This article approaches the question of mocking compliments and ironic praise from an interactional gender perspective. A statement such as “You're a real genius!” could easily be interpreted as a literal compliment, as playful humor or as an offensive insult. We investigate this thin line in the use of irony among adult men and women. The research introduces an interactional approach to irony, through the lens of gender stereotype bias. The main question concerns the impact of individual differences and gender effect on the perception and production of ironic comments. Irony Processing Task (IPT), developed by Milanowicz (2016), was applied in order to study the production and perception of ironic criticism and ironic praise in adult males and females. It is a rare case of a study measuring the ability to create irony because, unlike most of known irony research, it is not a multiple choice test where participants are given the response options. The IPT was also used to assess the asymmetry of affect (humor vs. malice) and impact of gender effect in the perception of ironic comments. Results are analyzed in relation to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) scores. The findings reveal the interactional relationship between gender and response to irony. Male responses were consistently more ironic than female's, across all experimental conditions, and female responses varied more. Both, men and women used more irony in response to male ironic criticism but female ironic praise. Anxiety proved to be a moderate predictor of irony comprehension and willingness to use irony. Data, collected in control and two gender stereotype activation conditions, also corroborates the assumption that the detection of compliments and the detection of criticism can be moderated by the attitude activation effect. The results are interpreted within the framework of linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) and natural selection strategies.

The aim of this study was to see if and how the intensity of depression correlates with the cognitive representation of notions, and if any influence is reversed during remission. The cognitive representation indices used were the valence and number of metaphors produced for a notion. Three adult groups took part: persons with depression (), persons in remission (), and a control group (). Five notions were considered: PAST, FUTURE, JOY, SADNESS, and HAPPINESS. The Questionnaire of the Metaphorical Conceptualization of a Notion was used. The results showed that (a) depressive subjects did not have problems with metaphorical processing, (b) depressive subjects demonstrated strong interpretational negativism, (c) subjects during remission did not present distorted conceptual processing. The results are discussed in the context of theories of automatic metaphor processing, and conceptions of cognitive depressive distortions, in tasks requiring effort and substantial involvement of cognitive resources.

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A review of the current literature shows that by the age of two and a half (and probably earlier), children have already acquired a rich working knowledge of human intentionality and goal-directed action (Stein & Albro 1997: 7; Mandler 1998). The paper focuses on the ways in which children use this knowledge to tell stories from pictures. The story is the description of the actions performed by animate actors. We distinguish the main actors (protagonists in the narrative line) and the background actors (participants in the narrative field) who can observe and interpret what is going on in the main action. So the narrative text contains not only the action presented by the story-teller (landscape of action) but also how this action is interpreted by the story characters (landscape of consciousness). They are all thinking minds who can think similarly or differently about the plot. And the narrator uses characters’ minds to produce different representations of the story (Bokus 1998, 2000). The narrator can confront one interpretation with another, and a) makes choices of the “true” representation of the main action (in doing this the child plays the role of the omniscient and omnipresent story-teller who is directly in touch with the ontology of the story), or b) presents a possible but not a certain story reality (the listener is not told how things are but rather how they seem to be). Therefore we can speak about the interplay of the narrator’s mind and the minds of story characters in a kind of internal narrator’s dialogue. The storyteller creates different minds and alternative ways of interpreting the main action. Also shown are examples of such inter-mind phenomena in the stories told by preschool children.

Using the Semantic Distance Task, we investigated the semantic distances between ME and five metaphorically conceptualized notions: PAST, FUTURE, JOY, SADNESS, and HAPPINESS. Three Polish-speaking groups participated in the study: depressive subjects (), patients in remission (), and non-depressed individuals (). T-test and the Kruskal–Wallis nonparametric equivalent of ANOVA analyses showed that subjects in remission placed ME significantly farther away from PAST than non-depressed individuals and depressed patients. Data mining algorithms indicated the distances ME–SADNESS, ME–PAST, and ME–FUTURE as the three strongest predictors of group membership. We interpret the findings in the light of a contrast effect and defense mechanisms. We propose that intergroup differences are especially prominent in tasks requiring creation of semantic associative relations, that is, in the first stage of conceptual processing. We suggest treating the results as confirmation that Beck’s theory of depression applies at the level of notion comprehension, proving that processing of key concepts in depression symptoms (particularly PAST) runs differently in all three groups under consideration.