Most of the extant humor research has focused on humor comprehension with only a few studies investigating humor appreciation as a separate construct. The purpose of this investigation was to determine the relation between humor and underlying cognitive processes. Literature on brain injured individuals has indicated that working memory, verbal and visual-spatial reasoning, cognitive flexibility, and concept formation are related to performance on comprehension tests of humor. In this study, cognitive processes underlying both verbal and nonverbal humor were investigated in a sample of healthy young adults. There is evidence that semantic and phonological humor are associated with different neural networks; therefore, both semantic and phonological humor were explored. Studies investigating physiological arousal and humor have indicated that arousal is necessary for the experience of humor. This suggests that the appreciation of humor may require the integration of cognitive and affective information, a process mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). Thus, a second goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between humor comprehension and appreciation and the VMPFC, by including experimental tasks that previously have been linked to VMPFC functioning. Participants included 94 undergraduate psychology students between the ages of 18 and 39 years. Participants watched film clips and listened to jokes. After the presentation of each joke and each film clip, they completed a humor comprehension/appreciation inventory developed for this study. They also completed measures assessing a range of cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie humor perception. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that verbal reasoning was predictive of semantic humor comprehension, indicating that verbal reasoning is a core cognitive ability for the comprehension of jokes in which the humor depends on factors other than simple word play. Cognitive measures were not predictive of phonological humor comprehension or nonverbal humor comprehension. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the indicators of VMPFC functioning did not correlate with either humor comprehension or humor appreciation and did not moderate the relation between humor comprehension and humor appreciation. Future research is necessary to elucidate the relationships between cognitive abilities and humor perception and to further explore the contribution of the VMPFC to humor appreciation.

Abstrakt: det finns mycken forskning som visar att humor/skratt i olika former kan bidra till positivare sinnestämning och ökad kreativitet i arbetslivet. En relativt ny metod är skrattyoga - en företeelse som knappt varit föremål för studier i Sverige. Syftet med denna undersökning var att studera om skrattyoga påverkar sinnesstämningen och kreativitet, om kvinnor och män påverkas olika. Ett kvasiexperiment med skrattyoga genomfördes vid ett tillfälle på en vårdcentral som var försöksgrupp och en annan vårdcentral som var kontrollgrupp utan skrattyoga. Totalt trettio respondenter testades med kreativitets- och sinnesstämningsfrågeformulär. Inga signifikanta skillnader påvisades varken mellan skrattyoga och sinnesstämning, kreativitet eller genus. Dock påvisades korrelation mellan sinnesstämning och kreativitet.

Humor is usually associated with trivial or non-serious banter; it is however a significant factor in the construction of organizational culture. This work provides an experience based organizational account of how organizations are produced and reproduced, as well as how organizational interaction is coupled with structure. This dissertation is based on two ethnographic studies: the first, a year-long study of a hotel kitchen, and the second, a three-year study of a private boarding school. This long term examination of an organization??s interaction is used to illustrate how organizational interaction produces the duality of organizational structuration overtime. An ethnographic communication-focused approach provides methods for recognizing multiple sites and levels of the Structuration process. As a result, this approach provides a major contribution to understanding the process of Structuration through agents?? actions in the context of their organizational culture.

This study aimes to the investigate relationship between individual and organizational variables on staff innovative behavior. The individual variable is personal sense of humor, and the organizational variable is organizational playfulness climate. The analysis are done by using hierarchical linear modeling for Windows. The major results of thisstudy are as following: 1. The sense of humor has significant influence on staff innovative behavior. 2. Organizational playfulness climate has significant influence on staff innovative behavior. 3. The relationship between sense of humor, and staff innovative behavior is not affected by organizational playfulness climate. Finally, some suggestions provide as references to businesses and further studies.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Theses (Faculty of Education) / Simon Fraser University. Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 317-347).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 272-279). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

This study explores the use of humor among bloggers coping with cancer. Framed by health communication literature on stress and coping and literature on humor styles, I analyzed the use of humor by individuals coping with various types of cancer. Using content analysis, I investigated 600 blog posts from 85 cancer bloggers for humor use. I adapted the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ), a scale assessing four different uses of humor, into a codebook to use for content analysis within the blog posts. The different styles of humor included affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating. Individually, I tested the relationships between the style of humor a blogger used and the blogger’s gender, age, type of cancer, and point in the cancer trajectory. I also tested the relationships between the frequency of humor use within each blog post and the blogger’s gender, age, type of cancer, and point in the cancer trajectory. Every humorous remark was categorized into at least one of the four humor style categories. Overall, I found no significant relationships among the variables tested. However, each of the humor styles was used multiple times throughout the sample. This study provides future researchers with a new way to operationalize humor use based on the HSQ and with relevant examples from cancer blogs. The findings also suggest that humor is a common communicative device among those coping with cancer, and further research into how humor is used among more specific samples of cancer patients may provide more significant results. / text

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STANDUP COMEDY AS ARTISTIC EXPRESSION: LENNY BRUCE, THE 1950s, AND AMERICAN HUMOR by ANDREA SHANNON PRUSSING-HOLLOWELL Under the Direction of Michelle Brattain ABSTRACT Despite the common memory of the 1950s being an intolerant, conformist decade, many “underground” cultures developed and thrived in response to America’s homogenized national culture. Lenny Bruce was immersed within these cultures, using standup comedy as a vehicle to express his and his audiences’ disillusionment. This thesis aims to place Bruce back in his original context of the 1950s in order to understand why the 1960s youth embraced him as their own. By examining the 1950s underground, the history of standup comedy, and Bruce’s comedy, the 1950s youth emerge as an important precursor to the 1960s social movements, and Bruce’s martyrdom as a free speech crusader becomes more understandable and tragic. INDEX WORDS: Lenny Bruce, Standup comedy, 1950s, Humor, Beats, Obscenity, Free speech, Satire