This article explores the affective dimensions of comedy education and performance through workshops with undergraduate acting students in Manchester, UK. Drawing on Suzanne Langer's process philosophy and recent research in affect studies, the authors compose complex mappings of affective intensity as it circulates through stand-up comedic…

Teachers often use in-class questions to examine the level of understanding of their students, while these also enable students to reorganize their acquired knowledge. However, previous studies have shown that students may resist being questioned because of negative emotions. Therefore, this paper proposes the idea of eliciting positive emotions…

According to the cognitive approach to humor, the comprehension of humorous texts implies recognizing an incongruity and resolving it. This article studies whether the cognitive process involved in the recognition of incongruity is affected by the conditions that make contrariety evident or only analytically recognizable in the perceptual domain.…

Three experiments illustrate that humor in advertisements prevents the development of negative brand associations due to resistance. Previous research on humor in advertising suggested that humor can counter negative responses during ad processing, but less is known about the effect of humor on the development of negative brand associations in…

College students ("n" = 846) enrolled in a general education course were randomly assigned to either an arousal (experimental) or no-arousal (control) group. The experimental group was exposed to a topic-relevant, 90-second external stimulus (a technique used to elevate arousal and focus attention). The control group listened to the…