There has been a renaissance of research interest in the ”sense of humor” in recent years, partly äs an attempt to define the concept but more strenuously to provide Instruments for its measurement. A quick count of recent publications shows an average of two to three new sense of humorinstruments per year — or one every four to six months. This intensity of research is unparalleled in the hist...

Humor has been recognized by nurse researchers and practitioners as a constructive therapeutic intervention and has shown positive psychological and physiological outcomes for patient care. Because cross-cultural research on humor is sparse, this preliminary study investigates how nursing faculty members approach teaching therapeutic humor in the classroom and clinical education in different co...

The present study investigates the relationship of self-report inventories of ”sense of humor” and behavioral measures of humor as well as their location in the Eysenckian PEN system. 110 male and female adults ages 17 to 83 answered the following inventories: SHRQ (Martin and Lefcourt 1984), SHQZ (Ziv 1981), SHQ-3 revised (Svebak 1993), CHS (Martin and Lefcourt 1983), MSHS (Thorson and Powell ...

Three experiments illustrate that humor in advertisements prevents the development of negative brand associations due to resistance. Previous research on humor in advertising suggested that humor can counter negative responses during ad processing, but less is known about the effect of humor on the development of negative brand associations in memory. Brand associations are important because th...

It is well accepted that the humor comprehension processing involves incongruity detection and resolution and then induces a feeling of amusement. However, this three-stage model of humor processing does not apply to absurd humor (so-called nonsense humor). Absurd humor contains an unresolvable incongruity but can still induce a feeling of mirth. In this study, we used functional magnetic reson...

Sense of humor is a multidimensional personality construct. Some components may be more relevant to psychological health than others. While there has been a considerable amount of research on humor styles, humor creation ability (HCA) has remained relatively understudied in relation to well-being. This study employed two methods of assessing HCA (a cartoon captioning task and a task involving t...

Are people who are funny more attractive? Or does being attractive lead people to be seen as funnier? The answer may depend on the underlying evolutionary function of humor. While humor has been proposed to signal “good genes,” we propose that humor also functions to indicate interest in social relationships – in initiating new relationships and in monitoring existing ones. Consistent with this...

This paper proposes a virtual driving system for enhancing efficient driving style. We compared fuel economies and levels of consumable wear on three driving simulation test (none, visual, visual+auditory). The test results show that higher fuel economy can be achieved and consumable wear be reduced when they received feedback from the proposed system compared to driving without eco-driving tra...

The recent emergence of positive psychology gave rise to the idea to conceptualize humor from a “good character” perspective. Present constructs, however, show a “virtue gap,” and the two concepts of benevolent and corrective humor were developed to fill this gap. The former describes a humorous outlook on life that entails the realistic observations and understanding of human weaknesses (and t...

Across 8 experiments, we demonstrate that humor can influence status, but attempting to use humor is risky. The successful use of humor can increase status in both new and existing relationships, but unsuccessful humor attempts (e.g., inappropriate jokes) can harm status. The relationship between the successful use of humor and status is mediated by perceptions of confidence and competence. The...