Joking in the face of death: A terror management approach to humor production

Humor
Volume 26, Issue 4 (19 Oct 2013), Pages 493–509
DOI: 10.1515/humor-2013-0012

Christopher R. Long [1], Dara N. Greenwood [2]

[1] Ouachita Baptist University
[2] Vassar College

Abstract

Terror management theory has spawned a body of experimental research documenting a multitude of defensive responses to mortality salience manipulations (e.g., rigid adherence to dominant cultural values, self-esteem bolstering). Another substantive body of work suggests that humor functions as a natural and often effective means of down-regulating stressful or traumatic experiences. Integrating a terror management paradigm with a cartoon captioning task, the present study finds that participants subliminally primed with death wrote funnier captions than those primed with pain, as judged by outside raters. Interestingly, a reverse pattern was obtained for participants' own ratings of their captions; explicitly death-primed participants rated themselves more successful at generating humorous captions than their pain-primed counterparts, while no significant difference emerged between the two subliminal priming conditions. Findings contribute new insights to recent research suggesting that death reminders may sometimes facilitate creativity and open-mindedness.

Keywords: humor; terror management; mortality; creativity

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/humr.2013.26.issue-4/humor-2013-0012/humor-2013-0012.xml