This book addresses the fact that Americans tend to live under a considerable amount of stress, tension, and anxiety, and suggests that humor can be helpful in alleviating their distress. It posits ...that humor is a useful placebo in this regard; cites studies that show that humor moderates life stress; considers the relationship of religion and humor, especially as means to alleviate anxiety; proposes that Jesus had a sense of humor; suggests that his parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard has humorous implications for the relief of occupational stress; explores the relationship of gossip and humor; and suggests that Jesus and his disciples were a joking community. It concludes that Jesus viewed the kingdom of God as a worry-free existence.
When people high in prejudice censor prejudice in one setting, they can experience a prejudice rebound effect-subsequently responding with more prejudice than otherwise. Disparagement humor fosters ...the release rather than suppression of prejudice. Thus, two experiments tested the hypothesis that exposure to disparagement humor attenuates rebound effects. Participants suppressed prejudice by writing fewer anti-gay thoughts about same-sex adoption (Experiment 1) or by reporting greater support for same-sex civil rights (Experiment 2) when expecting to share their responses with others (non-prejudice norm condition) but not if others first exchanged anti-gay jokes (prejudice norm condition). High-prejudice participants then exhibited prejudice rebound in the non-prejudice norm condition only. They rated a gay man more stereotypically (Experiment 1) and allocated greater budget cuts to a gay student organization (Experiment 2) in the non-prejudice norm condition.
The article investigates the manipulative potential of humor in business media discourse and its application in Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) teaching. Recognizing humor as a tool for ...simplifying complex ideas and engaging a broad audience, the study aims to identify the functional-stylistic means through which humor is conveyed in business media, focusing on its capacity to influence audience perceptions and attitudes. Employing continuous sampling along with descriptive, comparative, and discursive methods, the research analyzes utterances from Russian- and English-language business media to explore humors various functions such as persuasion, focus-setting, and entertainment and how these can be harnessed to facilitate linguistic manipulation. The findings reveal that humor, through rhetorical devices like metaphors, idioms, understatement, allusion, sarcasm, and oxymoron, plays a key role in making business concepts accessible and engaging. A starter pack of tools is identified for LSP education, equipping students to recognize and utilize humors manipulative power in professional contexts. This toolkit aims to prepare future business communicators to craft and recognize humorous statements. Implications for LSP educators, students, and business communication professionals are significant, advocating for an integrated approach in curricula that balances the creative and manipulative implementation of humor. This prepares students for global business communication, emphasizing humors strategic importance in effective leadership.
Technological advances have enabled firms to automate customer service by employing artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. Despite their many potential benefits, interactions with chatbots may still ...feel machine‐like and cold. The current study proposes the use of humour by chatbots as a gateway to humanizing them and thereby enhancing the customer experience. Across three experimental studies, the results reveal that (i) the use of humour enhances service satisfaction when it is used by a chatbot but not when it is used by a human agent, (ii) this chatbot humour effect is serially mediated by enhanced perceptions of anthropomorphism and interestingness of the interactions with the chatbot, and (iii) whilst both positively and negatively valenced chatbot humour may enhance the interestingness of the interactions, socially appropriate (i.e., affiliative) humour as opposed to inappropriate (i.e., aggressive) humour leads to enhanced service satisfaction. This study extends the understanding of the humanization processes of chatbots and provides guidelines for how firms should use chatbot humour to positively influence consumers' service satisfaction.
This paper intends to analyze the humorous manifestations in the podcast Medo e delírio em Brasília, using the theoretical and methodological assumptions of French Discourse Analysis. The aim is to ...observe whether the chaotic podcast aesthetic is an element of humor production. The results of the analyzes show that this aesthetic configuration generates unusual effects, and it is argued that these effects are primarily responsible for promoting humor in the program. Additionally, it is argued that chaotic aesthetics, unusual effects and humor may be associated with the abundant intertextuality that necessitates an exercise in recognizing the interlocutor while revealing the interdiscursive functioning, thereby situating the language manifestations of the program within the Brazilian political spectrum.
