Social enhancement of laughter: an experimental analysis of some companion variables.

Three experiments, investigate companion influences on humorous laughter and smiling. Boys and girls, aged 7 to 9 years, were played humorous recordings through headphones in dyadic and solitary conditions. Experiment I demonstrates that social facilitation effects in laughter and smiling reported in Chapman (1973) generalize to cases where a 2-year age/status difference exists between naturalistic coactors. In Experiments II and III companions were confederates, 2 years senior to subjects. They responded to directions relayed through headphones (coaction conditions) or a concealed speaker (audience conditions). It is shown in Experiment II that subjects' laughter, smiling, and looking are facilitated by increases in the laughter and smiling of coactors and, in Experiment III, that audiences are less effective in promoting high levels of responses. While increments in the coactor's looking enhance smiling and looking, corresponding increases in laughter are not statistically significant. Humor-ratings are associated with behavioral responses in Experiment II, but not Experiment III. Interaction data and results from subsidiary conditions are discussed.     

The informational and facilitative effects of an audience upon expression and the evaluation of humorous stimuli

A study was conducted to investigate the facilitative and informational effects of an audience upon a subject's expressive behavior (i.e., smiling and laughing) and his rating of cartoon stimuli. Forty-eight male and 48 female subjects were shown single frame cartoons accompanied by audience laughter and were asked to rate the cartoons for funniness and liking. Two aspects of the audience were varied: the appropriateness of the audience setting for the expression of laughter (the audience was identified as viewing the cartoons in a classroom or party condition) and the consistency of the audience's laughter (either consistently high for both good and poor quality cartoons, or varied, high for good cartoons and low for poor cartoons). The findings show that male subjects discriminated most between good and poor cartoons when the audience laughter was in an appropriate (party) setting and was varied with cartoon quality. They discriminated least (gave similar ratings to good and poor cartoons) to a party audience that expressed consistently high laughter. No convergence in rating of good and poor cartoons was found in the inappropriate classroom conditions. These results support the hypothesis that male subjects use the audience laughter as information about cartoon quality either averaging or discounting the audience laughter with the perceived quality of the cartoon. For female subjects, on the other hand, the party audience and consistently high laughter elevated observed expressions of mirth and elevated cartoon ratings. The fact that variables which increased expressive behavior also increased ratings is consistent with the two-part hypothesis that female subjects base their cartoon ratings on their feeling states, and that these feelings states reflect the pooled impact of the quality of the cartoons and the subject's expressive behavior. There was no overall difference in amount of audience influence for male and female subjects. Thus, male and female subjects differ in the way they are influenced by an audience rather than in how much they are influenced.     

“It’s not funny if they’re laughing”: Self-categorization, social influence, and responses to canned laughter

Pre-recorded, or “canned” laughter is often used to encourage audience laughter. Previous research suggests that hearing others laugh can influence an audience, although several variables moderate its effects. We examined an unexplored moderator, hypothesizing that canned laughter would influence listeners only if they believed the laughter came from fellow in-group members. We manipulated the presence or absence of canned laughter in a potentially humorous recording and participants’ beliefs about the in-group or out-group composition of the laughing audience. The results confirmed our hypothesis: participants laughed and smiled more, laughed longer, and rated humorous material more favorably when they heard in-group laughter rather than out-group laughter or no laughter at all.     

An Ethos of Affirmative Laughter in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006), Nietzsche presents Zarathustra as a sage and parodic prophet, who acquires and offers insight over the narrated journey of his spiritual development. Nietzsche’s conception of Zarathustra as a gift (to “all and none”) endorses learning as the kind of emulation condensed into Zarathustra’s complex formulation: rather than “corpses that I carry with me wherever I want . . . I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves—wherever I want.” Thus I aim, firstly, to follow the text closely to see what is given. However, noting that Zarathustra is deeply imbued with figures of laughter, I also impose an interpretation. “Repeating differently,” as demanded by Zarathustra, I outline a practicable, spiral-shaped “learning curve” of traversal and return to various “shades of laughter,” advancing from the worst laughters to “golden laughter,” which embraces complexity. This represents what it means to laugh well. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate that the complex ethos of affirmative laughter in Zarathustra remains strikingly pertinent for a contemporary era urgently tasked with embracing complexity.     

