Personal humorous remarks may be avoided in certain conversations out of fear of introducing and reinforcing undesirable assumptions. Teases directed at others and self-targeted humor are perhaps the most vulnerable in this regard. Unless participants know each other well, a tease intended as kidding could be heard as an insult, and a self-directed remark could be read as a confession. When hum...

This article deals with a typology of 45 techniques of humor that I found when doing research on the mechanisms that generate humor in texts, lists the techniques and applies them to a Jewish joke. It references the work of Vladimir Propp on folktales as analogous in that both are concerned with mechanisms in text that generate meaning. It also deals with four theories about why people find tex...

Despite its pervasiveness in popular culture, there remains much to be learned about the psychological and physiological processes that underlie our experience of humor. In the present study, we examined the temporal profile of verbal humor elicitation using psychophysiological measures of heart rate (HR) and facial electromyography (EMG). Consistent with recent prior research on cardiovascular...

Adult rabbits were given single intravenous injections of 25 mg. per kilogram of sodium dicloxacillin. At intervals of time ranging from 15 minutes to 8 hours after injection, primary or secondary aqueous humor was aspirated from each eye. At the same time, a specimen of cardiac blood was withdraion. Other animals were given subconfunctival injections of 50 mg. of dicloxacillin. Aqueous humor w...

Previous research indicates a positive relation ship between psychopathy and various negative humor styles. The purpose of the present study was to investigate social exclusio n as a possible mediator of the association between psycho pathy and negative humor styles in noninstitutionalized young adults. One hundred and thirty-nine university students participated by responding to questionnaires...

Humor is an important part of the human condition. A world without laughter would be a world without a soul. Indeed, comedy serves many key purposes in life – reducing stress, defusing social tensions, revealing the absurdity of human behavior, and generally increasing the quality of life (Martin, 2007). One main vehicle by which funny thoughts are conveyed is through creative writing, which ca...

A dominant theory of humor comprehension suggests that people understand humor by first perceiving some incongruity in an expression and then resolving it. This is called "the incongruity-resolution theory." Experimental studies have investigated the neural basis of humor comprehension, and multiple neural substrates have been proposed; however, the specific substrate for incongruity resolution...

In the anterior segment of the eye, fibrin clots must be rapidly resorbed to prevent further fibrosis and scarring. The aqueous humor of patients undergoing cataract surgery was analyzed for the presence of components of the fibrinolytic cascade. In 30 patients, aqueous humor and plasma were compared for their content of urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA), tissue-type plasminogen activa...

The anterior chamber of the eye is an immunologically privileged site. Over the past 15 years, numerous laboratories documented that the privileged status of this unique site is mediated by multifactorial immunoregulatory processes. Among the participating factors is the aqueous humor that circulates in the anterior chamber and is in contact with most of the tissues in the anterior segment of t...

Humor can improve a performance of creative problem solving; this phenomenon was repeatedly demonstrated in various studies. However, mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are still unclear. We analyze the possible mechanisms of how humor facilitates creative problem solving. The experiment demonstrates that preliminary humor production facilitates insight problem solving. There is no such an e...