When an F-bomb bonks your funny bone: humor attenuates the taboo stroop effect

Taboo words interfere with language processing, e.g. responses are slowed when producing picture names paired with taboo distractors and identifying taboo words' font colour in Stroop tasks. Interference has been linked with taboo words' emotional properties, specifically high arousal. Because some taboo words are humorous, which is also arousing (Shafto et al., 2024b), the present research explored whether taboo Stroop interference is moderated by humour. Participants completed an online Stroop colour identification task for taboo and neutral words, identifying their font colour via keypress as quickly as possible. In Experiment 1, taboo words possessed a range of humor ratings based on previous norms and were intermixed with neutral words (mixed design). In Experiment 2, words with different levels of tabooness (high, low) and humor (high, low) were presented in sets corresponding to these categories (blocked design). Taboo Stroop interference occurred in both experiments, where font colours were identified more slowly for taboo words than neutral words, and humor affected taboo Stroop interference in the blocked design: Interference effects were smaller for taboo words high in humor than ones low in humor. These findings suggest that humor can attenuate the degree to which taboo words command attention during colour identification.