Investigating the Effects of Absurd Humor And Mortality Salience On Moral Identity, Belongingness, Belief in a Just World, and Meaning In Life

Background: Humans have a sense of meaning, and people actively create and maintain meaning in their lives. One way humans make meaning is through fluid compensation, which is the automatic process of compensating for a threat to one’s global meaning system by temporarily strengthening other, non-related beliefs. This phenomenon has been thoroughly investigated in response to mortality salience (i.e., reminders of one’s death), but not absurd humor. This is important because little is known about the role of humor in meaning making. More research is needed to determine whether humor is a unique meaning-making process. Further, no studies have investigated the effects of absurd humor and mortality salience on multiple aspects of the global meaning system. Finally, influential models of meaning making suggest that distress tolerance moderates meaning-making processes — but this has not been empirically verified. The present study aimed to fill these gaps in the literature by investigating the fluid compensatory effects of absurd humor and mortality salience on moral identity, belongingness, belief in a just world, and meaning in life. Results: Participants found humor in each reading condition and did not fluid compensate, suggesting that humor is a meaning-making process. Since fluid compensation was not detected, the role of distress tolerance in meaning making remains a fruitful direction for research. Discussion: The results of the current study indicate that humor is a meaning making process and bidirectional fluid compensation is theoretically possible. Research corroborating humor as a meaning-making process, the mechanism(s) by which humor works within the context of meaning making, and the clinical application of humor have important implications for people’s mental and physical health

Seeing Is What You Hear: Inducing Visual Hallucinations via Pavlovian Conditioning

Our study aims to create perceptual experience in the absence of sensory stimulation (that is, seeing something that is not actually there). Insofar as perceptual experience is constructed from a combination of past experience and current input to the senses, the perceptual system could be analyzed from a Bayesian perspective as weighing perceptual priors (past experience) and new data (sensory input) to construct a percept guessing at the current state of the world. Our experiment decreases the Bayesian weighting of sensory input by presenting a very dim visual stimulus near the threshold of detection, thus making participants uncertain if they are seeing anything. We then use classical conditioning during training trials (past experience) to induce a specific expectation in the perceptual system: by repeatedly pairing a tone and the visual stimulus during training, the tone comes to predict the presence of the visual stimulus. In occasional test trials, we play the tone without the visual stimulus. In these test trials, the perceptual system is getting no visual input from the eyes but does have an expectation of seeing something based on the past experience during conditioning. We predict that participants will sometimes report a visual experience when nothing is displayed

Creating Visual Experience In The Absence Of Sensory Stimulation

Our study aims to create perceptual experience in the absence of sensory stimulation (that is, seeing something that is not actually there). Insofar as perceptual experience is constructed from a combination of past experience and current input to the senses, the perceptual system could be analyzed from a Bayesian perspective as weighing perceptual priors (past experience) and new data (sensory input) to construct a percept guessing at the current state of the world. Our experiment decreases the Bayesian weighting of sensory input by presenting a very dim visual stimulus near the threshold of detection, thus making participants uncertain if they are seeing anything. We then use classical conditioning during training trials (past experience) to induce a specific expectation in the perceptual system: by repeatedly pairing a tone and the visual stimulus during training, the tone comes to predict the presence of the visual stimulus. In occasional test trials, we play the tone without the visual stimulus. In these test trials, the perceptual system is getting no visual input from the eyes but does have an expectation of seeing something based on the past experience during conditioning. We predict that participants will sometimes report a visual experience when nothing is displayed

Meet Them Where They Are: Investigating the Feasibility and Acceptability of Artificial Intelligence-Avatar-Delivered Community-Based Psychological First Aid Programming in a University Setting

The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of implementing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) avatar to deliver Community-Based Psychological First Aid training (CBPFA) to undergraduate students in a university setting. College students report high stress levels, and chronic stress is associated with negative physical, mental, and academic outcomes. CBPFA may be an effective way for colleges and universities to provide students with psychosocial support; however, traditional models utilize in-person training, which may not be accessible on a large scale. The present study developed a web-based AI-avatar-delivered CBPFA training to provide an alternative training modality. The AI-avatar-delivered CBPFA training resulted in statistically significant knowledge increases, and participants ranked it as both acceptable and feasible. Qualitative feedback also identified a number of positive and negative characteristics of the training. The current research is only the second published study to utilize CBPFA training among college students and is the first known program to utilize an AI avatar to deliver CBPFA training. The study results indicate that an AI-avatar-delivered CBPFA program is an acceptable and feasible way to teach CBPFA principles, corroborate prior research on CBPFA and the use of AI, and provide the foundation for future research of AI-avatar-delivered psychoeducational programming

Supplemental material - Is Humor a Meaning Making Process? Investigating the Effects of Absurd Humor and Mortality Salience on Meaning in Life, Moral Identity, Belongingness, and Belief in a Just World

Supplemental material for Is Humor a Meaning Making Process? Investigating the Effects of Absurd Humor and Mortality Salience on Meaning in Life, Moral Identity, Belongingness, and Belief in a Just World by Joshua H. Semko and Stefan E. Schulenberg in Psychological Reports</p