Stress

Stress

In the case of stress, environmental stimuli seem to challenge the personal resources of an individual who encounters them, which is why they are usually [Page 742]called stressors. One of the most obvious demonstrations of the relationship between stress and humor is nervous laughter. When nervous or distressed, a person may laugh in a typical way. Although at first sight, the person may seem to be having fun, that individual is in fact experiencing an internal state of anxiety or stress but expressing it through laughter.

Stress and Humor

In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers became interested in the physical manifestations of stress and its relationship to humor. An important concept in their work is arousal, referring to the response of the autonomic nervous system to stressors. These bodily responses are typically called fight-or-flight responses because they prepare the body for physical action (e.g., confronting an enemy or running away). They include an increase in heart and respiration rates and an extra delivery of blood sugars to the muscles to enable them to perform fast actions. The question for humor researchers in the 1960s and 1970s was how arousal was related to humorous responses.

Berlynes’s Arousal Boost-Arousal Jag Hypothesis

Daniel Berlyne (1972) proposed that humor increases pleasurable arousal and decreases unpleasant arousal, the so-called arousal boost–arousal jag hypothesis. The arousal boost part of this hypothesis states that certain combinations of new or unexpected stimuli (as in humor) raise pleasurable arousal. The arousal jag part of the hypothesis states that humor reduces very high levels of negative arousal, making humor pleasurable. Investigating the arousal boost part of the hypothesis, Michael Godkewitsch’s work in the 1970s showed that high levels of sexual arousal in jokes were related to a higher perceived funniness and a higher heart rate. In 2008, Nicole Giuliani, Kateri McRae, and James Gross confirmed this finding by showing that people were more aroused (had faster respirations and stronger heart activity) when watching amusing films than when watching neutral films. Thus, it has been shown that humorous material contributes to higher levels of (pleasurable) arousal.

The arousal jag part of Berlyne’s hypothesis shows quite another way in which humor may be pleasurable to a person: by reducing negative arousal. Usually this has been investigated using the concept of humorous coping, the active use of humorous behaviors or thoughts to adapt to stressors. These humorous coping responses are aimed at avoiding or reducing the unpleasant states or emotions that accompany stressors. Although not many studies have been done on the effects humorous coping may have on negative arousal, an experimental study conducted by Michelle Newman and Arthur Stone in 1996 showed that it is possible to influence one’s own arousal with humorous coping.

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