American Muslims stand up and speak out: trajectories of humor in Muslim American stand-up comedy

Muslim American stand-up comedy is a unique response to post-9/11 negative social discrimination where socially critical comedians debate the stereotypes and realities of Muslim American life. Thus they continue an American minority tradition of engaging with American social life through public humor. The analysis draws from functionalist theories of the sociology of humor in order to discern the intended social messages of jokes that are meant to entertain and also educate. It shows how Muslim American comedy intends to influence opinions held not only about Muslims but also amongst Muslims. The paper suggests how competing forces related to being Muslim and American undercut the critical public humor of comedians who use these performances to argue what American Muslims should be saying and doing in order to advance their cause for social justice.     

Impact of depression on response to comedy: a dynamic facial coding analysis

Individuals suffering from depression show diminished facial responses to positive stimuli. Recent cognitive research suggests that depressed individuals may appraise emotional stimuli differently than do nondepressed persons. Prior studies do not indicate whether depressed individuals respond differently when they encounter positive stimuli that are difficult to avoid. The authors investigated dynamic responses of individuals varying in both history of major depressive disorder (MDD) and current depressive symptomatology (N = 116) to robust positive stimuli. The Facial Action Coding System (Ekman & Friesen, 1978) was used to measure affect-related responses to a comedy clip. Participants reporting current depressive symptomatology were more likely to evince affect-related shifts in expression following the clip than were those without current symptomatology. This effect of current symptomatology emerged even when the contrast focused only on individuals with a history of MDD. Specifically, persons with current depressive symptomatology were more likely than those without current symptomatology to control their initial smiles with negative affect-related expressions. These findings suggest that integration of emotion science and social cognition may yield important advances for understanding depression.     

The question shapes the answer: the neural correlates of task differences reveal dynamic semantic processing

Task effects in semantic processing were investigated by contrasting the neural activation associated with two semantic categorization tasks (SCT) using event-related fMRI. The two SCTs involved different decision categories: is it an animal? vs. is it a concrete thing? Participants completed both tasks and, across participants, the same core set of items were presented in both tasks. Results showed task differences in the neural activation associated with these items: in the animal SCT there was greater activation in a number of frontal and temporal regions, including left superior and middle temporal gyri, while in the concrete SCT there was greater activation in left medial frontal gyrus and bilaterally in the precentral gyri. These results are interpreted as evidence of top-down modulation of semantic processing; participants make adjustments to optimize performance in a given task and these adjustments have consequences for the activation observed.     

Right hemisphere has the last laugh: neural dynamics of joke appreciation

Understanding a joke relies on semantic, mnemonic, inferential, and emotional contributions from multiple brain areas. Anatomically constrained magnetoencephalography (aMEG) combining high-density whole-head MEG with anatomical magnetic resonance imaging allowed us to estimate where the humor-specific brain activations occur and to understand their temporal sequence. Punch lines provided either funny, not funny (semantically congruent), or nonsensical (incongruent) replies to joke questions. Healthy subjects rated them as being funny or not funny. As expected, incongruous endings evoke the largest N400m in left-dominant temporo-prefrontal areas, due to integration difficulty. In contrast, funny punch lines evoke the smallest N400m during this initial lexical–semantic stage, consistent with their primed “surface congruity” with the setup question. In line with its sensitivity to ambiguity, the anteromedial prefrontal cortex may contribute to the subsequent “second take” processing, which, for jokes, presumably reflects detection of a clever “twist” contained in the funny punch lines. Joke-selective activity simultaneously emerges in the right prefrontal cortex, which may lead an extended bilateral temporo-frontal network in establishing the distant unexpected creative coherence between the punch line and the setup. This progression from an initially promising but misleading integration from left frontotemporal associations, to medial prefrontal ambiguity evaluation and right prefrontal reprocessing, may reflect the essential tension and resolution underlying humor.     

The awareness of thirst: proposed neural correlates

The neural and endocrine bases of the generation of thirst are reviewed. Based on this review, a hierarchical system of neural structures that regulate water conservation and acquisition is proposed. The system includes primary sensory-receptive areas; secondary sensory structures (circumventricular organs), which detect levels of hormones, including angiotensin II and vasopressin, which are involved in generating thirst; preoptic and hypothalamic structures; and an area within the ventrolateral quadrant of the periaqueductal gray matter. Hodological and other data are used to determine the hierarchical organization of the system. Based on studies of the effects of lesions to various structures within the hierarchy of the system, it is proposed that the awareness of thirst in rodents is either entirely or predominantly due to neuronal activities in a subsection of the ventrolateral periaqueductal gray matter. It is also hypothesized that the awareness of thirst in primates is due to neuronal activities in both the ventrolateral periaqueductal gray and in a region within the medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex.     

