Laugh yourself to sleep: memory consolidation for humorous information

There is extensive evidence that emotional information is better remembered than neutral information across long delays, especially if the delay interval contains an opportunity for sleep. However, as prior studies have focused on memory for negative stimuli, it is unclear whether positive memories benefit from time and sleep as well. To investigate the consolidation of positive memories, the current study examined differences in memory for humorous and non-humorous cartoons. While prior evidence demonstrates that humorous information is preferentially remembered relative to non-humorous information over brief delays, it is unknown whether this benefit lasts across longer delay intervals or whether sleep is important for lasting humor memories to form. Thus, we tested memory for 27 cartoons across 12-h delay periods containing either sleep or wakefulness. Results indicate that humor's enhancing effect on recall memory is robust across a 12-h delay and that a period of sleep facilitates this effect over wakefulness when cartoons are novel to participants and ranked based on subjective emotional ratings. Further, in accordance with previous studies that reveal diminished emotional reactivity to stimuli following sleep, in a supplemental experiment, we found that sleep reduced subjective ratings of humor, arousal, and positivity of humorous cartoons. These findings provide preliminary evidence that sleep's impact on negative emotional memory consolidation and emotional reactivity can be extended to positive stimuli as well.