Laugh before You Study: Does Watching Funny Videos before Study Facilitate Learning?

Emotions exist widely in the entire process of learning and affect students’ motivation as well as academic performance. In multimedia learning, academics usually focus on the impact of teachers’ emotions or the emotional design of multimedia learning materials on students’ emotions and learning results. Few studies have investigated how to enhance learning by regulating students’ pre-learning emotions. This study focused on whether playing funny videos before learning could promote students’ positive emotions to enhance their motivation, satisfaction, and learning outcomes. We randomly divided 81 elementary school students into two groups: experimental group and control group. While the experimental group watched funny video clips, the control group watched neutral video clips before starting the video learning. The experimental group had more positive pre-learning emotions than the control group. After the course, the emotion of the experimental group declined while that of the control group enhanced. However, positive pre-learning emotions still promoted students’ understanding and transfer of learning materials. Moreover, no significant differences were observed between the two groups in learning motivation, satisfaction, and retention tests. Furthermore, this paper analyzed the causes of the experimental results and discussed the insights for teaching.