The exception of humour: Iconicity, Phonemic Surprisal, Memory Recall, and Emotional Associations
It addresses a cognitive psychology puzzle about memory and emotion, but is incremental as it builds on known factors like surprisal and valence.
This meta-study investigates how humor, despite being linked to positive emotions, shows high phonemic surprisal and improved memory recall, similar to negative words, challenging prior assumptions about emotional valence and memorability.
This meta-study explores the relationships between humor, phonemic bigram surprisal, emotional valence, and memory recall. Prior research indicates that words with higher phonemic surprisal are more readily remembered, suggesting that unpredictable phoneme sequences promote long-term memory recall. Emotional valence is another well-documented factor influencing memory, with negative experiences and stimuli typically being remembered more easily than positive ones. Building on existing findings, this study highlights that words with negative associations often exhibit greater surprisal and are easier to recall. Humor, however, presents an exception: while associated with positive emotions, humorous words also display heightened surprisal and enhanced memorability.