The neural correlates of visual self-recognition

This paper presents a review of studies that were aimed at determining which brain regions are recruited during visual self-recognition, with a particular focus on self-face recognition. A complex bilateral network, involving frontal, parietal and occipital areas, appears to be associated with self-face recognition, with a particularly high implication of the right hemisphere. Results indicate that it remains difficult to determine which specific cognitive operation is reflected by each recruited brain area, in part due to the variability of used control stimuli and experimental tasks. A synthesis of the interpretations provided by previous studies is presented. The relevance of using self-recognition as an indicator of self-awareness is discussed. We argue that a major aim of future research in the field should be to identify more clearly the cognitive operations induced by the perception of the self-face, and search for dissociations between neural correlates and cognitive components.     

The neural correlates of alcohol-related aggression

Alcohol intoxication is implicated in approximately half of all violent crimes. Over the past several decades, numerous theories have been proposed to account for the influence of alcohol on aggression. Nearly all of these theories imply that altered functioning in the prefrontal cortex is a proximal cause. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, 50 healthy young men consumed either a low dose of alcohol or a placebo and completed an aggression paradigm against provocative and nonprovocative opponents. Provocation did not affect neural responses. However, relative to sober participants, during acts of aggression, intoxicated participants showed decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex, caudate, and ventral striatum, but heightened activation in the hippocampus. Among intoxicated participants, but not among sober participants, aggressive behavior was positively correlated with activation in the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These results support theories that posit a role for prefrontal cortical dysfunction as an important factor in intoxicated aggression.     

The neural correlates of conscious experience: an experimental framework

Demonstrating that neural activity ‘represents’ physical properties of the world such as the orientation of a line in the receptive field of a nerve cell is a standard procedure in neuroscience. However, not all such neural activity will be associated with the mental representations that form the contents of consciousness. In some cases, such as when patients with blindsight correctly ‘guess’ the location of a stimulus, neural activity is associated with physical stimulation and with appropriate behaviour, but not with awareness. To identify the neural correlates of conscious experience we need to identify patterns of neural activity that are specifically associated with awareness. Experiments aimed at making such identifications require that subjects report some aspect of their conscious experience either verbally or through some pre-arranged non-verbal report while neural activity is measured. If there is some characteristic neural signature of consciousness, then this should be distinguishable from the kinds of neural activity associated with stimulation and/or behaviour in the absence of awareness. It remains to be seen whether the neural signature of consciousness relates to the location of the neural activity, the temporal properties of the neural activity or the form of the interaction between activity in different brain regions.     

Making a life worth living: neural correlates of well-being

Despite the vast literature that has implicated asymmetric activation of the prefrontal cortex in approach-withdrawal motivation and emotion, no published reports have directly explored the neural correlates of well-being. Eighty-four right-handed adults (ages 57-60) completed self-report measures of eudaimonic well-being, hedonic well-being, and positive affect prior to resting electroencephalography. As hypothesized, greater left than right superior frontal activation was associated with higher levels of both forms of well-being. Hemisphere-specific analyses documented the importance of goal-directed approach tendencies beyond those captured by approach-related positive affect for eudaimonic but not for hedonic well-being. Appropriately engaging sources of appetitive motivation, characteristic of higher left than right baseline levels of prefrontal activation, may encourage the experience of well-being.     

The integration of social influence and reward: Computational approaches and neural evidence

Decades of research have established that decision-making is dramatically impacted by both the rewards an individual receives and the behavior of others. How do these distinct influences exert their influence on an individual’s actions, and can the resulting behavior be effectively captured in a computational model? To address this question, we employed a novel spatial foraging game in which groups of three participants sought to find the most rewarding location in an unfamiliar two-dimensional space. As the game transitioned from one block to the next, the availability of information regarding other group members was varied systematically, revealing the relative impacts of feedback from the environment and information from other group members on individual decision-making. Both reward-based and socially-based sources of information exerted a significant influence on behavior, and a computational model incorporating these effects was able to recapitulate several key trends in the behavioral data. In addition, our findings suggest how these sources were processed and combined during decision-making. Analysis of reaction time, location of gaze, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data indicated that these distinct sources of information were integrated simultaneously for each decision, rather than exerting their influence in a separate, all-or-none fashion across separate subsets of trials. These findings add to our understanding of how the separate influences of reward from the environment and information derived from other social agents are combined to produce decisions.     

