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Placing failed humor within the broader category of miscommunication and drawing on a range of conversational data, this text represents the first comprehensive study of failed humor. It provides a framework for classifying the types of failure that can occur, examines the strategies used by both speakers and hearers to avoid and manage failure, and highlights the crucial role humor plays in social identity and relationship management.
This book examines social aspects of humour relating to the judiciary, judicial behaviour, and judicial work across different cultures and eras, identifying how traditionally recorded wit and humorous portrayals of judges reflect social attitudes to the judiciary over time. It contributes to cultural studies and social science/socio-legal studies of both humour and the role of emotions in the judiciary and in judging. It explores the surprisingly varied intersections between humour and the judiciary in several legal systems: judges as the target of humour; legal decisions regulating humour; the use of humour to manage aspects of judicial work and courtroom procedure; and judicial/legal figures and customs featuring in comic and satiric entertainment through the ages. Delving into the multi-layered connections between the seriousness of the work of the judiciary on the one hand, and the lightness of humour on the other hand, this fascinating collection will be of particular interest to scholars of the legal system, the criminal justice system, humour studies, and cultural studies.
The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is a comprehensive, anatomically-based system for describing all observable facial movement. It has been used for research on the psychology of emotion, to understand mental health, to detect deception, and to drive the computer generated images in special effects. This book includes original studies using FACS, the study of spontaneous behavior in both humans and animals that cuts across several fields--including Psychology, Medicine, Law, and Veterinary Medicine.
An innocent online DNA test releases fifty years of hidden and long-buried secrets. Her husband takes an online DNA test to help in building his family tree and research his ancestry. His wife is somewhat amused by it and doesn't have much interest in it because she knows here heritage. After a few weeks, his DNA results come back. Happy times for him! During a visit to the in-laws, her husband tells his sister and his family all about his results. His sister Joyce is so excited about hearing their origins. She starts dancing around, doing a dance that she believes would have been done there. Everyone is laughing and having fun. This sort of peeks her interest, and after returning home from a three-hour drive, she says to her husband, "You know, I think I want to do the DNA test." He is a surprised by this, looks at her, and for no particular reason says, "You sure you really want to do this?" She replies, "Yes, I know my nationalities but want to know how much of each." Weeks later, her results come back-not exactly what she expected. Actually, it's a little surprising. Over the next few months, she learns that for fifty plus years she has been holding a secret.
In The Virtue of Wit: Humor, Social Connection, and Flourishing, Clair Morrissey argues that wit is a form of social ingenuity, an aptitude for building and maintaining human connection. Her novel account of wit understands it as the capacity for joining people in feeling through playful, amusing creativity with words and behaviors. In animating and enlivening our everyday shared social landscape, exercising wit is partially constitutive of living a good human life. Through analysis of the history of philosophical treatments of wit and related concepts, contemporary empirical and theoretical research on humor, and examples drawn from across the narrative arts and standup comedy, Morrissey argues that wit should be considered a proper moral virtue. Her analysis illuminates how virtue ethicists can embrace a non-ideal ethical framework that centers the joy and flourishing of marginalized or oppressed people. The exercise of wit can play an important role in asserting and celebrating one’s humanity in everyday resistance to oppression.
In 2003 David Smiedt traveled to South Africa and found a very different country from the one he left in 1989 at the age of 19. This stirring memoir covers Smiedt’s travels across a post-Apartheid nation full of confusion and contradictions as he searches for his long-lost father. From Soweto to Cape Town, from Kruger to Kimberley, what Smiedt finds in this rapidly evolving country is shocking, entrancing, surreal, and stunningly beautiful.
“This book will soon become a widely accepted standard on how to deliver a successful project on time and on budget in any industry.” —John Garahan, Vice President, Global Delivery, Broadridge Financial Solutions Successful project managers must engage and motivate others to achieve complex goals. Ruth Pearce shows how behavior, language, and attitudes affect engagement and how leveraging character strengths can help improve relationships, increase innovation, and build higher-functioning teams. This focus on character strengths—such as bravery, curiosity, fairness, gratitude, and humor—can help project managers recognize and cultivate the things that are best in themselves and oth...
Character can be defined as self-aware knowledge that helps the individual to set goals, values and ethical principles (Cloninger, 2004). This meta-cognitive dimension of human personality involves ‘Theory of Mind’, and is positively related to measures of well-being, mental health, and constructive behavior patterns. Research from at least three different fields, cultural (Shweder, Much, Mahapatra & Park, 1997), personality (Cloninger, 2004), and social psychology (Abele & Wojcizke, 2007) suggest that character can be organized along three broad principles: agency, which is related to the autonomy and the fulfillment and enhancement of the self; communion, which is related to engagement...
Debatable Humor represents the first systematic foray into understanding the use of humor by politicians on the campaign trail. Using content analysis of primary debates for both Republican and Democratic parties during the 2008 presidential election, Patrick A. Stewart considers not just how humor was used, who used it, and how successful these attempts at humor were, but he also gives readers insight regarding why humor and the laughter that results is an important part of politics. Not only can humor reveal a candidate’s intelligence, values, personality, and his/her connection with the audience, it also reveals the underlying values of egalitarian political systems.
From cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Christian Jarrett, a fascinating book exploring the science of personality and how we can change ourselves for the better. What if you could exploit the plasticity of personality to change yourself in specific ways? Would you choose to become less neurotic? More self-disciplined? Less shy? Until now, we’ve been told that we’re stuck with the personality we were born with: The introvert will never break out of their shell, the narcissist will be forever trapped gazing into the mirror. In Be Who You Want, Dr. Christian Jarrett takes us on a thrilling journey, as he not only explores the ways that life changes us, but shows how we can deliberately shape our...