u2019s still laughing at her mother\u2019s funny text, and she\u2019s hardly feeling her prior negative emotions. Meanwhile, James continues to overthink everything bad that could come from this exam. Two weeks later, they get their tests back and Emma receives a much higher grade than James.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reason for this is that Emma\u2019s mind wasn\u2019t stuck in a constant cycle of stress. The comic strip was able to relax her and relieve her stressful feelings. She was calmer going into the exam, and therefore had a much easier time completing the test. This was all thanks to her exposure to humor. Humor helped her by decreasing her stress levels. James, on the other hand, never saw anything funny. He stayed stressed, and therefore was much more distracted and overwhelmed during the test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This may be a fabricated story, but it is an example of a very real phenomenon. As a way of managing stress, humor impacts performance and promotes students\u2019 success (Ford et al., 2012). Humor can make students do better on tests. It momentarily relaxes students, and this allows them to go into tests feeling calmer. If Emma hadn\u2019t seen the funny comic, it is likely she wouldn\u2019t have performed as well on the test. She would\u2019ve been overrun with negative feelings. Thanks to humor, these emotions were relieved, or in other words, controlled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, humor influences our cognitive abilities. It captures our attention and has a hold on our memory. It also takes away negative feelings like stress or sadness and improves our performance. Giving yourself breaks to read hilarious articles, laugh with your friends, or watch the sitcom you love doesn\u2019t just feel<\/em> great, but is <\/em>great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bibliography<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martin, R. A., Lefcourt, H. M., (2012). How TikTok changed the world in 2020. BBC Culture.<\/em> https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/culture\/article\/20201216-how-tiktok-changed-the-world-in-2020<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ford, T. E., Ford, B. L., Boxer, C. F., & Armstrong, J., (2012). Effect of humor on state anxiety and math performance. Humor. <\/em>https:\/\/www.degruyter.com\/document\/doi\/10.1515\/humor-2012-0004\/html<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conner, J., Pope, D., & Galloway, M., (2019). Success with less stress. Stanford University. https:\/\/stacks.stanford.edu\/file\/druid:mf751kq7490\/Conner_Pope_Galloway_EL2009.pdf<\/a><\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martin R. A., (2001). Humor, laughter, and physical health: methodological issues and research findings. Psychological bulletin, 127<\/em>(4), 504-519. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1037\/0033-2909.127.4.504<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amici, P. (2020). Humor in the age of COVID-19 lockdown: An explorative qualitative study. Psychiatria Danubina, 32<\/em>(1), 15-20. https:\/\/hrcak.srce.hr\/file\/381537<\/a>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marks, H. (2021). Stress Symptoms. WebMD.<\/em> https:\/\/www.webmd.com\/balance\/stress-management\/stress-symptoms-effects_of-stress-on-the-body<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strick. M., Holland. R., Van Baaren. R., Van Knippenberg. A., (2009). Humor in the eye tracker: attention capture and distraction from context cues. The Journal of General Psychology, 137<\/em>(1), 37-48 https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/00221300903293055<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You walk into your friend\u2019s room and find them crying, and so you desperately try to cheer them up. Give them a hug? No, they look like they want their space. Tell them it\u2019ll all work out? No, they won\u2019t believe you. Ok, how about you crack a light-hearted joke? Yes! They\u2019re smiling so you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80216,266316],"tags":[117417,210,426150,105962,266283],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6542"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6542"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6934,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6542\/revisions\/6934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}