Humor is a multifaceted communication phenomenon that has been approached from different perspectives in existing research studies. Such heterogeneity of views poses a challenge to the creation of metadata records for digital humor assets, if rich interpretive and descriptive sentences are desired for the construction of semantic access interfaces. Ontologies in the context of Semantic Web rese...

This study explored relationships between sense of humor, stress, and coping strategies. Undergraduate students (N=258) from introductory psychology courses completed a perceived stress scale, an everyday problems scale, a state anxiety inventory, a sense of humor scale, and a scale assessing their preferred coping strategies. High and low sense of humor groups were determined by selecting part...

This is the final article in a four part series reviewing the influence of humor and laughter on physiological and psychological well-being. This final article reviews the evidence for the effect of sense of humor, exposure to a humor stimulus and laughter on various immune system components, with a focus on the effects of laughter on natural killer cell cytotoxicity.

irony in literature is an art that reflects the underlying pain and heals the hidden anguish that it wants to use to heal its grief and remove its anguish through its opposite. hence, the pain felt by the writer or the poet and his inability to remove the causes of this pain is the motivation behind this irony that the poet creates. however, the motivation to resort to this method varies from e...

We believe that the use of humor by conversational software agents would significantly improve secondlanguage learning. Puns help students to learn about homophony, and to distinguish between words with similar sounds or spellings; idiom-based jokes provide memorable contexts for idioms, which are notoriously difficult to memorize; and scalar humor introduces the student to common comparisons i...

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 ...

The Eysenckian PEN System of personality (Eysenck 1991; Eysenck and Eysenck 1985), comprising the superfactors Psychotidsm (P), Extraversion (E), and Neuroticism (N), is used äs a means to locate different humorrelated traits. A sample of 159 German adults answered a sample of temperamental traits relating to the PEN System äs well äs five humorrelated questionnaires. The temperament inventorie...

Shortly before his death in 1995, Kenneth B. Schwartz, a cancer patient at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) founded The Kenneth B. Schwartz Center at MGH. The Schwartz Center is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and advancing compassionate health care delivery, which provides hope to the patient and support to caregivers and encourages the healing process. The center sponsors...

By using a highly sensitive and specific radioimmunoassay and the slot-blot technique, transferrin was quantified in fresh samples of aqueous humor from patients with primary open-angle glaucoma (POAG, n = 36) or secondary glaucoma (SG, n = 18). The levels were compared with those in aqueous humor obtained from age-matched patients without glaucoma (n = 33) and in primary and secondary aqueous ...