Studies of mood and humor appreciation

Wicker, Frank W.; Thorelli, Irene M.; Barron, William L.; Willis, Amy C.

doi:10.1007/bf00993661

Cited by 13 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Mood likely affects one's tendency to laugh (reviewed in Deckers, 1998). Cheerfulness seems to facilitate humor (Ruch and Carrell, 1998) and funniness of jokes tends to correlate with self-rated moods of surgency, elation and vigor (Wicker, Thorelli, Barron, and Willis, 1981). Mood affects laughter possibly through the calculation of SIU.…”

Section: The Inner Eye Theory Of Laughtermentioning

confidence: 99%

The Inner Eye Theory of Laughter: Mindreader Signals Cooperator Value

Jung

2003

Evol Psychol

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In this hypothesis paper, I propose a three-component set of jointly necessary and sufficient trigger criteria for all cases of involuntary laughter. The theory incorporates concepts from the theory of mind in cognitive science. I then examine the information content of the laughter signal from a game theoretic perspective. I conclude that laughter is a signal of cooperator value as it provides information on the laugher's empathy with the attributed mental states and her sympathy levels for all affected by the laugh-inducing situation. Laughter also indicates what types of mental representations children, autistic people, nonhuman primates and adults possess and can falsify.

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Section: The Inner Eye Theory Of Laughtermentioning

confidence: 99%

The Inner Eye Theory of Laughter: Mindreader Signals Cooperator Value

Jung

2003

Evol Psychol

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“…Much of the theory and empirical work briefly outlined above focuses on complete multi-word jokes, such as this zinger by Steven Wright: “I couldn’t repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.” To this end, a number of studies have taken to rating and creating databases of jokes in an effort to allow researchers disaggregate the various mechanisms that make them work (e.g., Goldberg, Roeder, Gupta, & Perkins, 2001 ; Wicker, Thorelli, Barron III, & Willis, 1981 ). A few studies have looked at single non-words (Westbury, Shaoul, Moroschan, & Ramscar, 2016 ), suggesting the absurdness of a non-word results in associated humor.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humor norms for 4,997 English words

Engelthaler

Hills

2017

Behav Res

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Humor ratings are provided for 4,997 English words collected from 821 participants using an online crowd-sourcing platform. Each participant rated 211 words on a scale from 1 (humorless) to 5 (humorous). To provide for comparisons across norms, words were chosen from a set common to a number of previously collected norms (e.g., arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, age of acquisition, and reaction time). The complete dataset provides researchers with a list of humor ratings and includes information on gender, age, and educational differences. Results of analyses show that the ratings have reliability on a par with previous ratings and are not well predicted by existing norms.

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“…Gelotophobia entails dispositional loathing of laughter, which also predicts experienced amusement (Ruch et al, 2009). Other between-persons differences in humor appreciation stem from people’s situational mindset and mood (e.g., Gervais & Wilson, 2005; Ruch et al, 1997; Wicker et al, 1981) and more stable dispositions such as emotional intelligence, extraversion, and sensation seeking as well as political and moral beliefs (Carretero-Dios & Ruch, 2010; Gignac et al, 2014; Yam et al, 2019). In sum, numerous dispositional and situational tendencies of audience members affect whether humorous material will be met with either amusement and laughter or unease and silence.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Relative Importance of Joke and Audience Characteristics in Eliciting Amusement

2022

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The current work estimated the relative importance of joke and audience characteristics for the occurrence of amusement. Much psychological research has focused on stimulus characteristics when searching for sources of funniness. Some researchers have instead highlighted the importance of perceiver characteristics, such as dispositional cheerfulness. Across five preregistered studies ( Ns = 118–54,905) with varied stimuli and perceiver samples (website visitors, students, Mechanical Turk and Prolific users), variance-decomposition analyses found that perceiver characteristics account for more variance in funniness ratings than stimulus characteristics. Thus, psychological theories focusing on between-persons differences have a relatively high potential for explaining and predicting humor appreciation (here, funniness ratings). Crucially, perceiver-by-stimulus interactions explained the largest amount of variance, highlighting the importance of fit between joke and audience characteristics when predicting amusement. Implications for humor-appreciation theories and applications are discussed.

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Studies of mood and humor appreciation

Cited by 13 publications

References 3 publications

The Inner Eye Theory of Laughter: Mindreader Signals Cooperator Value

The Inner Eye Theory of Laughter: Mindreader Signals Cooperator Value

Humor norms for 4,997 English words

The Relative Importance of Joke and Audience Characteristics in Eliciting Amusement

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