Paul McGhee and humor research Goldstein, Jeffrey; Ruch, Willibald
Humor (Berlin, Germany),
05/2018, Letnik:
31, Številka:
2
Journal Article
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Humor research has developed along a trajectory, and branched out in many directions, that were foreseen and stimulated by Paul McGhee. From his initial interest in children’s humor and cognitive ...development as a graduate student at Ohio State University to his work applying humor in myriad settings, McGhee has broadened our understanding of humor and expanded its horizons. As early as the 1970s, Paul expressed interest in the neuropsychology of humor and laughter and in the evolution of humor in nonhuman primates. The development and validation of the Sense of Humor Scale is an integral part of the 7 Humor Habits Program used effectively to train humor skills. McGhee played an early role in advocating humor and laughter as a learnable tool in the promotion of health and well-being, and in the training of health-care personnel. His work has been recognized through various Lifetime Achievements awards and other honors.
•This study tested the two-step model of humor comprehension via EEG measures.•The incongruity detection step affects the Left Anterior Negativity and not the N400.•The resolution step involves the ...late LAN and the P600 extending in a later phase.•The later stage affects the LPC and possibly reflects more elaborative inferences.•Participant-based and item-based differences were observed in early LAN and P600.
We studied the electrophysiological correlates of verbal humor comprehension by comparing Event Related Potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency representations recorded while 50 participants read humorous and non-humorous passages. Using linear mixed models on single trials we showed that humorous target words elicited a larger Left Anterior Negativity (LAN), sustained in time and followed by a positive shift involving P600 and Late Positive Complex (LPC) components. In the time-frequency domain, humor was associated with a power decrease in the beta-band of the EEG. Furthermore, participants’ Autism-spectrum Quotient correlated with the size of the LAN, suggesting that social skills may affect humor comprehension during the early processing phase. Our results describe a sequence of events where incongruity detection (associated with the LAN) precedes a composite set of mechanisms serving resolution and acting in parallel: the sustained LAN might reflect the search for an alternative script, while the P600 might index inferential processes arriving at the resolution and the updating of the discourse model. The processing differences associated with the LPC and the changes in beta power may reflect a later stage of more elaborative and reflective processing (where the receiver reflects upon the joke’s solution) and the abandonment of the current discourse model.
Since the beginning of the COVID‐19 pandemic, there have been widespread conversations about the origins of the virus and who to blame for it. This article focuses on the online hate directed at ...Chinese and Asian people during the pandemic. Taking a critical discursive psychological approach, we analysed seven online threads related to COVID‐19 and China from two Finnish websites (Suomi24 and Ylilauta) and one US (8kun) site. We identified three discursive trends associated with dehumanising Chinese populations: ‘monstrous Chinese’, ‘immoral Chinese’ and ‘China as a threat’, which created different forms of dehumanisation on a continuum from harsher dehumanisation to milder depersonalisation. The animalistic metaphors, coarse language, humorous frames and conspiracy beliefs worked to rhetorically justify the dehumanisation of Chinese individuals, making it more acceptable to portray them as a homogeneous and inhumane mass of people that deserves to be attacked. This study contributes to the field of discursive research on dehumanisation by deepening our knowledge of the specific features of Sinophobic hate speech.
The influence of leader humor on employee innovative behavior has been attracting increasingly more attention from various scholars and enterprises. Based on previous relevant literatures in the ...fields of humor, leadership, and innovation, this study proposes and verifies a model to examine the internal mechanism and boundary condition of the relationship between leader humor, work engagement, supervisor's organizational embodiment, and employee innovative behavior. Specifically, this study introduces work engagement as a mediator in the relationship between leader humor and employee innovative behavior, and supervisor's organizational embodiment as a moderator in the relationship between leader humor and work engagement. Then, this study conducts two separate questionnaire surveys on Chinese employees and their direct supervisors at two different times to collect the sample data. In total, 383 supervisor-subordinate dyads were collected. The results suggest that leader humor can promote employee innovative behavior. Work engagement can partly mediate the influence of leader humor on employee innovative behavior. Supervisor's organizational embodiment of employee can positively moderate the influence of leader humor on work engagement, which in turn ultimately should account for positive increases of employee innovative behavior. The conclusions from the analyses above not only further verify and develop some previous points on leader humor and employee innovation but also derive certain management implications for promoting employee innovative behavior from the perspective of leader humor.
American Humor Dudden, Arthur Power
1987, 1987-07-02
eBook
Among the questions posed by this collection of essays are: What are the characteristics of American humor? How have they evolved and expressed themselves? What elements are distinctively or uniquely ...American?
Across a wide range of issues and a variety of sources, scientific information often gets lost in translation, failing to properly inform, educate, and engage publics in a meaningful way. But science ...communication is like a wine—it is better when it is outside the box. One promising tactic for more effective scientific communication is the use of humor to both engage and educate less interested and knowledgeable citizens on important topics. Here, we investigate whether the identity of a speaker influences perceptions of their effectiveness at connecting with and engaging public audiences. We conducted a 2 (Gender: Female vs. Male) × 2 (Race: Black Speaker vs. White Speaker) × 2 (Credentials: Scientist vs. Comedian) between-subjects experiment and found that race and gender of the source, relative to their credentials, were not significant factors for predicting the perceptions of communicator effectiveness. We also found that experienced humor, or mirth, moderated the relationship between the speaker’s credentials and perceived effectiveness. We discuss the implications of our findings for science communication research and practice.
This paper contributes to the literature on geographies of masculinities by examining how young men's (aged 12-18) performances of masculinity through humour was mutually constitutive of and ...constituted by the spaces of the Fusion and Retro youth cafés in the city and suburbs of Cork in the south of Ireland. Research on open access youth provision such as youth clubs, centres and youth cafés have found that they can afford young people the opportunity to 'be themselves', reflecting the ideals of safety and inclusivity that are meant to be sustained in these spaces. Using ethnographic observations, this paper shows that such ideals are never a given as the inequality embedded in gendered performances mean the spaces must be continually (re)produced as inclusive. It contributes to an understanding of youth cafés as micropolitical spaces of becoming that shape and are shaped by negotiations over meanings of gender and masculinity in particular. Furthermore, it advances two new concepts - 'humorous improprieties' and 'humour bombing' - to the performative geographies literature, highlighting two nuanced ways in which young men construct themselves as men in relation to space.
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