Can cold joke make people cold?——The relationship between temperature perception and emotional experience of cold jokes

Han-Lin WANG

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (4) : 829-833.

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PDF(3715 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2014, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (4) : 829-833.

Can cold joke make people cold?——The relationship between temperature perception and emotional experience of cold jokes

  • Han-Lin WANG1,2, 1
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Abstract

Three experiments were designed to explore the relationship between an emotional experience produced by reading a special humor – cold jokes and the lower temperature perception. The first experiment used 2 (cold joke / general joke) x 2 (higher / lower temperature picture) within-group design. Through recording participants’ eye movements, the influence on attentional biases of different temperature pictures caused by reading different texts were investigated. Experiment two used 2 (cold joke / general joke) x 2 (neutral \ positive facial affective pictures) mixed design to test the relationship between different jokes and different emotions. Experiment three using the implicit association test (IAT) to explore implicit association between higher / lower temperature concept and positive / neutral emotions. The results show that: (1) after reading cold jokes, participants’ total fixation on lower temperature pictures is longer than that on higher temperature pictures, which suggests that the comprehension of cold jokes can promote the perceptual processing for lower temperature pictures; (2) after reading cold jokes, the speed of judging neutral facial affective pictures is faster than that of judging positive facial affective pictures, indicating that the comprehension of cold jokes can induce a sort of emotion similar to the neutral emotion; (3) both of lower temperature concepts - neutral emotion and higher temperature concepts - positive emotion has a significant implicit relationship. Overall, the comprehension of cold jokes can prime the concepts about lower temperature, which indicates that to some extent, cold joke can make people "feel cold". According to the embodied cognition, the relationship between body and cognition is a kind of interaction. Therefore, we suggest that comprehension of cold joke is a cognitive activity, while the effect of priming lower temperature perception induced by cold jokes reflects a sensuous change in body, the comprehension can lead to the perceptual priming effects, which supports the point of embodied cognition. What’s more, the emotional feeling induced by reading the cold joke is similar to neutral emotion. As it’s shown in IAT, there is a close implicit association between this specific emotion and the concept of lower temperature. However , this kind of relationship needs to be further studied.

Key words

Embodied cognition / Cold joke / Humor / Emotion / temperature perception

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Han-Lin WANG. Can cold joke make people cold?——The relationship between temperature perception and emotional experience of cold jokes[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2014, 37(4): 829-833
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