Este artigo pretende analisar as manifestações humorísticas do podcast Medo e delírio em Brasília, partindo dos pressupostos teóricos e metodológicos da Análise do Discurso francesa. O objetivo é observar se a estética caótica do podcast é um elemento da produção do humor. Os resultados das análises mostram que essa configuração estética gera efeitos insólitos e argumenta-se que são estes que promovem majoritariamente o humor no programa. Argumenta-se ainda que estética caótica, efeitos insólitos e humor podem ser associados à intertextualidade abundante que exige um exercício de reconhecimento do interlocutor ao mesmo tempo que revela o funcionamento interdiscursivo posicionando as manifestações linguageiras do programa no espectro político brasileiro.
Este artículo pretende analizar las manifestaciones humorísticas del podcast Medo e delírio em Brasília, utilizando los fundamentos teóricos y metodológicos del Análisis del Discurso Francés. El propósito es observar si la estética caótica del podcast es un elemento de producción de humor. Los resultados de los análisis muestran que esta configuración estética genera efectos insólitos y se argumenta que son estos los que principalmente promueven el humor en el programa. Además, se sostiene que la estética caótica, los efectos insólitos y el humor pueden estar asociados a la abundante intertextualidad que exige un ejercicio de reconocimiento del interlocutor revelando el funcionamiento interdiscursivo, posicionando las manifestaciones del lenguaje del programa en el espectro político brasileño.
Introdução: O Bicycle Motocross (BMX) é um esporte que pode sofrer influência de diversas variáveis, dentre elas o estado de humor dos atletas. Objetivo: Verificar o estado de humor de atletas da ...Seleção Brasileira de BMX no Campeonato Brasileiro e no Campeonato Mundial de BMX. Materiais e Métodos: A amostra compreendeu 8 atletas masculinos da categoria elite, com média de idade de 19,3 ±2,3 anos. O instrumento utilizado para verificar o estado de humor dos atletas foi o BRUMS. Os dados foram submetidos ao teste de normalidade Shapiro Wilk e de acordo com a distribuição estes foram comparados através do teste t de Student, com nível de significância de p≤0,05. Para a análise estatística utilizou-se o pacote estatístico Graphic Prism 6.0. Resultados: Os resultados mostraram que foram encontradas diferenças significativas apenas na variável fadiga durante o Campeonato Brasileiro de BMX e o Campeonato Mundial de BMX (p˂0,05). Conclusão: Podemos concluir que o volume de treinamento parece mediar mudanças na percepção psicológica de fadiga, de atletas de alto rendimento, no Campeonato Brasileiro e Campeonato Mundial de BMX.
We compared the metabolomic profile of aqueous humor from patients with primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG; n = 26) with that of a group of age- and sex-matched non-POAG controls (n = 26), all ...participants undergoing cataract surgery. Supervised paired partial least-squares discriminant analysis showed good predictive performance for test sets with a median area under the receiver operating characteristic of 0.89 and a p-value of 0.0087. Twenty-three metabolites allowed discrimination between the two groups. Univariate analysis after the Benjamini–Hochberg correction showed significant differences for 13 of these metabolites. The POAG metabolomic signature indicated reduced concentrations of taurine and spermine and increased concentrations of creatinine, carnitine, three short-chain acylcarnitines, 7 amino acids (glutamine, glycine, alanine, leucine, isoleucine, hydroxyl-proline, and acetyl-ornithine), 7 phosphatidylcholines, one lysophosphatidylcholine, and one sphingomyelin. This suggests an alteration of metabolites involved in osmoprotection (taurine and creatinine), neuroprotection (spermine, taurine, and carnitine), amino acid metabolism (7 amino acids and three acylcarnitines), and the remodeling of cell membranes drained by the aqueous humor (hydroxyproline and phospholipids). Five of these metabolic alterations, already reported in POAG plasma, concern spermine, C3 and C4 acylcarnitines, PC aa 34:2, and PC aa 36:4, thus highlighting their importance in the pathogenesis of glaucoma.
