Research on nonverbal vocal cues and verbal irony has often relied on the concept of an ironic tone of voice. Here we provide acoustic analysis and experimental evidence that this notion is oversimplified and misguided. Acoustic analyses of spontaneous ironic speech extracted from talk radio shows, both ambiguous and unambiguous in written form, revealed only a difference in amplitude variabili...

OBJECTIVE The present study examined mentalizing capacities as well as the relative implication of mentalizing in the comprehension of ironic and sincere assertions among 30 older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 30 healthy control (HC) subjects. METHOD Subjects were administered a task evaluating mentalizing by means of short stories. A verbal irony comprehension task, in whic...

Four experiments examined ironic effects of repetition, effects opposite to those desired (cf. D. M. Wegner, 1994). For an exclusion task, participants were to respond "yes" to words heard earlier but "no" to words that were read earlier. Results from young adults given adequate time to respond showed that false alarms to earlier-read words decreased with their repetition. An opposite, ironic e...

s in conference procedings Binsch, O., Oudejans, R.R.D., Bakker, F.C., & Savelsberg, G.J.P. (2006). Unwanted effects inaiming tasks are mediated by changes in gaze behavior. Proceedings of the 9 EuropeanWorkshop of Ecological Psychology. Groningen, The Netherlands. Binsch, O., Oudejans, R.R.D., Bakker, F.C., & Savelsberg, G.J.P. (2007). Ironic effects in penalty shooting: It’s priming, ...

This paper explores the risks and reward of ironic communication. We argue that irony can not be characterized simply as having positive or negative social impact, but can serve multiple communicative purposes, depending on the social context and aims of the conversational participants. Irony may either distance, or bond, speakers and listeners. Contrary to the standard view, understanding iron...