冷笑话能让人体验到冷么?——冷笑话的温度知觉及其与情绪体验之间的关系

本研究通过三个实验,从具身认知的角度来探讨阅读特殊体裁的幽默——冷笑话所产生的情绪体验及其与低温知觉的关系。实验1通过眼动记录法,探讨被试阅读不同形式幽默后对高低温图片注意偏向的影响,实验2使用句-图匹配范式探讨不同幽默题材与不同情绪效价之间的关系,实验3采用内隐联想测验(IAT),探讨高温/低温概念与正性/中性情绪之间的内隐联想强度。实验结果表明对冷笑话的阅读理解能启动低温知觉,并且能够产生一种类中性平静的情绪,同时这种特殊的情绪体验与低温概念之间存在较强的内隐联系。     

The Rating of Sexist Humor Under Time Pressure as an Indicator of Spontaneous Sexist Attitudes

Spontaneous vs. more controlled indicators of sexist attitudes were assessed in a laboratory experiment with 131 male German undergraduates. Participants rated the funniness of sexist and nonsexist jokes either with or without time pressure, and completed self-report measures of sexism and related constructs. With time pressure, participants showed greater liking for sexist jokes than without. No such effect was found for nonsexist jokes. Both with and without time pressure, sexist joke ratings showed meaningful correlations with standard self-report measures, which attests to the joke measure’s high reliability and construct validity. Directions for future research are discussed.     

A LABORATORY ANALOGUE FOR THE STUDY OF PEER SEXUAL HARASSMENT

The purpose of this study was to develop a laboratory analogue for the study of peer sexual harassment, and to examine person and situational factors associated with male on female peer sexual harassment. One hundred twenty-two male participants were given the opportunity to tell jokes to a female confederate from a joke list that included sexually offensive jokes, as well as other types of jokes. Participants were exposed to either a sexist laboratory environment or a neutral laboratory environment during the study. Eighty percent of participants told at least one sexually offensive joke to a female confederate. Higher scores on a measure of adversarial sexual beliefs were associated with telling a greater number of sexually offensive jokes. The results suggest that the joke-telling analogue may be a useful means for laboratory explorations of person and situational factors associated with peer sexual harassment.     

Relations between emotions,display rules,social motives,and facial behaviour

We report research on the relations between emotions, display rules, social motives, and facial behaviour. In Study 1 we used a questionnaire methodology to examine how respondents would react to a funny or a not funny joke told to them by a close friend or a stranger. We assessed display rules and motivations for smiling and/or laughing. Display rules and social motives (partly) mediated the relationship between the experimental manipulations and self‐reported facial behaviour. Study 2 was a laboratory experiment in which funny or not funny jokes were told to participants by a male or female stranger. Consistent with hypotheses, hearing a funny joke evoked a stronger motivation to share positive affect by showing longer Duchenne smiling. Contrary to hypotheses, a not funny joke did not elicit greater prosocial motivation by showing longer “polite” smiling, although such a smiling pattern did occur. Rated funniness of the joke and the motivation to share positive affect mediated the relationship between the joke manipulation and facial behaviour. Path analysis was used to explore this mediating process in greater detail.     

I’m Only Kidding: On Racist and Ethnic Jokes

Toward the end of his book Jokes, perhaps the best known philosophical treatment of the subject, Ted Cohen includes a notorious joke about a group of young Black men who are deterred from committing a gang rape by being thrown a basketball. This is a joke that perplexes Cohen and that he admits plays into stereotypes that presuppose the mindless obsession of Black youths with basketball as well as their unbridled sexuality. He agrees that the joke is morally bad and that it would be a better world without it. But he denies that its evil compromises its alleged funniness. He writes: “Wish that there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing.” In this paper, I want to challenge the claim that the moral defectiveness of a joke, especially a racist joke, cannot ever compromise its capacity to be funny.     

