Recipe for a Good Meme: Cognitive and Emotional Effects on Internet Meme Evaluations

What are the ingredients that make a good meme? Internet memes are new forms of communication that can be found all over social media platforms. Despite their popularity, these digital stimuli have gone largely unnoticed in the affective sciences. Although there are many databases of emotional stimuli available to researchers, there is no emotional database of internet memes. The goal of our study is to collect, validate, and describe 300 user-generated memes rated on their aesthetic evaluation, features, and elicited emotions. We will use this database to sample stimuli for future experiments on internet memes. Since this is the first study of its kind, we are reluctant to make specific predictions about the ratings. However, based on the literature of aesthetic psychology, we have some reason to believe internet memes are subject to processing fluency. Processing fluency is a hedonically-marked metacognitive feedback mechanism. People tend to prefer stimuli that are processed with ease rather than difficulty. Internet memes that are judged to be fast to process or easier to understand should also have higher ratings of overall liking. Other variables like prototypicality and truthiness have also been linked to processing fluency where prototypical stimuli are processed fluently and fluency increases judgment of truth. Since fluency is hedonically marked, fluently processed memes should generate higher levels of positive valence emotions like amusement while memes that are harder to understand generate negative valence emotions like confusion and frustration. We also have reason to believe aptness is a key factor in the liking of internet memes. Internet memes can be thought of as visual metaphors that illuminate a relationship between two domains. Aptness is the closeness or fit of this relationship. We will be measuring subjective aptness which has been shown to increase humor ratings of internet memes. Incongruity theory of humor suggests that incongruity and surprise are key to humor. Researchers have also explored how aptness and incongruity interact in creating humorous metaphors. So, we will test if these factors also increase evaluations of humor.