Social interactions can be facilitated by action-outcome contingency, in which self-actions result in relevant responses from others. Research has indicated that the striatal reward system plays a role in generating action-outcome contingency signals. However, the neural mechanisms wherein signals regarding self-action and others' responses are integrated to generate the contingency signal rema...

The humour found in short jokes and their often equivalent newspaper cartoons graphic representations are often dependent on the results of ambiguity in human speech. The ambiguities can be unexpected and funny. Sometimes wellknown ambiguities cooperatively repeated can also be funny. Captioned cartoons often derive their humour from an unexpected ambiguity that can be understood by a listener ...

In a sense, psychoanalysis began with dreams. The Interpretation of Dreams was first published in 1900, followed quickly by two books, on jokes and on the psychopathology of everyday life, in which Freud demonstrated how his new theory of the processes of the unconscious mind could be used to explain a great deal of everyone's everyday behaviour. His stress throughout was on the normality and u...

If we laugh at a ]oke we are likely to think it funny, and funnier situations are expected to cause more laughter and more positive judgments (Calvert, 1949, Zigler, Levme, & Could, 1966) Common sense and psychological theories (Rosenberg, 1^0) suggest that a person's attitudes (evaluations) and emotional reactions are hkely to be consistent But does this consistency between laughter and evalua...

24 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 52, NUMBER 1 I n the discipline known as folkloristics [D1] (the study of folklore), a folk is defined as any group whatsoever that shares at least one common linking factor. The factor could be nationality, ethnicity, religion, or occupation. Members of a profession would also qualify as a folk group. Hence, mathematicians constitute a folk. And, like all folk grou...