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.