A joke is just a joke (except when it isn't): cavalier humor beliefs facilitate the expression of group dominance motives

Past research reveals preferences for disparaging humor directed toward disliked others. The group-dominance model of humor appreciation introduces the hypothesis that beyond initial outgroup attitudes, social dominance motives predict favorable reactions toward jokes targeting low-status outgroups through a subtle hierarchy-enhancing legitimizing myth: cavalier humor beliefs (CHB). CHB characterizes a lighthearted, less serious, uncritical, and nonchalant approach toward humor that dismisses potential harm to others. As expected, CHB incorporates both positive (affiliative) and negative (aggressive) humor functions that together mask biases, correlating positively with prejudices and prejudice-correlates (including social dominance orientation [SDO]; Study 1). Across 3 studies in Canada, SDO and CHB predicted favorable reactions toward jokes disparaging Mexicans (low-status outgroup). Neither individual difference predicted neutral (nonintergroup) joke reactions, despite the jokes being equally amusing and more inoffensive overall. In Study 2, joke content targeting Mexicans, Americans (high-status outgroup), and Canadians (high-status ingroup) was systematically controlled. Although Canadians preferred jokes labeled as anti-American overall, an underlying subtle pattern emerged at the individual-difference level: Only those higher in SDO appreciated those jokes labeled as anti-Mexican (reflecting social dominance motives). In all studies, SDO predicted favorable reactions toward low-status outgroup jokes almost entirely through heightened CHB, a subtle yet potent legitimatizing myth that "justifies" expressions of group dominance motives. In Study 3, a pretest-posttest design revealed the implications of this justification process: CHB contributes to trivializing outgroup jokes as inoffensive (harmless), subsequently contributing to postjoke prejudice. The implications for humor in intergroup contexts are considered.     

Understanding the directedness of gaze: three ways of doing it

It is argued that alongside the mentalistic and the behaviouristic forms, there is a third kind of gaze understanding. Gaze may be understood to be subjective in the sense that there can be diversity across self and other in terms of what is seen, without it being understood to be representational. This form of gaze understanding is more consistent with the evidence on toddlers' understanding of gaze and may well represent a developmentally intermediate form between the behaviouristic and mentalistic forms discussed in the target article. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Relationships among affective and cognitive factors in humor

One hundred and twenty-five college students rated a total of 74 jokes, chosen by stratified sampling, on funniness and on 13 other scales suggested by humor theories. Highly similar factor structures were found with two sets of jokes. Ratings of surprise, resolution, and originality correlated strongly with funniness and helped define a factor on which funniness ratings loaded. Scales pertaining to painfulness, anxiety, or importance of joke topic were positively correlated with funniness but defined a factor essentially independent of it. Partial correlations suggested that these scales were related to funniness through their common relationship with incongruity and resolution scales. Ratings of how much a joke made subjects “feel free” correlated much more highly with ratings of incongruity and resolution than with ratings of painfulness, anxiety, or importance of joke topic. Results were interpreted as providing support for an incongruity-resolution theory of humor, and for the interdependency of affective factors with incongruity-resolution mechanisms.     

The Influence of Peer Interactions on Sexually Oriented Joke Telling

Although the negative consequences and prevalence rates of sexual imposition are widely known through self-report surveys, currently there are few laboratory paradigms to examine the determinants of this type of behavior, especially peer sexual harassment. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effects of two types of peer interactions on peer sexual harassment among college students using a laboratory paradigm of sexually oriented joke telling as an analogue of sexual harassment. Results from two different experiments revealed an effect of type of peer interaction on sexually oriented joke telling. In Experiment 1, male college students, who were exposed to a male peer who modeled sexually harassing behavior, subsequently told significantly more sexually oriented jokes to an unknown female peer than did male students exposed to a male peer who modeled nonsexually harassing behavior. In Experiment 2, male college students, who were exposed to a male peer who was seemingly sexist in his interaction with them, subsequently told significantly more sexually oriented jokes to an unknown female peer than did male students exposed to a male peer who was seemingly nonsexist in his interactions with them. These results suggest that peer interactions may serve as a disinhibiting situational factor of sexually harassing behaviors perpetrated by male college students on female peers. The results also provide further validity for the use of a laboratory paradigm for the study of peer sexual harassment.     

