Judged humor, arousal, and the relief theory.

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The hypothesis that humor represents the sudden relief from strong affect was tested. Anxiety was used as the affect, and was varied among 3 groups of freshmen and sophomores by informing them of tasks they would be required to do, which supposedly would entail handling or extracting blood from white rats. At the start of the task the rat was discovered to be a toy. Questionnaires were then administered, asking Ss to rate humor, anxiety, and surprisingness. Humor ratings showed a significant positive trend with both anxiety and surprisingness. The results are interpreted as supporting the relief theory of humor, and as suggesting surprisingness as a strongly correlated variable.