In order to examine if laughter can indeed draw some of the stress away that students may feel with cognitive conflict and to see if laughter’s incongruity can gave them transferable coping skills, I conducted an activity and collected data. With pre-approval of students and the instructor, I had the instructor indentify two class periods during the semester when students often experience cognitive conflict. At the end of each class, students completed a survey to see how much cognitive conflict they experienced. For the next class, each student was asked to bring to class something related to the topic that made them laugh. Students then presented the thing that made them laugh to the entire class.

During that class, students completed an in-class survey that asked them to rate how funny they found each item and why. At the end of the class, students completed another survey. The purpose of this survey was to examine if their level of cognitive conflict had changed after the activity. Over the semester, students did this activity twice. I ran this activity with a professor and his class in the fall of last year. I’m currently running it again. One professor has one section, and another professor has two sections.