Locus coeruleus TDP-43 pathology in a community-based cohort: Clinical and pathological correlates.

When creating and delivering their learning units, instructors often face the question of whether to include jokes, humorous anecdotes or fun facts. The evidence is contradictory on the effects of such adjuncts. On the one hand, survey‐based research on course‐related teacher humour revealed positive associations with cognitive and affective‐motivational outcomes (e.g., Bieg & Dresel, ; Wanzer et al., ). On the other hand, seductive details research suggests that augmenting learning material with interesting texts and/or pictures that are tangentially related to but irrelevant for the learning goal can hamper learning (e.g., Garner et al., ; Sundararajan & Adesope, ). One explanation for these inconsistent findings refers to the various functions that humorous elements fulfil in a learning unit (e.g., Cazes et al., ; Wanzer et al., ). For example, some humorous elements may be both entertaining (i.e., affective‐motivational function) and illustrate the learning content or add relevance (i.e., cognitive function). Such relevant humour could enable motivate deep, effortful processing (see e.g., Eitel et al., ; Wanzer et al., ). In contrast, humorous elements lacking an additional cognitive function might act as a detrimental seductive detail because they interfere with students' processing of the relevant content (Harp & Mayer, ; see chapter ‘Research on Seductive Details’ for detailed information). Two studies investigated when instructional humour is effective or ineffective for learning by focussing specifically on how humour's affective‐motivational and cognitive functions influence learning. The present work thereby aims to bring the related research fields of teacher humour and seductive details closer together. Instructional humour (also referred to as teacher humour) is a fairly broad construct ranging from jokes or witty comments to comics, pictures, funny voices or sounds (e.g., Banas et al., ; Frymier et al., ; Martin, ; Robinson et al., ). Likewise, researchers view the functions and effects of instructional humour as quite multidimensional (e.g., Bieg & Dresel, ; Frymier et al., ; Martin et al., ). The focus of the present paper is affiliative humorous messages from an instructor (e.g., jokes and funny anecdotes). Such humour might mainly be incorporated to amuse and motivate students, facilitate relationships or reduce tension, but it could also serve cognitive functions (e.g., Banas et al., ; Bieg & Dresel, ; Martin et al., ). Survey studies have revealed positive associations between affiliative humour and different instructional dimensions (Banas et al., ; Bieg et al., ; Bieg & Dresel, ; Wanzer et al., ). For example, a survey with 985 secondary school students in Germany revealed positive relationships between perceived teacher humour and socio‐emotional and motivational dimensions on the one hand (e.g., perceived teacher–student relationship, interestingness and enjoyment of instruction) and cognitive dimensions on the other hand (perceived clarity of instruction and elaboration; Bieg & Dresel, ). Noteworthy, these positive relationships were only apparent for humour that is to the course content (i.e., has a thematic connection to the topic in class). Course‐unrelated humour proved to be not at all or even negatively associated with such outcomes (e.g., Bieg & Dresel, ; Frymier et al., ). This pattern of results was also supported by an experimental study comparing students' ratings of videos displaying a teaching unit containing four different types of humour or no humour (Bieg et al., ).