Level of Aspiration as a Method of Studying Personality: IV. The Analysis of Patterns of Response

Summary

It was hypothesized that Israeli Jews of Eastern descent would find absurd jokes less funny than would Israeli Jews of Western descent. Thirty-five respondents of each ethnic group reacted to five absurd and five nonabsurd jokes. As predicted, the former found abstract humor less funny that did the latter. Moreover, the respondents' educational level did not affect their reactions to the jokes. The element of incongruity was grasped by the Eastern Ss but they did not consider it funny. It is suggested that enjoyment of absurd humor represents a temporary release from rational thought. Since those of Eastern descent come from a culture where rational logic was less emphasized, they have less need for such a release and, therefore, find absurd humor less funny.     

Harm that does not hurt: Humour in coping with self-threat

We examined the affective and cognitive impact of humour on coping with self-threat. Research was based on an incongruity concept of humour that specifies humour as a state resulting from appraising an aversive incident as both harmful and as acceptable. An appraisal related procedural priming paradigm was used to induce humour. In Study 1 (N = 41 female students) the impact of humour on positive and negative affect following self-threat was examined. In Study 2 (N = 52 students; 94% women) we investigated the consequences of humour for a self-serving interpretation of failure, the awareness of harm, and subsequent performance. Relative to the control condition, humour increased positive affect, while not exclusively affecting negative affect, and increased the tendency for an external attribution of failure, while harm was clearly recognized. However, humour led to poorer subsequent performance, suggesting that humour may also have its costs.     

Sensation seeking and the enjoyment of structure and content of humour: Stability of findings across four samples

The role of sensation seeking in the realm of enjoyment of humour was investigated. It was hypothesized that the personality trait sensation seeking (SS) is able to predict both, the structure and content of jokes and cartoons. Seven hypotheses were derived and tested for four samples comprising a total of 448 Ss. The hypotheses were related to both components in appreciation of humour, funniness (representing the positive feelings induced by humour) and aversiveness (representing the negative feelings). Experience seeking (ES) and boredom susceptibility (BS) were predictive of low appreciation of humour in which the punchline is mildly surprising and the surprise can easily be overcome by resolving the incongruity (i.e. incongruity-resolution humour). Furthermore, ES and BS were predictive of funniness and (low) aversiveness of humour in which the punchline is largely unpredictable and the incongruity can only partly be resolved or not resolved at all (i.e. nonsense humour). Disinhibition (DIS) was correlated with funniness and (low) aversiveness of sex humour. These correlations were especially high when the sexual content was embedded in the nonsense structure and when DIS was related to an index representing the content of humour only. Sensation seekers yielded lower aversiveness ratings to nonsense and sex humour whereas low disinhibition appeared to represent the tendency to find all kinds of humour aversive.     

Frightfully funny: combining threat and humour in health messages for men and women

Objective: It is imperative for public health to investigate what factors may reduce defensive responses and increase the effectiveness of health information. The present research investigated gender differences in responses to threatening health-promoting information communicated with humour.

Design: Male and female participants were exposed to a health message stressing the negative consequences of binge drinking (Experiment 1; N = 209) or caffeine consumption (Experiment 2; N = 242), that did or did not contain a funny visual metaphor (Experiment 1) or a slapstick cartoon (Experiment 2).

Main Outcome Measures: Message evaluation, message attention, and attitudes and intentions towards the behaviour were measured.

Results: Results showed that health messages were more persuasive when communicated with humour, although humour played a different role for men and women. Whereas men responded more in line with message goals when the message combined high threat with humour, women preferred the low threat humour messages.

Conclusion: By uncovering the moderating role of gender as a key audience characteristic, this research contributes to designing effective future health campaigns and provides important insights for future studies investigating the underlying mechanisms responsible for the different effects of threat and humour appeals for men and women.     

Lift Up Your Hearts: Humour and Despair in Later Life

SUMMARY

According to Erikson, the homework of later life is integrity versus despair. The work of integrity is difficult, especially when faced with loss and grief, with the pain, suffering and anxiety that often accompany later life. However, it is also the case that humour accompanies the ageing process, and that elderly people laugh at all things associated with ageing right through to death. This paper explores the relationship between humour and despair in the task of integrity. It does so from the work of Kierkegaard, who argued that despair is a sign that we are spiritual beings. Humour comes from our responses to despair–either as giving in too easily and not attempting integrity at all, or as a willful defiance and denial of this task. Ageing humour is used to illustrate Kierkegaard's argument. Humour is then shown to function in various ways. It raises our sights when we too easily retreat into our perishing bodies. It earths us when we attempt to get too spiritual, and it gives us a glimpse of the larger framework of God's future out of which we are invited to live, and to “lift up our hearts.”     

