The aim and purpose of this research project is to investigate the interplay between humor and emotion regulation. On the one hand, the emotion exhilaration - which is elicited through humorous stimuli - can be cognitively regulated, on the other hand, humor can be seen as a form to regulate emotions. In the first research question, the malleability of the emotional response to humorous ambiguous stimuli is investigated with respect to bottom-up and top-down processes. This research project will investigate whether humor appreciation (exhilaration) is affected by stimulus characteristics of short film clips (harmless/humorous, mixed (humorous and repulsive), repulsive: hostile/painful) and by implicit and explicit instruction manipulations aimed to bring the humor response under cognitive control (the focus is on the funny/absurd or the offensive/hostile/painful elements of the stimulus). Behavioral (ratings), psychophysiological (cardiovascular, electrodermal, respiratory) and neural correlates measured with functional brain imaging (fMRI) will be assessed. Specific neural activations for cognitive control (top-down processes) in more prefrontal regions and the modified emotional response in sub-cortical regions such as the amygdala are expected to be found. Furthermore, individual differences in the response to repulsive, humorous and mixed material, such as cheerfulness, the use of different humor styles and katagelasticism (the joy of laughing at others) will be taken into account. The second research question focuses on humor as a strategy to regulate negative emotions. Surprisingly, the neural correlates of active humor production have not been investigated yet. Measuring emotions on two-dimensional valence scales (positive and negative emotions) will enable to test behaviorally whether negative and positive emotions are differentially modulated by using different types of humor and reappraisal strategies. In addition, the neural correlates of down-regulating negative emotions with different types of humor and other reappraisal strategies might reveal processes that are not directly assessable by using rating scales only: For example, using different types of humor might lead to the same emotional ratings, but also to different activations in areas associated with self-referential processes and emotions. In an already submitted paper, the differential effect of using a benevolent type of humor was shown to down-regulate negative emotions more effectively than a negative (aggressive, sarcastic) type of humor. In a following step, the benefit of humor has to be empirically differentiated from other forms of emotion regulation strategies. Therefore, further behavioural but also neuroscientific studies are planned with the method of fMRI. These two approaches will help to better understand the malleability of the humor response as a reaction towards ambiguous humorous stimuli (i.e., repulsive and humorous film clips) and how benefial is humor to regulate emotions.
