Can mood influence people’s ability to produce humorous verbal messages? Based on recent theories linking affect to social cognition and information-processing strategies, this experiment predicted and found that positive mood increased people’s ability to generate more creative, humorous, and elaborate verbal contents. Participants viewed positive, neutral, or negative videos, then produced verbal captions to fit four different cartoon images. Their messages were rated for creativity, humor, and elaboration by two trained raters, and the processing latency to produce each message was also recorded. Results showed that positive mood resulted in more creative and humorous messages, and that this effect was significantly mediated by mood-induced differences in information-processing strategies. The results are interpreted as supporting recent theories linking affect to cognition, and the theoretical and practical implications of the findings for everyday verbal communication are considered.

中文翻译：

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情绪对幽默产生的影响：积极的情绪提高幽默的语言能力

情绪会影响人们产生幽默的口头信息的能力吗？根据将情感与社会认知和信息处理策略联系起来的最新理论，该实验预测并发现积极情绪会提高人们产生更多创造性、幽默和复杂的口头内容的能力。参与者观看了正面、中性或负面的视频，然后制作了适合四种不同卡通图像的文字说明。他们的信息由两名训练有素的评分员根据创造力、幽默感和详细程度进行评分，并且还记录了产生每条信息的处理延迟。结果表明，积极的情绪会产生更具创造性和幽默感的信息，而这种影响在很大程度上是由情绪引起的信息处理策略差异所介导的。