Humor appreciation can be predicted with machine learning techniques

Humor research is supposed to predict whether something is funny. According to its theories and observations, amusement should be predictable based on a wide variety of variables. We test the practical value of humor appreciation research in terms of prediction accuracy. We find that machine learning methods (boosted decision trees) can indeed predict humor appreciation with an accuracy close to its theoretical ceiling. However, individual demographic and psychological variables, while replicating previous statistical findings, offer only negligible gains in accuracy. Successful predictions require previous ratings by the same rater, unless highly specific interactions between rater and joke content can be assessed. We discuss implications for humor research, and offer advice for practitioners designing content recommendations engines or entertainment platforms, as well as other research fields aiming to review their practical usefulness.

Money or funny: Effective connectivity during service recovery with a DCM-PEB approach

While monetary compensation is considered the most effective service recovery strategy, relief theory claims that humor may also be useful in service recovery situations. This study investigated the effects of humor in service recovery using dynamic causal modeling and parametric empirical Bayes analysis to identify effective connectivity (EC) patterns in the dopaminergic reward system across four conditions representing different service recovery strategies: monetary compensation and humor (MH), monetary compensation and an apology (MA), non-monetary compensation using humor (H), and non-monetary compensation using an apology (CON, the control condition). The findings support the importance of the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in the monetary compensation (MH and MA) conditions and the amygdala in the non-monetary compensation (H and CON) conditions. Monetary compensation (MH and MA) resulted in right substantia nigra (rSN) to NAc EC, suggesting the processing of recovery satisfaction associated with perceived outcome fairness. Conversely, non-monetary compensation strategies (H and CON) resulted in left substantia nigra (lSN) to amygdala EC, suggesting the processing of satisfaction related to perceived interactional fairness. The use of humor for service recovery resulted in VTA-to-lSN-to-amygdala EC during humor appreciation, while the use of apologies (CON and MA) resulted in lSN-to-amygdala and lSN-to-VTA connectivity. Surprisingly, processing satisfaction in the MH condition did not activate the amygdala during humor appreciation. Coping humor could be norm-violating for service recovery, and its effectiveness depends on multiple factors. The results suggest that monetary compensation, humorous responses, and apologies play key roles in neurological responses to service recovery strategies.

The Relative Importance of Joke and Audience Characteristics in Eliciting Amusement

The current work estimated the relative importance of joke and audience characteristics for the occurrence of amusement. Much psychological research has focused on stimulus characteristics when searching for sources of funniness. Some researchers have instead highlighted the importance of perceiver characteristics, such as dispositional cheerfulness. Across five preregistered studies (Ns = 118-54,905) with varied stimuli and perceiver samples (website visitors, students, Mechanical Turk and Prolific users), variance-decomposition analyses found that perceiver characteristics account for more variance in funniness ratings than stimulus characteristics. Thus, psychological theories focusing on between-persons differences have a relatively high potential for explaining and predicting humor appreciation (here, funniness ratings). Crucially, perceiver-by-stimulus interactions explained the largest amount of variance, highlighting the importance of fit between joke and audience characteristics when predicting amusement. Implications for humor-appreciation theories and applications are discussed.

Humour Against Binge Drinking During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cartoon-Based Anti-Alcohol Health Campaign Targeting Women-Who-Have-Sex-With-Women

This study focuses on the role of humour in health and well-being of women-who-have-sex-with-women (WSW) during COVID-19. This group has been shown to be vulnerable to alcohol abuse, especially as self-medication coping with social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigated the potential usefulness of WSW-inclusive (i.e., depicting a female-female romantic couple) versus hetero-normative (i.e., depicting a male-female romantic couple) humorous cartoons in an anti-alcohol health campaign against excessive drinking among WSW. One-hundred-and-twenty-seven self-categorized WSW of diverse genders (woman, non-binary) and sexual orientations (e.g., lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, heterosexual) participated in a 2 × 2 factorial between-participants design. Data were collected during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in The Netherlands. Humorous cartoons explicitly referring to lockdown measures systematically varied the humour subject (punchline about excessive drinking versus staying sober) and the couple (male-female, female-female) that were depicted. Although the (very brief) health message did not influence binge drinking determinants, the humorous health campaign depicting a female-female couple was perceived as more inclusive and evoked more amusement and less anger than when the cartoons depicted a male-female couple. High WSW identifiers were less amused about the health campaign text (but not the cartoons), less likely to share campaign materials offline (but not online), and had more positive binge drinking attitudes but lower binge drinking intentions than low identifiers. Implications are discussed.

Who shows which kind of humor? Exploring sociodemographic differences in eight comic styles in a large Chilean sample

The present study investigates mean-level differences in eight comic styles (fun, benevolent humor, nonsense, wit, irony, satire, sarcasm, and cynicism) depending on the sociodemographic variables gender, age, education, political spectrum, and religious affiliation. A large and varied Chilean adult sample (N = 1,272, 60.1% women; age M = 39.94, SD = 17.33) was recruited in face-to-face interviews and online testing. They completed self-reports of the comic styles (the Comic Style Markers) and sociodemographic variables. Overall, small, but meaningful, differences in comic styles were found for the different sociodemographic groups. Men scored higher than women in all comic styles except for benevolent humor, and six styles decreased with age. Having lower education was associated with more cynicism, while the reverse pattern was found for satire and wit. Religious people showed lower scores in four styles than non-religious people, and cynicism was higher in those identifying with left wing rather than right-wing attitudes. The present study thus provides insights into who is more likely to engage in different kinds of humor in their everyday lives.

Humor Improves Women's but Impairs Men's Iowa Gambling Task Performance

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a popular method for examining real-life decision-making. Research has shown gender related differences in performance, in that men consistently outperform women. It has been suggested that these performance differences are related to decreased emotional control in women compared to men. Given the likely role of emotion in these gender differences, in the present study, we examine the effect of a humor induction on IGT performance and whether the effect of humor is moderated by gender. IGT performance and parameters from the Expectancy Valence Model (EVM) were measured in 68 university students (34 men; mean age 22.02, SD = 4.3 and 34 women; mean age 22.3, SD = 4.1) during a 100 trial-IGT task. Participants were exposed to a brief video before each of the IGT decisions available; one half of the samples (17 men and 17 women) was exposed to 100 humor videos, while the other half was exposed to 100 non-humor videos during the task. We observed a significant interaction between gender and humor, such that under humor, women's performance during the last block (trials 80-100) improved (compared to women under non-humor), whereas men's performance during the last block was worse (compared to men under non-humor). Consistent with previous work, under non-humor, men outperformed women in the last block. Lastly, our EVM results show that humor impacts the learning mechanisms of decision-making differently in men and women. Humor impaired men's ability to acquire knowledge about the payoff structure of the decks, and as a consequence, they were stuck in suboptimal performance. On the other hand, humor facilitated women's ability to explore and to learn from experience, improving performance. These findings deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying IGT decision-making and differential effects of humor in men and women.