Excelsior Newsletter

The Amsterdam Experience

Asil Ali Özdoğru

Hello, Hallo.

I was in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands, last week for the 15th European Congress of Psychology. The congress was held from July 11th to 14th at the Amsterdam RAI Conference Center. It was organized by the Netherlands Institute of Psychologists and the Belgian Federation of Psychologists. There were over two thousand participants from all parts of the world presenting and discussing on a whole variety of topics in psychology.

I also presented a poster at the conference about one of our studies on facial feedback hypothesis. The hypothesis claims that individuals’ facial expressions affect their emotional experiences. Our findings showed that sense of humor, rather than the facial expressions, had a better role explaining individuals’ humor experience. I was glad to share and discuss our results and get to learn about other studies. The conference is a great professional development experience in the depth and breadth of psychology for both students and professors.

Conferences are also good opportunities to learn about host locations and cultures. It was my first time in the Netherlands and got to experience the Dutch culture. As a person who lived many years in Albany, New York, I was pleased to witness the Dutch heritage of my past hometown. The buildings, food, and even people looked very familiar in Amsterdam.

I advise and encourage all of my students and colleagues to attend this conference and other professional meetings. The next European Congress of Psychology will be held in Moscow in 2019. Hope to see you at one of those places in the future.

Citation: Özdoğru, A. A. (2017, July). Faculty spotlight: The Amsterdam experience. PsychOut: Excelsior College Psychology Program Newsletter, 2017(4), 1-2.

ECP 2017

The Role of Sense of Humor in the Facial Feedback Effect

Asil Ali Özdoğru

The facial feedback hypothesis claims that individuals’ facial expressions can influence their emotional expressions. In their highly cited study testing this hypothesis, Strack and colleagues (1988) found that when participants evaluated the funniness of humorous cartoons holding a pen in their teeth, which stimulated a smile, gave higher ratings than participants holding a pen in their mouth inducing a pout. A recent multilab replication study by Wagenmakers and colleagues (2016) that involved 17 labs from 8 countries using the same protocol had failed to reproduce the facial feedback effect. As one of the participating labs, we wanted to test the role of sense of humor in this model, which is individuals’ tendency to appreciate, generate, and make use of humorous material. A total of 157 Turkish university students were asked to rate four of the original cartoons either in the smile or pout condition as in the multilab protocol and to complete a self-report measure of sense of humor at the end of the experimental procedures different than other labs. This study will present findings on the role of sense of humor in explaining individuals’ affective responses to humorous material under different facial feedback conditions and its implications for the study of individual differences in experimental investigations of emotional experience.

Citation: Özdoğru, A. A. (2017, July). The role of sense of humor in the facial feedback effect. Poster presented at the 15th European Congress of Psychology, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.