Classes and collections: Principles of organization in the learning of hierarchical relations

This study demonstrates that children tend to distort class inclusion relations (e.g., the relation of oaks to trees) into the part-whole structure of collections (e.g., the relations of oaks to a forest). Children aged 6 to 17 were taught novel class inclusion hierarchies, analogous to the relation between oaks, pines, and trees. In one condition, the class inclusion relations were taught by ostensive definition alone, e.g., stating “These are trees” while pointing to trees and, “These are oaks” while pointing to oaks. in the second condition, children were additionally told what would be analogous to “Oaks and pines are two kinds of trees”. With this additional information to constrain their interpretation, even the youngest children correctly interpreted the relation as class inclusion. In contrast, with limited information, children as old as 14 erroneously imposed a collection structure on the inclusion hierarchies. They would deny, for example, that any single tree was a tree (as they should of they thought “tree” meant “forest”), and would pick up several trees despite being asked for a tree. The results indicated that the part-whole structure of collections is simpler to establish and maintain than the structure of inclusion.     

Stimulus control over sex-typed play in cross-gender identified boys.

Discriminative stimulus control over masculine and feminine sex-typed play behaviors was investigated in five boys, aged 5–8 yr, with “childhood crossgender identification.” Reliable observational measures of play were obtained with two sets of toys: (a) “dress-up toys” (girls' apparel vs boys' apparel), and (b) “affect toys” (maternal-nurturance play vs masculine-aggression play). With an ABA reversal intrasubject design, certain stimulus conditions (e.g., presence of father, mother, male, or female stranger) were found to be discriminative for reliable changes in sex-typed play. Sex-typed play was found to vary as a function of the social stimulus situation and as a function of the type of play response required. All children played predominantly feminine while alone in the playroom. While no single environmental stimulus was consistently discriminative for masculine play across children, at least one stimulus condition was found for each subject under which he played predominantly masculine.     

The effect of adults' eating on young children's acceptance of unfamiliar foods

Adults presented unfamiliar foods to 14- to 20- and 42- to 48-month-old children individually in their homes. More children put the food in their mouths when the adults also were eating than when the adults simply were offering the food. More children put food in their mouths when their mothers were the source than when the source was a friendly adult “visitor”. However, even when alone with a child, the visitor's eating elicited reliably more tasting. Analysis of requesting behavior indicated that the adults' eating aroused a desire to eat in the children. There were no consistent sex differences or interactions between sex of visitor and sex of child in children's food acceptance. There was a suggestion that younger children were more affected by repeated offerings than were older children. It is concluded that a relatively “low level” form of observational learning—“social facilitation”—can account for the data.     

Effort as Person-Focused Praise: “Hard Worker” Has Negative Effects for Adults After a Failure

Although work with children demonstrates a benefit of process-focused praise relative to person-focused praise on post-failure motivation, few studies have examined this result in adults. We tested the effect of three types of praise on adults' post-failure outcomes: person-focused intelligence (“high intelligence”), person-focused effort (“hard worker”), and process-focused effort (“worked hard”) in a sample of 156 adults recruited from Amazon's MTurk. Participants completed a set of easy visual pattern recognition problems and were told that they performed better than most adults and were given one of the three types of feedback. They then completed more difficult problems and were told that they had not performed well. Participants in the “hard worker” condition (compared to “worked hard”) were more likely to endorse intelligence as a reason for failure. They also reported lower perceived success and less enjoyment than participants in other conditions. Participants in the “high intelligence” condition were more likely to attribute their failure to intelligence than participants in the “worked hard” condition. The results suggest that the benefit of process-focused praise typically found in children (worked hard compared to intelligent) was mostly not replicated in adults, and person-focused effort praise was detrimental in a non-college student adult sample.     

The effects of sex-role ideology,self-esteem,and expected future interactions with an audience on male help seeking

Male subjects, purportedly being observed by an audience, received failure feedback while working on a task (rating dialogues for neuroticism). Help was readily available, from a male or female assistant, and the primary dependent variable was whether or not subjects requested help. Embarrassment was postulated as the major inhibitor of help seeking in this situation. Self-report measures of embarrassment and perceived accuracy were taken throughout the session. The independent variables were: task centrality (sex-role appropriateness), sex of assistant, expectation of future interaction with the audience, self-esteem, and sex-role ideology (“traditional” vs “feminist” beliefs). The principal results for help seeking were: high esteem traditional subjects sought help less frequently on the central (male) task and more frequently sought help on the peripheral (female) task; feminists did not differ in help seeking according to sex of task. Increased embarrassment was not generally associated with inhibition of help seeking. In fact, there was a trend for high embarrassment to be reported immediately before help was sought. To explain these results, two forms of embarrassment are distinguished — the embarrassment due to continued failure, which should result in seeking help to bring about success, and anticipated embarrassment involved in the act of seeking help, which should inhibit help-seeking behavior.     

