Many of the jokes people enjoy carry a certain degree of moral violation. Since displaying humor often requires committing benign moral violations, we hypothesize that 1) a moral mindset stifles humor and 2) morally-focused people are less humorous, and are therefore less liked by their workplace peers. Participants primed with a moral mindset were less likely to appreciate humor that involved ...

As a high-level cognitive activity, humor comprehension requires incongruity detection and incongruity resolution, which then elicits an insight moment. The purpose of the study was to explore the neural basis of humor comprehension, particularly the moment of insight, by using both characters and language-free cartoons in a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. The results showed that i...

This paper proposes that cognitive humour can be modelled using the mathematical framework of quantum theory, suggesting that a Quantum Theory of Humour (QTH) is a viable approach. We begin with brief overviews of both research on humour, and the generalized quantum framework. We show how the bisociation of incongruous frames or word meanings in jokes can be modelled as a linear superposition o...

This paper will start from basic knot theory to define the Jones polynomial, then define and explore Khovanov homology, with computations. Two main goals are to present a proposition about the knot mirror and to explore the Khovanov homology of some classes of knots. Elementary algebra will be the only necessary prerequisite for this paper, though familiarity with basic homology will be useful....

Humour research is often about verbal humour. Language allows us to play with words and with its syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. It provides us with building blocks that can be composed in unusual ways, introducing ambiguities, confusion, inappropriate language use, and incongruities. This allows the design of humour, whether it is word play, verbal jokes, or humorous remarks trigger...