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Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: Evidence from pun comprehension

Empirical findings on embodied cognition have shown that bodily states (e.g., bodily postures and affective states) can influence how people appreciate humor. A case in point is that participants were reported to read pleasant sentences faster than the unpleasant controls when their muscles responsi...

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Autores principales: Zheng, Wei, Wang, Xiaolu
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9912983/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36777229
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1127275
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author Zheng, Wei
Wang, Xiaolu
author_facet Zheng, Wei
Wang, Xiaolu
author_sort Zheng, Wei
collection PubMed
description Empirical findings on embodied cognition have shown that bodily states (e.g., bodily postures and affective states) can influence how people appreciate humor. A case in point is that participants were reported to read pleasant sentences faster than the unpleasant controls when their muscles responsible for smiling were activated. However, little research has examined whether the feeling of amusement derived from humor processing like pun comprehension can exert a backward influence on ongoing cognitive tasks. In the present study, the participants’ eye movements were tracked while they rated the comprehensibility of humorous sentences (homophone puns) and two types of unfunny control sentences (congruent and incongruent). Fixation measures showed an advantage in the critical homophone region for the congruent controls relative to the homophone puns; however, this pattern was reversed in terms of total sentence reading time. In addition, the humor rating scores acquired after the eye-tracking experiment were found negatively correlated to the overall sentence reading time, suggesting that the greater amusement the participant experienced the faster they would finish the rating task. Taken together, the current results indicate that the positive affect derived from humor can in turn provide immediate feedback to the cognitive system, which enhances text comprehension. As a result, the current finding provides more empirical evidence for the exploration of the interaction between the body and cognition.
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spelling pubmed-99129832023-02-11 Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: Evidence from pun comprehension Zheng, Wei Wang, Xiaolu Front Psychol Psychology Empirical findings on embodied cognition have shown that bodily states (e.g., bodily postures and affective states) can influence how people appreciate humor. A case in point is that participants were reported to read pleasant sentences faster than the unpleasant controls when their muscles responsible for smiling were activated. However, little research has examined whether the feeling of amusement derived from humor processing like pun comprehension can exert a backward influence on ongoing cognitive tasks. In the present study, the participants’ eye movements were tracked while they rated the comprehensibility of humorous sentences (homophone puns) and two types of unfunny control sentences (congruent and incongruent). Fixation measures showed an advantage in the critical homophone region for the congruent controls relative to the homophone puns; however, this pattern was reversed in terms of total sentence reading time. In addition, the humor rating scores acquired after the eye-tracking experiment were found negatively correlated to the overall sentence reading time, suggesting that the greater amusement the participant experienced the faster they would finish the rating task. Taken together, the current results indicate that the positive affect derived from humor can in turn provide immediate feedback to the cognitive system, which enhances text comprehension. As a result, the current finding provides more empirical evidence for the exploration of the interaction between the body and cognition. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-01-27 /pmc/articles/PMC9912983/ /pubmed/36777229 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1127275 Text en Copyright © 2023 Zheng and Wang. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Zheng, Wei
Wang, Xiaolu
Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: Evidence from pun comprehension
title Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: Evidence from pun comprehension
title_full Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: Evidence from pun comprehension
title_fullStr Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: Evidence from pun comprehension
title_full_unstemmed Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: Evidence from pun comprehension
title_short Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: Evidence from pun comprehension
title_sort humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: evidence from pun comprehension
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9912983/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36777229
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1127275
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