Developmental differences in memory for temporally neutral and temporally tagged information

Forty children (ages 7 and 11 years) listened to stories and then answered questions about temporally neutral and temporally tagged information appearing in them (e.g., “Linda is smart” vs “Linda ate an apple”). Number of presentations and free recall of the stories were manipulated to study age-related changes in the effects of additional processing on memory for the two kinds of information. Older children exhibited overall better memory, but with additional processing that difference was larger for temporally neutral than for temporally tagged information. The observed interactions among age, additional processing, and kind of information demonstrated the importance of the distinction between temporally neutral and temporally tagged information for developmental studies of memory for prose.     

Effects of peer presence on sex-typing of children's play behavior

Effect of peer presence on the sex-typed toy choices of 3- and 4-year-olds was investigated in a repeated measures experimental design. Twenty-six girls and thirty-six boys were tested under three conditions: (a) alone; (b) in the presence of a same-sex peer; and (c) in the presence of an opposite-sex peer. Amount of time spent playing with three feminine- and three masculine-stereotyped toys was recorded. For both boys and girls, play with “sex role-inappropriate” toys was significantly lower in the presence of an opposite-sex peer than in the solitary condition. Across conditions boys exhibited less play with opposite-sex-typed toys than girls. Rate of play with opposite-sex-typed toys increased in successive trials for both sexes. These results indicate that the presence of an opposite-sex peer functions as a discriminative stimulus for avoidance of “sex role-inappropriate” play in preschoolers and suggests that preschoolers may have a history of differential reinforcement for sex-typed play in the presence of peers.     

An examination of vicarious reinforcement processes in children

The primary purpose of the present investigation was to examine vicarious reinforcement processes in children. More specifically, the effects on one child of observing another same-sex child receive direct reinforcement were explored across three different age levels. Subjects were 216 children, randomly assigned to experimental or control conditions. For the control condition, neither child in the same-sex, same-age dyad received reinforcement for performance on the experimental task. For the experimental condition, one child in each dyad received direct social reinforcement for performance, while the other child received no social reinforcement for similar performance. Although children who observed other children receive direct social reinforcement initially increased performance (as predicted by vicarious reinforcement hypotheses), their performance soon decreased and was characterized by verbal and nonverbal responses which appeared to interfere with task performance (e.g., “Hey, I can do them too”, “Look at mine”, “There's no use in trying”). It appeared as if these observing children were being punished for their performance. Such effects were more pronounced for older than younger children; however, they were observed equally in boys and girls. Results were discussed in terms of vicarious reinforcement and “implicit punishment” hypotheses. Implications for applied settings were also addressed.     

What Could It Mean to Say That Today's Stand-Up Audiences Are Too Sensitive?

Contemporary comedy audiences are accused by some comedians of being too morally sensitive to appreciate humor. To get closer to an answer, I will first briefly present the argument over audience sensitivity as found in the nonphilosophical literature. Second, I then turn to the philosophical literature and begin from the idea that “funny” is a response-dependent property. I present a criticism of this response-dependence account of “funny” based in the claim that funniness is not determined by what normal audiences actually laugh at, but by what merits laughter. Third, I argue that excessive or deficient moral sensitivity distorts audience receptivity to humor. Fourth, I turn to candidates for ideally sensitive audiences. I conclude by returning to the particular cases of supposed oversensitivity or undersensitivity to jokes to see how we might judge them.     

The Effect of Predicate Matching on Perceived Understanding and Factual Recall

Grinder and Bandler (1976) asserted that if therapists communicate with clients using verbal predicates that match the modality of the clients' primary representational system (PRS), it will be easier for the clients to understand the therapist and to believe that they are understood. In this study we investigated the relationship between predicate matching and understanding. Participants (N=99) listened to a recorded narrative under either a “matched” or “mismatched” experimental condition. Participants' objective understanding (factual recall) and subjective understanding (feelings of having understood) were assessed. The results weakly supported a claim of enhanced accuracy of understanding on one measure of objective understanding, and they suggested greater understanding and recall for visual PRS participants.     

The Role of Animacy in Children's Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English: Evidence From Sentence–Picture Matching and Eye Movements

