Is it worth turning a trigger into a joke? Humor as an emotion regulation strategy in remitted depression

Abstract

Aim Humor has long been considered as an effective emotion regulation strategy for people vulnerable to depression, but empirical evidence in this area is scarce. To address this issue, we investigated the emotional consequences of humor in remitted depressed patients and compared them with the effects of positive reappraisal and spontaneous emotion regulation. Methods Fifty‐five patients with remitted major depression took part in a laboratory computer experiment in which they were shown negative pictures twice. First, the patients simply viewed the pictures and rated their reactions. Second, they viewed each of the pictures according to instructions, which are to (a) use humor, (b) use positive reappraisal, or (c) simply view the pictures, and then, they again rated their reactions. Results Humor was found to decrease negative emotions, increase positive emotions, and enhance the distance from adversity; it was more effective than spontaneous emotion regulation and similarly as effective as positive reappraisal. Humor was the most effortful form of emotion regulation. Patients were able to successfully produce humorous comments, and their failure to do so did not lead to worse emotional outcomes than regulating emotions spontaneously. The analyses also indicated that distancing mediates between using humor and the intensity of positive and negative emotions. Conclusions Our findings provide preliminary empirical support for the idea that for individuals vulnerable to depression, humor can be an adaptive tool in dealing with negative responses to aversive events, and, thus, it may impair their potential of these events to trigger depressive episodes. Further studies in this area are warranted to determine the most adaptive forms of humor and analyze their effects in various depressogenic contexts.

Differential effects of stress-related and stress-unrelated humor in remitted depression

“…In line with the previous evidence of the beneficial impact of humor-based emotion regulation on remitted depression 23 , we expected that both stress-related humor and stress-unrelated humor would be effective in relation to all outcomes examined immediately and after a brief delay. We also presumed that, as demonstrated in previous clinical and non-clinical studies 23 , 38 , humor could impose some costs, such as requiring immense effort and compromising subsequent performance.…”

“…In addition, a research on short humorous interventions and perception of stressful events demonstrated that humor is a powerful tool to attenuate both psychological stress response and salivary cortisol levels 22 . Only one study has investigated the impact of humorous emotion regulation strategies in remitted depression; it demonstrated that the use of humor by previously depressed people to comment on a series of distressing scenes could alleviate their negative emotions, increase positive emotions, and enhance distance from adversity 23 . Additionally, humor-based regulation was found to be more effective than spontaneous regulation, but contrary to initial expectations, humor did not prevail over positive reappraisal.…”

Conceptualizing Emotion Regulation and Coregulation as Family-Level Phenomena

“…Naturalistic observations, for example, have found that caregivers’ expressions of their own positive emotion, physical touch, and engagement sustained school-aged children’s expression of positive emotion (Bai et al, 2016 ). There is also an emerging focus on the link between humor and emotion regulation in both adults (Braniecka et al, 2019 ; Horn et al, 2019 ; Wu et al, 2021 ) and children and adolescents (Kuhlman et al, 2021 ; Mireault et al, 2015 ). A recent study found that infants aged five to seven months smiled more frequently, longer, and more quickly in response to an absurd event when caregivers provided cues that the event was humorous than when they provided neutral cues, suggesting caregivers can begin shaping their children’s understanding of humor very early on (Mireault et al, 2015 ).…”

Comportamiento y salud. Investigación traslacional y aplicada

“…Las personas que se exponen a él tienen una mayor tendencia a afectos positivos. La exposición a estímulos divertidos disminuye la experiencia de emociones negativas (Braniecka et al, 2019). Considerando el tipo de humor, se ha encontrado que el humor afiliativo y autoafirmativo se correlacionan negativamente con la soledad (MacDonald et al, 2020), con la ansiedad y la depresión; y positivamente con el optimismo (Menéndez-Aller et al, 2020).…”