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Some things are funny -- jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed -- but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature -- aka natural selection -- cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.
The human visual system is particularly attuned to and remarkably efficient at processing social cues. This text examines the functional and neuroanatomical mechanisms which underpin social vision.
The Second Edition of Paul G. Nestor and Russell K. Schutt’s successful and unique Research Methods in Psychology: Investigating Human Behavior draws from substantive research stories to illustrate how research is presented while systematically unifying the entire research process within a conceptual framework. This accessible text examines engaging research studies and examples, considering research ethics throughout. “This is a great text that emphasizes the important concepts within research methods. The resources are excellent; they incorporate up-to-date research and technology and introduce the student to empirical articles, and the information is presented in a way that challenges the student to apply the material.” —Maria Pacella, Kent State University “The text is comprehensive. It covers a wide variety of information without being overwhelming. This is a very good textbook for an introductory course in research methods. I like that its focus is on psychological research specifically.” —Angela M. Heads, Prairie View A&M University
Face perception is a highly evolved visual skills in humans. This complex ability develops across the life-span, steeply rising in infancy, refining across childhood and adolescence, reaching highest levels in adulthood and declining in old age. As such, the development of face perception comprises multiple skills, including sensory (e.g., mechanisms of holistic, configural and featural perception), cognitive (e.g., memory, processing speed, attentional control), and also emotional and social (e.g., reading and interpreting facial expression) domains. Whereas our understanding of specific functional domains involved in face perception is growing, there is further pressing demand for a multid...
This volume brings together leading investigators to explore the science of first impressions: how they are formed, their underlying processes, and effects on emotions, cognitions, and behavior. Integrating cutting-edge theories, methods, and findings from diverse research traditions, the book accessibly conveys the "big picture" of this dynamic area of study. Showcasing the best current work on a fundamental aspect of person perception and social cognition, this book will be read with interest by researchers and students in social and personality psychology, as well as scholars in applied domains. It will fill a unique niche as a text in graduate-level courses.
This breakthrough volume brings together cultural neuroscience and intercultural relations in an expansive presentation. Its selected topics in reasoning, memory, and other key cognitive areas bridge the neuroscience behind culture-related phenomena with the complex social processes involved in seeing the world through the perspective of others. Coverage ranges beyond the familiar paradigms of acculturation and cultural differences to propose new ideas of potential benefit to the new generation of immigrants, negotiators, executives, and other travelers. Taken together, these chapters offer a deeper understanding of issues that can only become more important as the world becomes smaller and ...
A multidisciplinary investigation of contemporary Mexican cinema
The Consolations of Humor and Other Folklore Essays unfolds as a series of questions, commentaries, and criticisms of the analysis, interpretation, and explanation of folklore. Can we confidently regard jokes as the catharsis of sexual and aggressive impulses? What is the basis for characterizing a joke as Jewish or Scottish or Japanese? What do we really know about “dirty jokes”? How is a text or behavior constructed so that it is perceived as humorous? Can we get a computer to reliably recognize jokes? What is the relevance of memetics and a Darwinian paradigm to understanding folklore change over time? Can we identify laws operating in the realm of folklore? How can the marginalizatio...
The field of social cognitive neuroscience has captured the attention of many researchers during the past ten years. Much of the impetus for this new field came from the development of functional neuroimaging methods that made it possible to unobtrusively measure brain activation over time. Using these methods over the last 30 years has allowed psychologists to move from simple validation questions -- would flashing stimuli activate the visual cortex -- to those about the functional specialization of brain regions-- are there regions in the inferior temporal cortex dedicated to face processing-- to questions that, just a decade ago, would have been considered to be intractable at such a leve...
This book attempts to discuss selected but thorny issues of humor research that form the major stumbling blocks as well as challenges in humor studies at large and thus merit insightful discussion. Any discourse is action, so the text-creation process is always set in a non-verbal context, built of a social and communicative situation, and against the background of relevant culture. On the other hand, humor scholars claim that humorous discourse has its special, essential features that distinguish it from other discourses. The pragmatic solution to the issue of potential circularity of humor defined in terms of discourse and discourse in terms of humor seems only feasible, and thus there is a need to discuss the structure and mechanisms of humorous texts and humorous performances. The chapters in the present volume, contributed by leading scholars in the field of humor studies, address the issues from various theoretical perspectives, from contextual semantics through General Theory of Verbal Humor, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, sociolinguistics, to Ontological Semantic Theory of Humor, providing an excellent overview of the field to novices and experts alike.