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are typically processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs), but this difference is diminished by an inanimate head-noun in semantically non-reversible ORCs (“The book that the boy is reading”). In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the influence of animacy on online processing of semantically reversible SRCs and ORCs using lexically inanimate items that were perceptually animate due to motion (e.g., “Where is the tractor that the cow is chasing”). In Experiment 1, 48 children (aged 4;5–6;4) and 32 adults listened to sentences that varied in the lexical animacy of the NP1 head-noun (Animate/Inanimate) and relative clause (RC) type (SRC/ORC) with an animate NP2 while viewing two images depicting opposite actions. As expected, inanimate head-nouns facilitated the correct interpretation of ORCs in children; however, online data revealed children were more likely to anticipate an SRC as the RC unfolded when an inanimate head-noun was used, suggesting processing was sensitive to perceptual animacy. In Experiment 2, we repeated our design with inanimate (rather than animate) NP2s (e.g., “where is the tractor that the car is following”) to investigate whether our online findings were due to increased visual surprisal at an inanimate as agent, or to similarity-based interference. We again found greater anticipation for an SRC in the inanimate condition, supporting our surprisal hypothesis. Across the experiments, offline measures show that lexical animacy influenced children's interpretation of ORCs, whereas online measures reveal that as RCs unfolded, children were sensitive to the perceptual animacy of lexically inanimate NPs, which was not reflected in the offline data. Overall measures of syntactic comprehension, inhibitory control, and verbal short-term memory and working memory were not predictive of children's accuracy in RC interpretation, with the exception of a positive correlation with a standardized measure of syntactic comprehension in Experiment 1.     

Theology from many angles

This paper takes up the interplay between the “particularity” and “universality” of the Pauline letters, which was so influentially identified by Nils A. Dahl, and demonstrates that even after the canon had provided a implicitly universalizing hermeneutic for the corpus Paulinum, a late antique preacher such as John Chrysostom still felt the need to explain why the letters contain material of such an apparently situation-specific nature. Through a close reading of an untranslated homily on Romans 16:3 (“Greet Priscilla and Aquila”), we shall demonstrate how this rhetorically astute interpreter fashioned his homily precisely around this dynamic – in order to prove to his skeptical audience that it is in the particular that the universal is to be found.     

The naive perception of masculinity-femininity on the basis of expressive cues

Groups of naive judges rated 18 videotaped stimulus persons on masculinity, femininity, “dominance, assertiveness,” and “compassion, sensitivity to others.” Stimulus persons were broken down by sex and sex-typing—half were male, half female—and within sexes one third were classified as masculine, feminine, and androgynous on the basis of their scores on the Bem Sex Role Inventory. Two experiments are reported in which groups of judges rate stimulus persons on the basis of such different expressive information as videotaped pictures and recorded voices, videotaped pictures alone, videotaped bodies, videotaped heads, recorded voices, and still photos. The results showed: (1) Judges reliably rated masculinity-femininity from largely expressive cues: (2) judgments of masculinity-femininity were not predominantly determined by judgments of sex role-related traits: (3) the naive judgment of masculinity-femininity significantly corresponded to stimulus subjects' assessed sex roles; (4) stimulus subjects (particulary males) showed a consistent display of masculinity-femininity across expressive channels; and (5) judges used different expressive cues in judging masculinity-femininity in males and females. These results are related to broader questions concerning the relation between expressive behavior and personality.     

Psychometric Properties of the Wiggins and Winder Peer Nomination Inventory

The present study explored audience effects as a function of (a) age of performer and (b) role as model or performer. Five-, eight-, and 11–year-old children (N # 72 boys and girls) performed seven acquisition trials of the WISC Object Assembly item #3 (FACE) and seven trials of Object Assembly #4 (AUTO) alone or in the presence of a peer who was a confederate of the E. In the audience conditions, the performer was told in the model condition that the observer would learn by watching him perform, or in the neutral audience condition that the observer was simply waiting for the E to return. Compared to the alone condition, the neutral audience produced a negative audience effect in 11-year-olds but not in the five- and eight-year-olds. For all ages, the model group was consistently superior to the alone and neutral audience conditions. Implications for social-learning theories of development are discussed.     

Do Overgeneral Memories Make us feel better? An experimental examination

A critical assumption of the CaR-FA-X model, that overgeneral memory is partly attributable to the “functional avoidance” of specific details about one’s past experiences, has not been experimentally tested. Further, while it is assumed that the reinforcing properties of said avoidance leads to the emergence of an overgeneral recall style over time, this question has not been addressed developmentally. To explore these issues, two studies were conducted. In Study 1, 41 children and adolescents (M_age?=?12 years) were randomly assigned to recall overgeneral or specific negative memories on the Autobiographical Memory Test; participants later listened to their memories and provided pre- and post-tests of their emotional states at four time points: before and after memory generation and before and after memory exposure. In Study 2, 52 college-aged participants (M_age?=?19 years) completed the same protocol. Results indicated that children and adolescents in the overgeneral condition reported higher levels of positive affect relative to those in the specific condition, while recall condition did not impact adults’ emotional states. These findings were not explained by differences in emotion regulation strategies or psychopathological symptoms. Implications for developmental models of autobiographical memory and emotion regulation are discussed.