The neural correlates of everyday recognition memory

We used a novel automatic camera, SenseCam, to create a recognition memory test for real-life events. Adapting a 'Remember/Know' paradigm, we asked healthy undergraduates, who wore SenseCam for 2 days, in their everyday environments, to classify images as strongly or weakly remembered, strongly or weakly familiar or novel, while brain activation was recorded with functional MRI. Overlapping, widely distributed sets of brain regions were activated by recollected and familiar stimuli. Within the medial temporal lobes, 'Remember' responses specifically elicited greater activity in the right anterior and posterior parahippocampal gyrus than 'Know' responses. 'New' responses activated anterior parahippocampal regions. A parametric analysis, across correctly recognised items, revealed increasing activation in the right hippocampus and posterior parahippocampal gyrus (pPHG). This may reflect modulation of these regions by the degree of recollection or, alternatively, by increasing memory strength. Strong recollection elicited greater activity in the left posterior hippocampus/pPHG than weak recollection indicating that this region is specifically modulated by the degree of recollection.     

The cognitive and neural correlates of "tactile consciousness": a multisensory perspective

People's awareness of tactile stimuli has been investigated in far less detail than their awareness of stimuli in other sensory modalities. In an attempt to fill this gap, we provide an overview of studies that are pertinent to the topic of tactile consciousness. We discuss the results of research that has investigated phenomena such as "change blindness", phantom limb sensations, and numerosity judgments in tactile perception, together with the results obtained from the study of patients affected by deficits that can adversely affect tactile perception such as neglect, extinction, and numbsense. The similarities as well as some of the important differences that have emerged when visual and tactile conscious information processing have been compared using similar experimental procedures are highlighted. We suggest that conscious information processing in the tactile modality cannot be separated completely from the more general processing of spatial information in the brain. Finally, the importance of considering tactile consciousness within the larger framework of multisensory information processing is also discussed.     

Neural correlates of viewing paintings: Evidence from a quantitative meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging data

Many studies involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have exposed participants to paintings under varying task demands. To isolate neural systems that are activated reliably across fMRI studies in response to viewing paintings regardless of variation in task demands, a quantitative meta-analysis of fifteen experiments using the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method was conducted. As predicted, viewing paintings was correlated with activation in a distributed system including the occipital lobes, temporal lobe structures in the ventral stream involved in object (fusiform gyrus) and scene (parahippocampal gyrus) perception, and the anterior insula—a key structure in experience of emotion. In addition, we also observed activation in the posterior cingulate cortex bilaterally—part of the brain’s default network. These results suggest that viewing paintings engages not only systems involved in visual representation and object recognition, but also structures underlying emotions and internalized cognitions.     

The neural correlates of statistical learning in a word segmentation task: An fMRI study

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to assess neural activation as participants learned to segment continuous streams of speech containing syllable sequences varying in their transitional probabilities. Speech streams were presented in four runs, each followed by a behavioral test to measure the extent of learning over time. Behavioral performance indicated that participants could discriminate statistically coherent sequences (words) from less coherent sequences (partwords). Individual rates of learning, defined as the difference in ratings for words and partwords, were used as predictors of neural activation to ask which brain areas showed activity associated with these measures. Results showed significant activity in the pars opercularis and pars triangularis regions of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). The relationship between these findings and prior work on the neural basis of statistical learning is discussed, and parallels to the frontal/subcortical network involved in other forms of implicit sequence learning are considered.     

The capacity to tell a joke: Reflections from work with Asperger children

The capacity to tell a joke is a highly complex interpersonal event that depends upon the maturation of certain developmental achievements which are absent or stunted in children with Asperger's Syndrome. These include the ability to know another's mind, a sense of interpersonal timing and, most notably, a capacity for abstract thinking. The author discusses Freud's ( 1905 ) notion of joke‐work, which is akin to dream‐work, both of which are pathways to forming mental representations. Freud considered joke‐work as a mental activity that operated on the verbal level and the author examines the preverbal dimensions that are rooted in the earliest mother/infant interactions. An extended case discussion of the psychoanalytic treatment of an Asperger boy is offered to illustrate these points and to demonstrate the activity of joke‐work as a means of building mental representations.     

Views of a good life and allostatic load: Physiological correlates of theories of a good life depend on the socioeconomic context

This research examines the relationship between one’s theory of a good life and allostatic load, a marker of cumulative biological risk, and how this relationship differs by socioeconomic status. Among adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher, those who saw individual characteristics (e.g. personal happiness, effort) as part of a good life had lower levels of allostatic load than those who did not. In contrast, among adults with less than a bachelor’s degree, those who saw supportive relationships as part of a good life had lower levels of allostatic load than those who did not. These findings extend past research on socioeconomic differences in the emphasis on individual or relational factors and suggest that one’s theory of a good life has health implications.