ABSTRACT
Applied psychologists attempt to solve problems in real-world settings. This chapter examines three specific applied areas: 1) advertising and marketing, 2) the workplace, and 3) classrooms and educational materials. With regards to advertising, applied psychologists explore the effectiveness of humor in improving explicit and implicit memory and liking for brands or message in ads. Findings concern whether humor draws attention toward or away from information in ads, individual differences in response to humor’s appearance in ads, and whether humor loses its effectiveness with ad repetition. With regards to the workplace, humor is found to increase employee satisfaction and creativity, help employees make sense of organizations’ decisions and policies, and increase identification with the company. Supervisors’ humor styles may affect employee morale: positive styles increase but negative styles decrease morale. With regards to educational materials, the evidence is mixed as to whether humor does or does not improve retention of learned material, but students may perceive humor as effective nonetheless, which produces benefits besides memory for learned information.
