Humor appreciation as a function of sexual,aggressive, and sexist content

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine the relationship between the rated sex, aggression, and sexism values of cartoons with their rated funniness values. Multiple regression analyses indicated that for women, only sexism values correlated with cartoon funniness, albeit negatively. For men, however, only sex values correlated (positively) with cartoon funniness. The results were interpreted by Zillmann's social predisposition theory. Women, more likely having been victims of sex discrimination, identified with the cartoon victim and thus found sexist cartoons less funny. Men, because of their social history, made no such identification and were more aware of the sexual aspects of the cartoons. This influenced their funniness ratings of the cartoons, which replicated previous research.     

Humor as an Optics: Bergson and the Ethics of Humor

Although the ethics of humor is a relatively new field, it already seems to have achieved a consensus about ethics in general. In this paper, I implicitly (1) question the view of ethics that stands behind many discussions in the ethics of humor; I do this by explicitly (2) focusing on what has been a chief preoccupation in the ethics of humor: the evaluation of humor. Does the immoral content of a joke make it more or less humorous? Specifically, I analyze whether a sexist joke is more humorous because of its sexism. Contra recent trends in the ethics of humor, I answer this question affirmatively. To this end, the paper presents a detailed and novel reading of Bergson's philosophy of humor, which I argue connects most easily and significantly to the alternate view of ethics I have in mind.     

Resolution of complex decisional conflicts as a function of degree of avoidance

The relationship between difficulty of conflict resolution and degree of avoidance was investigated in three experiments using imaginary conflicts consisting of choosing to have more or less of certain personal characteristics. Double forms of conflict were used to control for complexity of choice. In the first experiment, it was found that double approach-approach conflicts were resolved more quickly than double approach-avoidance which in turn were faster than double avoidance-avoidance. The second experiment showed a similar result using scaled judgments of subjective difficulty. In the third experiment, the basic finding was shown to be independent of situational pressure by permitting an undecided choice. The basic finding was also shown to be independent of individual differences in social desirability.