Citation

Harm J, Vieillard S, Didierjean A. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. (2006) 2014; 67(10): 1895-1909.

Affiliation

University of Franche-Comté , Besançon , France.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, SAGE Publications)

DOI

10.1080/17470218.2013.873474

PMID

24325142

Abstract

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 et al. (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.

Language: en