Researchers showed the robot ten puns, hoping that one of them would make it laugh. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did. What makes something funny? Humor theorists posit that incongruity—perceiving a situation from different viewpoints and finding the resulting interpretations to be incompatible— contributes to sensations of mirth. In this paper, we use a computational model of sentence comprehen...

The present study builds on our previous study within the framework of Wyer and Collin's comprehension-elaboration theory of humor processing. In this study, an attempt is made to segregate the neural substrates of incongruity detection and incongruity resolution during the comprehension of verbal jokes. Although a number of fMRI studies have investigated the incongruity-resolution process, the...

The aim of this study was to investigate the temporal cortical activation patterns underlying different stages of humor comprehension (e.g., detection of incongruity stage, resolution of incongruity stage, and affective stage). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured when 16 subjects were apprehending cartoon pictures including humorous, non-humorous and unrelated items. Results showed th...

In the past three decades the medical world has begun to take more serious notice of the healing power of humor and the positive emotions associated with it. Humor and laughter are currently being employed by psychotherapists and other care givers as tools to promote and maintain health, as well as intervention and rehabilitation tools for a host of maladies and illnesses related to stress and ...

Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit problems with understanding the figurative meaning of language. This study evaluates neural correlates of diminished humor comprehension observed in schizophrenia. The study included chronic schizophrenia (SCH) outpatients (n = 20), and sex, age and education level matched healthy controls (n = 20). The fMRI punchline based humor comprehension task consist...

As noticed by Michotte (1946), triggering effect, in which there is incongruity between cause and effect, produces a funny impression. To explore this phenomenon and more generally the perceptual bases of humor, we focused on the role of paradoxical animacy, that is, the simultaneous presence of mechanical and psychological features, in causal paradigm. We hypothesized that animations that prod...

Humor is a unique ability in human beings. Suls [A two-stage model for the appreciation of jokes and cartoons. In P. E. Goldstein & J. H. McGhee (Eds.), The psychology of humour. Theoretical perspectives and empirical issues. New York: Academic Press, 1972, pp. 81-100] proposed a two-stage model of humor: detection and resolution of incongruity. Incongruity is generated when a prediction is not...