Humor is an advanced emotional and cognitive ability of mankind that involves complex semantic inference and deep passionate appreciation. This paper presents the cognitive foundations of amusement and a general theory of humor based on the recent advances in cognitive informatics, cognitive linguistics, cognitive computing, and fuzzy causal analyses. A theory of fuzzy false causation (FFC) is ...

This study tested a model of the development of incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor during adulthood. Subjects were 4,292 14- to 66-year-old Germans. Twenty jokes and cartoons representing structure-based humor categories of incongruity resolution and nonsense were rated for funniness and aversiveness. Humor structure preferences were also assessed with a direct comparison task. The resul...

Humor is a uniquely human quality whose neural substrates remain enigmatic. The present report combined dynamic, real-life content and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to dissociate humor detection ("getting the joke") from humor appreciation (the affective experience of mirth). During scanning, subjects viewed full-length episodes of the television sitcoms Seinfeld or...

Smiling, laughing, and humor is something that individuals come across everyday. People watch humorous videos, listen to comedians, and read the comics in the newspaper. However, is humor only beneficial in causing us to laugh, or can it be used for more? Can humor be used in a more structured form and reap more complex benefits than producing a smile or laugh? Researchers and therapists have b...

Research has shown that a factor in a victim's forgiveness of an offender is the victim's ability to make more positive, or at least less negative, attributions of the offender's behavior and that perspective-taking can be a factor in facilitating that process. Self-enhancing humor has been found to be positively correlated with perspective-taking empathy and aggressive humor found to be negati...

Since the start of the 21st century, the investigation of various psychological aspects of humor and laughter has become an increasingly prominent topic of research. This growth can be attributed, in no small part, to the pioneering and creative work on humor and laughter conducted by Professor Rod Martin. Dr. Martin's research interests in humor and laughter began in the early 1980s and contin...

The present study examines the role of sensation seeking, conservatism, toughmindedness, sex, and age in appreciation of humor in Italian adults. A sample of 100 females and 48 males responded to Italian adaptations of the 3 WD humor test, Form V of the sensation seeking scale, and the C-Scale. Funniness of incongruity-resolution humor correlated positively with conservatism, female sex, and ag...

The present study examined the relationships between four personality traits, humor styles, and happiness. Replicating previous research, happiness was positively correlated with four personality traits: extraversion, locus of control, self-esteem, and optimism. Further, happiness positively related to self-enhancing and affiliative humor styles; it related negatively to self-defeating and aggr...

Organization Behavior has paid more and more attentions on the impact of leaders’ humor on employees. The leaders’ humor plays an important role in the fight against organization silence as an important means to ease the work pressure and adjust the organizational climate. This study has surveyed 502 Chinese employees to explore the impact of leader’s affiliative humor and aggressive humor styl...