Gender,attitudes towards women,and the appreciation of sexist humor

According to the dispositional theory of humor, females should enjoy female-disparaging jokes less than male-disparaging jokes because the recipient of the disparagement in the former situation is a member of the respondent's reference group. Several studies have shown, however, that both men and women often prefer female-disparaging humor. In the present study, attitudinal disposition was measured using Spence and Helmreich's Attitudes Toward Women Scale. Participants were then asked to rate the funniness of sexist and nonsexist jokes. Although sexist jokes were, in general, rated funnier than nonsexist jokes, joke type interacted with attitudinal disposition such that males and females with less traditional views of women's roles showed reduced preference for sexist humor, compared to their more traditional counterparts.     

A processing fluency-account of funniness: Running gags and spoiling punchlines

Earlier theories on humour assume that funniness stems from the incongruity resolution of the surprising punchline and thus an insight into the joke's meaning. Applying recent psychological theorising that insight itself draws on processing fluency being the ease and speed with which mental content is processed, it is predicted that increasing the fluency of processing the punchline of a joke increases funniness. In Experiments 1 and 2, significant nouns from the punchlines or from the beginnings of jokes were presented before a joke was rated in funniness. Pre-exposing punchline words 15 minutes and even only 1 minute before the eventual joke led to increased funniness ratings. In contrast, pre-exposing punchline words directly before a joke led to decreased funniness ratings. Furthermore, pre-exposing the beginning of a joke 1 minute before the joke had no effects on funniness. Experiment 3 ruled out exposure-facilitated punchline anticipation as alternative mechanism, and Experiment 4 replicated this fluency effect with typing font as manipulation. These findings also show that pre-exposing a punchline, which in common knowledge should spoil a joke, can actually increase funniness under certain conditions.     

Do the wrong thing: How toddlers tell a joke from a mistake

We investigated whether 19–36-month-olds (1) differentiate mistakes from jokes, and (2) understand humorous intentions. The experimenter demonstrated unambiguous jokes accompanied by laughter, unambiguous mistakes accompanied by the experimenter saying, “Woops!”, and ambiguous actions that could either be a mistake or a joke, accompanied by either laughter or, “Woops!” Toddlers were asked to try. Nineteen- to 36-month-olds differentiated jokes and mistakes by copying unambiguous jokes and correcting unambiguous mistakes. Only 25–36-month-olds differentiated mistakes and humorous intentions by copying ambiguous actions marked by laughter, and correcting those marked by, “Woops!” Understanding humorous intentions precedes understanding intentions behind pretense, lying, and false beliefs, thus may be a first step in understanding that others can intend to do the wrong thing.     

Preschool children's ability to visually represent relations

The developmental origins of mapping temporal relations onto space was investigated in N = 122 3- to 5-year-old children and adults. Spontaneous production and comprehension were investigated. Production was investigated in two conditions: an iconic condition (three-dimensional objects depicting the events or objects to be represented) and an abstract condition (plain discs). Consistent with findings by Tversky, Kugelmass and Winter (1991), 5-year-olds performed on an adult-like level. Developmental progress was observed between the ages of 3 and 4 years, with comprehension preceding production. Consistent with DeLoache's findings (2000), 4-year-olds' performance was better in abstract than in iconic conditions, indicating that dual representational demands may have affected task performance in the iconic condition. In sum, abilities to map temporal relations onto spatial relations appear to develop spontaneously, even before children have experience with conventional notational systems.     

Surprise but not coherence: Sensitivity to verbal humor in right-hemisphere patients

Verbal humor deficits were investigated in right-hemisphere-damaged patients. It was hypothesized that the appreciation of jokes presupposes two elements: sensitivity to the surprise element entailed in the punch line of a joke and apprehension of the coherence which results when the punch line has been integrated with the body of the joke. The possible dissociation between these elements was tested by asking subjects to select from four alternatives the appropriate ending to a joke. Right-hemisphere patients exhibited a selective attraction to endings which contained an element of surprise but which were not otherwise coherent with the body of the joke. This finding suggests that right-hemisphere patients have difficulty in integrating content across parts of a narrative and confirms the psychological reality of the proposed distinction between the surprise and coherence elements of humor processing.     

