Three cartoons were shown to 87 children at two age levels: 5-6 years, and 9 years. The children's experience was assessed in interviews. The younger children experienced the cartoons in a fragmentary manner and not as a continuous story, understood less of the cartoons, and tended to base their moral judgements of a character's behaviour on whether or not they identified with that character. S...

BACKGROUND Cataplexy is observed in a subset of patients with narcolepsy and affects approximately 1 in 2,000 persons. Cataplexy is most often triggered by strong emotions such as laughter, which can result in transient, yet debilitating, muscle atonia. The objective of this study was to examine the neural systems underlying humor processing in individuals with cataplexy. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPA...

The present study examines the cross-national stability ofafactor analytically derived taxonomy ofjokes and cartoons. A sample oflOOfemale and 48 male Italian adults responded to Italian translations ofthe 3 WD humor test (Ruch 1983) which is aimed at measuring funniness and aversiveness of incongruity-resolution, nonsense, and sexual humor. The results were compared with that of a German sampl...

Although popular children's cartoons are replete with fantastical events, we know little about whether children understand that these events are fantastical rather than real. In Study 1, 54 children ages 4 to 6 years and 18 adults were shown 10 real and 10 fantastical events portrayed in 4s video clips from a popular cartoon. After viewing each clip, participants were asked to judge the reality...

Cartoons are one type of illustration usually in a non-realistic or semi-realistic style. To make cartoon drawing manually requires good ability. So, not everyone can cartoons. This research proposes non-photorealistic rendering algorithm to create drawings automatically. The consists four phases. First, an image abstraction using bilateral filtering. Second, kmeans clustering for abstract quan...

The young learners of today tend to show little enthusiasm for formal schooling. This does not necessarily mean pupils are not interested in learning or developing new skills and competences. In fact, the opposite often happens in the informal settings they belong to. Finding ways of transferring pupil’s informal learning to the school setting is therefore important. This paper gives a brief ov...

Previous functional imaging studies have explored the brain regions activated by tasks requiring 'theory of mind'--the attribution of mental states. Tasks used have been primarily verbal, and it has been unclear to what extent different results have reflected different tasks, scanning techniques, or genuinely distinct regions of activation. Here we report results from a functional magnetic reso...

Two studies tested the hypothesis that in judging people's emotions from their facial expressions, Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate information from the social context. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by other people expressing the same emotion as the central person or a different one. The surrounding people's emoti...