Is children’s wellbeing different from adults’ wellbeing?

ABSTRACT

Call generalism about children’s and adults’ wellbeing the thesis that the same theory of wellbeing applies to both children and adults. Our goal is to examine whether generalism is true. While this question has not received much attention in the past, it has recently been suggested that generalism is likely to be false and that we need to elaborate different theories of children’s and adults’ wellbeing. In this paper, we defend generalism against the main objections it faces and make a positive case for it.     

内外向者幽默加工进程差异:ERP研究

本研究采用事件相关电位技术(ERP),探究幽默的加工进程及内外向者在加工进程中的差异。研究以笑话为实验材料,要求被试先浏览背景信息和妙句结尾,然后评估先后呈现的文字材料的关系。行为结果:内向者的反应时显著短于外向者。ERP结果:(1)幽默加工过程包括不一致探测阶段、不一致消解阶段和情绪加工阶段。(2)不一致无关的N400波幅显著大于一致不可笑;不一致无关的P600波幅显著小于不一致可笑和一致不可笑;800ms之后不一致可笑引发了比一致不可笑和不一致无关更大的正波幅。(3)内外向者在幽默加工进程上的差异主要体现在幽默加工阶段的早期。与内向者相比,外向者在幽默不一致探测阶段所用的认知资源较少,加工的自动化程度较高。     

Funny business in branching space-times: infinite modal correlations

The theory of branching space-times is designed as a rigorous framework for modelling indeterminism in a relativistically sound way. In that framework there is room for “funny business”, i.e., modal correlations such as occur through quantum-mechanical entanglement. This paper extends previous work by Belnap on notions of “funny business”. We provide two generalized definitions of “funny business”. Combinatorial funny business can be characterized as “absence of prima facie consistent scenarios”, while explanatory funny business characterizes situations in which no localized explanation of inconsistency can be given. These two definitions of funny business are proved to be equivalent, and we provide an example that shows them to be strictly more general than the previously available definitions of “funny business”.     

Comic Immoralism and Relatively Funny Jokes

A widely accepted view in the philosophy of humour is that immoral jokes, like racist, sexist or homophobic jokes, can nevertheless be funny. What remains controversial is whether the moral flaws in these jokes can sometimes increase their humour. Moderate comic immoralism claims that it is possible, in at least some cases, for moral flaws to increase the humour of jokes. Critics of moderate comic immoralism deny that this ever occurs. They recognise that some jokes are both funny and immoral, yet they claim that it is always something other than the moral flaws of jokes that contribute to their humour. In a series of recent papers, Aaron Smuts has pressed this objection to moderate comic immoralism. I argue that Smuts' attempt to narrow the range of cases in which humour can be attributed to immoral features is not sufficient to demonstrate that moderate comic immoralism is false. Specifically, I claim that Smuts cannot rule out a case for moderate comic immoralism grounded in the possibility that humour is normatively relative while the ethical status of jokes is not.     

Two Versions of the Conceptual Content of Experience

ABSTRACT

In ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’, McDowell revisits the main themes of Mind and World in order to make two important corrections: first, he does not longer believe that the content of perceptual experience is propositional in character; second, he does not believe now that the content of an experience needs to include everything the experience enables us to know non-inferentially. In this article, I take issue with both retractions. My thesis is that McDowell’s first version of perceptual content is preferable to the latest one.     

Humor-based online positive psychology interventions: A randomized placebo-controlled long-term trial

While correlational evidence exists that humor is positively associated with well-being, only few studies addressed causality. We tested the effects of five humor-based activities on happiness and depression in a placebo-controlled, self-administered online positive psychology intervention study (N = 632 adults). All of the five one-week interventions enhanced happiness, three for up to six months (i.e. three funny things, applying humor, and counting funny things), whereas there were only short-term effects on depression (all were effective directly after the intervention). Additionally, we tested the moderating role of indicators of a person × intervention-fit and identified early changes in well-being and preference (liking of the intervention) as the most potent indicators for changes six months after the intervention. Overall, we were able to replicate existing work, but also extend knowledge in the field by testing newly developed interventions for the first time. Findings are discussed with respect to the current literature.     

