The three teachers in this study selected many types of humor to exemplify their points. To avoid predictability, they varied their humor presentation styles and frequency by using simple cartoons projected on a screen, jokes and stories, and songs and dance routines. All three teachers engaged in a continuous search for new material to further expand their repertoire. Careful not to overuse hu...

We believe that the use of humor by conversational software agents would significantly improve secondlanguage learning. Puns help students to learn about homophony, and to distinguish between words with similar sounds or spellings; idiom-based jokes provide memorable contexts for idioms, which are notoriously difficult to memorize; and scalar humor introduces the student to common comparisons i...

purpose: to ascertain whether the use of nested-pcr (nested polymerase chain reaction) technique leads to more rapid and accurate diagnosis of bacterial endophthalmitis. methods: the aqueous humor and vitreous samples of 24 eyes of 24 patients with bacterial endophthalmitis were evaluated by microscopy, diagnostic aerobic culture, and nested- pcr to detect the infectious agent. results: aerobic...

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...

It was hypothesized that appreciation of the structural basis and of sexual content in humor is related to punitiveness in different ways. Sixty-eight male subjects served as lay judges and stipulated what would be the just minimum and maximum punishment of committing one of 25 criminal acts and filled in scales relating to humor appreciation, conservatism, dogmatism, and intolerance of ambigui...

Cognitive distortions are negative biases in thinking that are theorized to represent vulnerability factors for depression and dysphoria. Despite the emphasis placed on cognitive distortions in the context of cognitive behavioural theory and practice, a paucity of research has examined the mechanisms through which they impact depressive symptomatology. Both adaptive and maladaptive styles of hu...

The appreciation of humor is a universal phenomenon and a key aspect of cognition. It has been studied in the context of jokes, where the incongruity in expected and observed context results in the perception of humor. The present study examines how the humor appreciation of single words relates to the humor of the whole joke – is a joke simply a sum of its parts? Using a novel dataset of singl...

The authors examined how certain humor styles mediate the relations between self-evaluative standards (which form the primary evaluative component of the self-schema) and psychological well-being. As predicted, greater endorsement of positive self-evaluative standards led to the use of more affiliative humor, which, in turn, led to higher levels of social self-esteem and lower levels of depress...

PURPOSE It has long been known that medical students become more cynical as they move through their training, and at times even exhibit "ethical erosion." This study examines one dimension of this phenomenon: how medical students perceive and use derogatory and cynical humor directed at patients. METHOD The authors conducted five voluntary focus groups over a three-month period with 58 third-...

The effects of vitreous humor and some of its components on the function of rabbit corneal endothelium were investigated and compared to those of artificial and natural aqueous humor. The rate of fluid pumping across the endothelium was measured while that layer was in contact with: (1) complete medium, an artificial aqueous solution; (2) pooled rabbit aqueous humor; (3) filtered and (4) unfilt...