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The motivational aspects of humor are considered from the perspective of terror management theory, testing the hypothesis that exposure to the mortality salience manipulation will result in an alteration in participants' appreciation of humorous material. Participants rated several comic strips, indicating how funny they found the jokes. The differential relevance of various forms of jokes to the process of terror management was also examined by having participants rate their appreciation of jokes that address issues of varying applicability to existential concerns. Results indicate that mortality salience results in an exacerbation of the evaluation of humorous material, and that jokes' relative centrality to terror management processes produces differing evaluative responses. Theoretical and practical implications are examined.

Two streams of thought are examined: Nancey Murphy's recently-proposed approach to integrating psychology and theology, and the burgeoning positive psychology movement. Points of congruence and divergence are considered, and the potential for a mutually-advantageous interaction is discussed, with curiosity research serving as an example. Murphy's application of virtue ethics to the question of human flourishing provides positive psychology with a missing teleological component. Positive psychology provides conceptual, methodological, institutional, and applicatory resources that would be valuable to a Christian psychologist who wishes to make use of Murphy's neo-Aristotelian model of human flourishing.

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