RECkoning with representational apriorism in evolutionary cognitive archaeology

In evolutionary cognitive archaeology, the school of thought associated with the traditional framework has been deeply influenced by cognitivist intuitions, which have led to the formulation of mentalistic and disembodied cognitive explanations to address the emergence of artifacts within the archaeological record of ancient hominins. Recently, some approaches in this domain have further enforced this view, by arguing that artifacts are passive means to broadcast/perpetuate meanings that are thoroughly internal to the mind. These meanings are conveyed either in the form of a Language of Thought, constituted by sub-personal, content-bearing mental representations, or in that of a natural language. In both cases, however, material culture stands as the physical derivative of computations run over representations, which include abstract concepts, semantic relationships, and meta-representations about intensional states, a conception hereby indicated as “representational apriorism”. In this paper, I will argue that such mentalistic models are plagued by the fundamental problems of content, substance, and origin, which affect the representational substrates required for the production of artifacts. At the same time, these models fail the criterion of minimalism at the crux of conditional cognitive archaeology, because they propose overly costly explanations which are insufficiently constrained by material evidence. An alternative proposal, based on the principles of radical enactive cognitive science, is hereby introduced in order to counter this mentalistic drift. It is concluded that a radical enactive cognitive archaeology is able to dissolve the deep problems confronting the mentalistic paradigm, while providing minimalistic cognitive explanations about the emergence of Paleolithic artifacts.     

Ambivalent Sexism and the Dumb Blonde: Men's and Women's Reactions to Sexist Jokes

This article examines the relationship between gender, hostile sexism, benevolent sexism and reactions to a seemingly innocuous genre of sexist humor, the dumb blonde joke. After hearing an audiotaped conversation in which two students swapped dumb blonde jokes, participants high in hostile sexism rated the jokes as more amusing and less offensive than those low in hostile sexism. Among individuals low in hostile sexism, however, benevolent sexism interacted with gender. Specifically, men high in benevolent sexism found the jokes significantly more amusing and less offensive than either women in the same group or men low in both hostile and benevolent sexism. This study replicates and extends previous research examining the relationship between hostile sexism and the enjoyment of sexist humor, and underscores the possibility that benevolent sexism may represent qualitatively distinct attitudes for men and women.     

Pretend play: an application of an intervention program in autism

Methodologically and theoretically based on metarrepresentational deficit hypothesis, we design an intervention to teach the mental state of pretense to an autistic boy. The production and comprehension of symbolic play by means of the use of two specific strategies founded on pictorial analogy of the mental representation and process, was the focus of the learning. The efficiency and efectiveness of the program is reflected in the results that indicated the subject's competence to generate and comprehend the pretense as well as to generalize the acquired knowledge into other areas of mentalistic functioning. We discuss the possibility to develop a metarrepresentational knowledge based on the internalizing of the strategies of conceptual support.     

Developmental Changes in Early Comprehension and Production of Drawings: Evidence From Two Socioeconomic Backgrounds

Two studies examined young children's comprehension and production of representational drawings across and within 2 socioeconomic strata (SES). Participants were 130 middle-SES (MSES) and low-SES (LSES) Argentine children, from 30 to 60 months old, given a task with 2 phases, production and comprehension. The production phase assessed free drawing and drawings from simple 3-dimensional objects (model drawing); the comprehension phase assessed children's understanding of an adult's line drawings of the objects. MSES children solved the comprehension phase of the task within the studied age range; representational production emerged first in model drawing (42 months) and later in free drawing (48 months). The same developmental pathway was observed in LSES children but with a clear asynchrony in the age of onset of comprehension and production: Children understood the symbolic nature of drawings at 42 months old and the first representational drawings were found at 60 months old. These results provide empirical evidence that support the crucial influence of social experiences by organizing and constraining graphic development.     

Representational change and children's numerical estimation

We applied overlapping waves theory and microgenetic methods to examine how children improve their estimation proficiency, and in particular how they shift from reliance on immature to mature representations of numerical magnitude. We also tested the theoretical prediction that feedback on problems on which the discrepancy between two representations is greatest will cause the greatest representational change. Second graders who initially were assessed as relying on an immature representation were presented feedback that varied in degree of discrepancy between the predictions of the mature and immature representations. The most discrepant feedback produced the greatest representational change. The change was strikingly abrupt, often occurring after a single feedback trial, and impressively broad, affecting estimates over the entire range of numbers from 0 to 1000. The findings indicated that cognitive change can occur at the level of an entire representation, rather than always involving a sequence of local repairs.