Compensating for Innovation: Extreme Product Incongruity Encourages Consumers to Affirm Unrelated Consumption Schemas

New products are often extremely incongruent with expectations. The inability to make sense of these products elevates anxiety and leads to negative evaluations. Although scholars have predominantly focused on combating the negative response to extreme incongruity, we propose that extreme incongruity may have implications that extend beyond the category. We base our predictions on the concept of fluid compensation, which suggests that when people struggle to make sense of something, they will nonconsciously reinforce highly accessible schemas in unrelated domains. Four studies confirm that extreme incongruity encourages fluid compensation, such that it elevates preference for dominant brands (study 1), green consumption (studies 2 and 4), and ethnocentric products (study 3). We isolate the causal role of anxiety using moderation tasks and biometric feedback. Furthermore, we demonstrate that compensation has an immediate dampening effect on arousal intensity. Thus, if consumers can compensate before explicitly evaluating an extremely incongruent product, their evaluations tend not to be negative. Taken together, we document that extreme innovations encourage compensation, and in compensating, consumers can become more receptive to extreme innovations.     

Verbal irony processing: How do contrast and humour correlate?

Verbal irony relies on contrast, that is, incongruity between the situational context and the ironic assertion. But is the degree of contrast related to the perceived humorousness of ironic comments? We answered this question by conducting two experiments. In the first experiment, participants were asked to read a list of sentence pairs (ironic or control) and judge the extent to which the meaning of the first sentence contrasted with that of the second. In the second experiment, participants were invited to rate the humorousness of ironic comments compared with their literal counterparts. Results showed that ironic remarks were rated as more contrasting and more humorous than their literal counterparts, but that humour only emerged from a moderate contrast.     

Mental Files,Blown Up by Indexed Files

Abstract

Our paper discusses Recanati’s application of the mental files apparatus to reports of beliefs and other attitudes. While mental files appear early on in Recanati’s work on belief-reports, his latest book introduces the concept of indexed files (a.k.a. vicarious files) and puts it to work to explain how we can report other people’s attitudes and to account for opacity phenomena. Our goal is twofold: we show that the approach in Recanati’s Mental Files (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) departs significantly from his earlier proposals as well as from the very spirit of truth-conditional pragmatics; and we argue that the indexed files approach, qua an attempt to provide a semantics for belief-reports, is untenable.     

Emotion recognition and emotional theory of mind in chronic fatigue syndrome

Background: Difficulties with social function have been reported in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), but underpinning factors are unknown. Emotion recognition, theory of mind (inference of another's mental state) and ‘emotional’ theory of mind (eToM) (inference of another's emotional state) are important social abilities, facilitating understanding of others. This study examined emotion recognition and eToM in CFS patients and their relationship to self-reported social function.

Methods: CFS patients (n?=?45) and healthy controls (HCs; n?=?50) completed tasks assessing emotion recognition, basic or advanced eToM (for self and other) and a self-report measure of social function.

Results: CFS participants were poorer than HCs at recognising emotion states in the faces of others and at inferring their own emotions. Lower scores on these tasks were associated with poorer self-reported daily and social function. CFS patients demonstrated good eToM and performance on these tasks did not relate to the level of social function.

Conclusions: CFS patients do not have poor eToM, nor does eToM appear to be associated with social functioning in CFS. However, this group of patients experience difficulties in emotion recognition and inferring emotions in themselves and this may impact upon social function.     

Credal imprecision and the value of evidence

This paper is about a tension between two theses. The first is Value of Evidence: roughly, the thesis that it is always rational for an agent to gather and use cost-free evidence for making decisions. The second is Rationality of Imprecision: the thesis that an agent can be rationally required to adopt doxastic states that are imprecise, i.e., not representable by a single credence function. While others have noticed this tension, I offer a new diagnosis of it. I show that it arises when an agent with an imprecise doxastic state engages in an unreflective inquiry, an inquiry where they revise their beliefs using an updating rule that doesn't satisfy a weak reflection principle. In such an unreflective inquiry, certain synchronic norms of instrumental rationality can make it instrumentally irrational for an agent to gather and use cost-free evidence. I then go on to propose a diachronic norm of instrumental rationality that preserves Value of Evidence in unreflective inquiries. This, I suggest, may help us reconcile this thesis with Rationality of Imprecision.     

The social functions of ingroup bias: Creating,confirming, or changing social reality

We describe our motivational analysis of ingroup bias. Central to our approach are two functions of ingroup bias: an identity function (the creation and expression of one's social identity) and an instrumental function (the facilitation of intergroup competition and social change). We present a research programme on the determinants of these two functions in which we have focused on socio-structural factors (group status and status stability), psychological factors (group identification and threat), and strategic considerations concerning the audience to which ingroup bias is communicated. In addition, we relate the different functions of ingroup bias to different forms of ingroup bias (symbolic versus material forms of ingroup bias; ingroup favouritism versus outgroup derogation). Our conclusions centre on the social and diverse nature of motivations underlying ingroup bias, and the integration of identity and instrumental perspectives on this phenomenon.