Revided A1-Research Plan

Rodrigo Iglesias Baptista

540383

1172 words

Introduction

In the current state of 2022, Europe faces a period of great uncertainty and stress

based on the current events happening in the continent: the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and

the Russian-Ukrainian conflict that arose in early February of the year (Seifman, 2022). In

fact, such preoccupations and stress levels were responsible for detrimental effects on the

people’s mental health and wellbeing (Armour et al., 2020; Sheather, 2022). Worry is the

term used to describe one’s reaction to threat and possible preoccupation in the future,

those reactions often take place in a form of a emotional, behavioral and cognitive patterns

that are highly associated with stress and anxiety (Borkovec, 2002; Capobianco et al., 2018).

Stress can be defined as the state of imbalance between demands, in which an individual

can experience a sense of being overwhelmed by their environment and its expectations

(Selye, 1956). By having those issues in mind, it’s possible to wonder about the possible

strategies that the people going through these difficult phases could be adopting to deal with

the stress and worry caused by events and their daily lives.

The experience of humor and humorous content is considered to be vital for

maintaining wellbeing and improving emotion regulation in difficult times (Crawford &

Caltabiano, 2011; Martin, 2001). By getting in contact with humorous content, a person can

lighten their perspective and alleviate feelings of tension in their daily lives, since the

consumption of humor, on a daily basis, can act as a moment of catharsis and a break from

the daily rush (Bischetti et al., 2020). Furthermore, with the recent advancements in

technology, people were able to decide when and what type of media they want to consume,
then online humorous content such as movies, tv shows and videos became easy and

instantly accessible from computer and phone devices. Besides, with the advance of social

media, new forms of consuming humor took place, such as internet memes, that represent

trends of humor thematically replicated across the internet, mainly using a combination of an

image and text (Rintel, 2013).

With such accessibility, it became possible for people to treat media as a way to

manage their mood and to heal undesirable mental states, making them choose the media

as being in accordance with the feeling and the state they want to achieve at the moment

(Knobloch-Westerwick, 2013). The Mood management theory, developed by Zillmann

(1988), explains that, depending on which messages a person is being exposed to, can

regulate that person’s mood states. In this scenario, the theory supports the idea that, if a

person is experiencing states of worry and stress, it would be valuable to use entertainment

media to help alter and balance those states, and, as it is offered by this paper, those states

could be balanced by the consumption of humor. Therefore, it is possible to expect that

looking for humor media can be naturally a practice of people that face stress and worry

regularly, then one can expect these states to act as a predictor of humor media

consumption behavior.

Therefore, the Research question is posed:

RQ: To what extent do levels of worry and stress predict humor consumption?

Social and Academic Relevance

In terms of relevance, this research will be able to provide society with insights on

mood management, since it will put to the test if people that are stressed and worried really

do use the tools of humor to cope with those emotional states. Then, if the relation between

the variables is significant, it would be possible to assume that using humor is indeed

effective to deal with those states, since it is being used by a significant number of people. In
this sense, the reader would be provided with the relation that when they are experiencing

those states, it is relevant to try to consume humorous content to heal those states.

Furthermore, the academic relevance of the paper will be reached with the new

perspective of humorous content, that is, also including new forms of humor that haven't

been explored before. Previous research done using the Mood management theory as a

basis indeed mentions humorous entertainment as a form of tool to manage mood (Molina et

al., 2016). However, such papers don’t go in depth into the comedy style and were limited to

certain types of content, such as feel-good type of shows and also uplifting movies, seeing

the whole entertainment as the object of study, but not specifying a genre.Therefore, little

was written about the shows and movies that have humor in the central role, and where

laughter is the protagonist above all. Besides, studies that look into the effects and prediction

of humor content don’t take into account other more subtle forms of humor, such as internet

memes and tik tok videos, which are a very recent and popular way of getting in contact with

humor (Colletta, 2003). Then, by taking a new path from the studies on the field, this paper

will take into account the new forms of humor as well as triggering humor and comedy as

central.

Research Design

The research will consist of a quantitative analysis, in which will analyze the data

gathered by a survey, in which will aim to measure most two important variables: Stress,

worry and Humorous media consumption. Stress ,an independent variable, will be measured

through the Perceived Stress Scale, which provides an effective and brief way of measuring

Stress based on recall. Furthermore, the other independent variable Worry will be measured

by an adaptation of the Climate Change Worry scale (Clayton & Karazsia, 2020). The choice

to use an adaptation of the scale was made because the scale provides a very clear

measurement to worry about, and its central theme can be easily changed, still maintaining
its validity, since the questions are based more on the worry and are not attached to the

theme of climate change. Then, since this scale provides a good measurement of worry

about events, the theme of climate change will be substituted by the theme of Covid-19 and

the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Furthermore, the dependent variable Humorous media

consumption will be measured by a series of questions based on recall. The questions to

measure this variable are going to be based on a likert scale, in which are going to contain a

media product, such as humorous sitcoms, in which the response will be asked to fill the

answers from Never to Very often in relation to the frequency that they consume such a

category based on recall. Besides, the variable motivation will also be measured as a

control, since the motivation behind humor media consumption can be important to clarify

the result in a later stage.

The population to be analyzed in the study will be European students from 18 to 34

years old, since this group represents the largest audience in streaming and social media

platforms (Ivan, 2022). Besides, the choice to reach students is due to the fact that that

group tends to have symptoms of stress and worry (Tavakoli et al., 2019). Furthermore, the

method of snowball sampling will be used in order to disseminate and to find the group of

people that meet the criteria.

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