IRC-Galleria

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Cognitive-Perceptual Processes in Humor
Besides occurring in a social context, humor is characterized by particular sorts
of cognitions. To produce humor, an individual needs to mentally process information
coming from the environment or from memory, playing with ideas, words, or
actions in a creative way, and thereby generating a witty verbal utterance or a comical
nonverbal action that is perceived by others to be funny. In the reception of humor,
we take in information (something someone says or does, or something we read)
through our eyes and ears, process the meaning of this information, and appraise it
as nonserious, playful, and humorous.

Etymology of Humor
Humor began as a Latin word (humorem) meaning fluid or liquid. It still retains
this meaning in physiology in reference to bodily fluids, such as the aqueous and vitreous
humors of the eye. The Greek physician Hippocrates (fourth century B.C.), who
is considered to be the father of medicine, believed that good health depends on the
proper balance of four fluids, or “humors,” of the body, namely blood, phlegm, black
bile, and yellow bile.

Changing Views of Laughter
At the same time that the meaning of the word humor was evolving in the English
language, popular conceptions of laughter and the laughable were also changing
(Wickberg, 1998). Prior to the eighteenth century, laughter was viewed by most
authors almost entirely in negative terms. No distinction was made between “laughing
with” and “laughing at,” since all laughter was thought to arise from making
fun of someone. Most references to laughter in the Bible, for example, are linked
with scorn, derision, mockery, or contempt (Koestler, 1964). The philosophical
conception of laughter as essentially a form of aggression can be traced to Aristotle,
who believed that it was always a response to ugliness or deformity in another person,
although he thought it would not occur if the object of laughter aroused other strong
emotions such as pity or anger.

Wit versus Humor
Both wit and humor were seen as being based on incongruity and were methods
of provoking laughter, but they were thought to do so in radically different ways. The
distinction between these two concepts was first made in theories of dramatic comedy,
where wit was associated with comedy based on intellect, while humor involved
comedy based on character (Wickberg, 1998). Over time, wit took on the meaning of
the old word ridicule, referring to aggressive cleverness and wordplay, whereas humor
emphasized sympathy and benevolence, and was seen as a more positive and desirable
basis for laughter. Wit was intellectual, sarcastic, and related to antipathy, whereas
humor was emotional, congenial, and related to “fellow-feeling.”

Evolution of the Concept of Sense of Humor
Along with changes in the meaning of humor and attitudes toward laughter, the
concept of “sense of humor” has also evolved over the past two centuries (Wickberg,
1998). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British philosophers developed
the notion of various aesthetic and moral “senses,” which were seen as refined
sensitivities or abilities to discern or judge the quality of certain things. Thus, they
spoke of a sense of beauty, a sense of honor, a sense of decency, moral sense, and
common sense. The “sense of the ridiculous” was an early expression to describe sensitivity
to laughable things. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, this had been
replaced by the “sense of humor.”

HUMOR AND PSYCHOLOGY
Psychology is often defined as the scientific study of behavior. The concept of
behavior in this definition is a very broad one, embracing all kinds of overt actions,
speech, and social interactions, as well as less easily observed processes such as
thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and the biological mechanisms underlying all of these in
the brain and nervous system. With such a diverse subject matter, psychology is a very
broad discipline, and is divided into a number of subfields focusing on particular
aspects of behavior, including cognitive, social, biologic, developmental, clinical, and
so on. As I have already noted, humor touches on all of these areas. Psychologists
view themselves as scientists, taking an empirical and predominantly quantitative
research approach to test theories and hypotheses about behavior. Psychological
research methods include controlled laboratory experiments in which one variable is
manipulated to observe its effect on other variables, as well as correlational approaches
in which variables are operationally defined and quantified and their association across
individuals is assessed.

Risks of Humor in Therapy
Although humor may potentially be beneficial for therapy, many clinicians have
also pointed out that it has some inherent risks. As we have seen in previous chapters,
humor may be used for many different purposes in everyday social interactions,
including such negative uses as disparagement and ridicule, enforcing conformity to
social norms, and avoiding dealing with problems. Even though most therapists are
careful to avoid using humor in these ways, there is a risk that their humor may be
misunderstood by clients and misperceived as coercive or aggressive. Since humor is
inherently ambiguous, there is always a possibility of misunderstanding. Therapists
therefore need to be alert to the way their humorous comments are perceived by
clients and how they affect their feelings and perceptions.

CONCLUSION
In summary, humor is a universal human activity that most people experience
many times over the course of a typical day and in all sorts of social contexts. There
is a good deal of evidence suggesting that humor and laughter have an evolutionary
origin and therefore confer adaptive benefits. At the same time, there are obviously
important cultural influences on the way humor is used and the situations that are
considered appropriate for laughter. From a psychological perspective, humor is
essentially a positive emotion called mirth, which is typically elicited in social contexts
by a cognitive appraisal process involving the perception of playful, nonserious
incongruity, and which is expressed by the facial and vocal behavior of laughter. In
social interactions, humor takes on many different forms, including canned jokes,
spontaneous witticisms, and unintentionally funny utterances and actions.

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About IT
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0) Martin, Rod; The Psychology of Humor - An Integrative Approach.
0x0001) Fischbein, Efraim; Intuition in Science and Mathemathics