How does the relation between two words create humor? In this article, we investigated the effect of global and local contrast on the humor of word pairs. We capitalized on the existence of ...psycholinguistic lexical norms by examining violations of expectations set up by typical patterns of English usage (global contrast) and within the local context of the words within the word pairs (local contrast). Global contrast was operationalized as lexical-semantic norms for single-words and local contrast was operationalized as the orthographic, phonological, and semantic distance between the two words in the pair. Through crowdsourced (Study 1) and best-worst (Study 2) ratings of the humor of a large set of word pairs (i.e., compounds), we find evidence of both global and local contrast on compound-word humor. Specifically, we find that humor arises when there is a violation of expectations at the local level, between the individual words that make up the word pair, even after accounting for violations at the global level relative to the entire language. Semantic variables (arousal, dominance, and concreteness) were stronger predictors of word pair humor whereas form-related variables (number of letters, phonemes, and letter frequency) were stronger predictors of single-word humor. Moreover, we also find that semantic dissimilarity increases humor, by defusing the impact of low-valence words-making them seem more amusing-and by enhancing the incongruence of highly imageable pairs of concrete words.
Premda se Antu Starčevića prvenstveno spominje i označava kao političara, zastupnika u Saboru i vođu Stranke prava, nesporna je činjenica da spomenute odrednice oslikavaju samo jedan dio njegove ...djelatnosti i samo jedan dio njegove slojevite osobnosti. U tom smislu je Starčević prepoznat i kao jezikoslovac i kao filozof i kao književnik. U ovom se radu naglasak želi staviti upravo na Starčevića kao književnika, poglavito satiričko-poučnoga usmjerenja, čiji je doprinos hrvatskoj književnosti razmjerno kasno prepoznat. Zbog toga se najprije daje povijesni pregled razvoja svijesti o Starčeviću kao književniku i satiričaru u publicistici i povijestima hrvatske književnosti. Nakon kratkoga pregleda tog razvoja, opisuju se Starčevićeve pamfletske strategije, stilska izražajna sredstva i tehnike kojima se služio u postizanju satirične, suvremenom čitatelju podredno i komične, intonacije svojih književnih djela. U zaključku se pokušava odrediti važnost koju Starčević ima za hrvatsku književnost.
Although Ante Starčević is primarily labelled as a politician, member of Parliament, andthe leader of the Party of Rights, it is an indisputable fact that the mentioneddeterminants reflect only one segment of his activities and only one aspect of his layered personality. Bearing that in mind, Starčević is also recognized as a linguist, a philosopher, and a writer. This essay puts emphasis on Starčević as a writer, especially as one of a satirical-educational orientation, whose contribution to the Croatian literature has been recognized relatively late. First, a short historical overview of the development of awareness of Starčević as a writer and a satirist in journalism and the history of Croatian literature is given. After a brief overview of this development, the author analyses the pamphlet strategies and satirical techniques Starčević employed to achieve a satirical intonation in his literary works. In the conclusion the author makes an attempt to determine the place that Starčević should occupy in Croatian literature.
Glaucoma is still a poorly understood disease with a clear need for new biomarkers to help in diagnosis and potentially offer new therapeutic targets. We aimed to determine if the metabolic profile ...of aqueous humor (AH) as determined by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy allows the distinction between primary open-angle glaucoma patients and control subjects, and to distinguish between high-tension (POAG) and normal-tension glaucoma (NTG). We analysed the AH of patients with POAG, NTG and control subjects (n = 30/group). 1H NMR spectra were acquired using a 400 MHz spectrometer. Principle component analysis (PCA), machine learning algorithms and descriptive statistics were applied to analyse the metabolic variance between groups, identify the spectral regions, and hereby potential metabolites that can act as biomarkers for glaucoma. According to PCA, fourteen regions of the NMR spectra were significant in explaining the metabolic variance between the glaucoma and control groups, with no differences found between POAG and NTG groups. These regions were further used in building a classifier for separating glaucoma from control patients, which achieved an AUC of 0.93. Peak integration was performed on these regions and a statistical analysis, after false discovery rate correction and adjustment for the different perioperative topical drug regimen, revealed that five of them were significantly different between groups. The glaucoma group showed a higher content in regions typical for betaine and taurine, possibly linked to neuroprotective mechanisms, and also a higher content in regions that are typical for glutamate, which can indicate damaged neurons and oxidative stress. These results show how aqueous humor metabolomics based on NMR spectroscopy can distinguish glaucoma patients from controls with a high accuracy. Further studies are needed to validate these results in order to incorporate them in clinical practice.
•Aqueous humor metabolomics achieved AUC 0.93 between glaucoma patients and controls.•Aqueous humor shows neural protection and damage happen simultaneously in glaucoma.•Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy distinguishes glaucoma patients and controls.
