The effect of laughter on evaluation of a slapstick movie.

If we laugh at a ]oke we are likely to think it funny, and funnier situations are expected to cause more laughter and more positive judgments (Calvert, 1949, Zigler, Levme, & Could, 1966) Common sense and psychological theories (Rosenberg, 1^0) suggest that a person's attitudes (evaluations) and emotional reactions are hkely to be consistent But does this consistency between laughter and evaluation reflect a correlation or a more dynamic, causal relationships" If there is a "dynamic" relationship between laughter and evaluation, we should be able to alter a person's evaluations of a ]oke or a movie by changing his laughter The evaluative change could be due to dissonance produced by a companson of behef and behavior (Festmger, 1957) or to persuasion due to exposure to one's own actions (Bem, 1967) In either case the person's laughter leads him to rate the stimulus as funnier The evidence from prior research is ambiguous about whether laughter does influence judgment For example, Martm (1905) asked subjects to encourage or suppress laughter while they were viewmg cartoons Suppression of laughter decreased the evaluated funnmess of the cartoons, while expression of laughter increased it She concluded that "laughter and a feeling of funnmess go hand m hand" (p 104). On the other hand. Young and Frye (1966) found that subjects who read jokes m group conditions (m companson to mdividual conditions) laughed more but did not rate the jokes as funnier. These authors "make a distmction between the overt laugh as a response to humor and