Pleasures of the Mind: What Makes Jokes and Insight Problems Enjoyable

Funny? Think About It! Selective effect of cognitive mechanisms of humour on insight problems

The present study aims to elucidate whether insight problem solving could be facilitated by the cognitive component of humour. The authors take interest in whether the logical mechanisms of humour can affect how fast insight problems are solved. To that end, the authors conducted two experiments where participants solved insight problems after watching visual humorous stimuli such as videos and slideshows. The first experiment demonstrated the overall impact of facilitation by humour on insight problem solving; however, it did not show any difference in how particular logical mechanisms of humour affect the solution time of insight problems. The second experiment showed that the cognitive component of humour could selectively affect insight problems whose difficulty stems from different sources. These results suggest that the cognitive component of humour, when operationalised as logical mechanisms and schema switching, contributes to solving insight problems.

Does Thinking in Opposites in Order to Think Differently Improve Creativity?

In this paper, we focus on the link between thinking in opposites and creativity. Thinking in opposites requires an intuitive, productive strategy, which may enhance creativity. Given the importance of creativity for the well-being of individuals and society, finding new ways to enhance it represents a valuable goal in both professional and personal contexts. We discuss the body of evidence that exists concerning the importance of the first representation of the structure of a problem to be solved, which determines the baseline representation and sets limits on the area within which a problem solver will explore. We then review a variety of interventions described in the literature on creativity and insight problem solving that were designed to overcome fixedness and encourage people to move away from stereotypical solutions. Special attention is paid to the research carried out in the context of problem solving, which provides evidence that prompting people to "think in opposites" is beneficial. We suggest that an extended investigation of the effects of this strategy in various types of tasks related to creativity is an interesting line of research to follow. We discuss the rationale supporting this claim and identify specific questions, both theoretical and methodological, for future research to address.

Surprise! Why Insightful Solution Is Pleasurable

Insight problems-as a type of ill-defined problems-are often solved without an articulate plan, and finding their solution is accompanied by the Aha! experience (positive feeling from suddenly finding a solution). However, the solution of such problems can also be guided, for example, by expectations in terms of criteria for achieving the goal. We hypothesize that adjusting the expectation accuracy based on the reward prediction error (discrepancy between the reward and its prediction) affects the strength of affective components of the Aha! experience (pleasure and surprise), allowing to learn how to solve similar problems. We manipulated expectation accuracy by varying the similarity in problem solution principle and structure in a short learning set. Each set was followed by a critical problem where both the structure and solution principle were changed (except for control set). Subjective feelings, solution time, and expectation were measured after each problem. The results revealed that problems with similarities become more expected at the end of the set and their solution time is decreased. However, the critical problem featured a rapid increase in pleasure and surprise and decrease in expectedness only in the condition where both the solution principle and structure were expected, suggesting that problem structure is a key feature determining expectedness in insight problem solving. The Aha! experience is not an epiphenomenon; it plays a role in learning of problem solving through adjusting expectations.

The Robust Italian Validation of the Coping Humor Scale (RI-CHS) for Adult Health Care Workers

The Coping Humor Scale (CHS) is a seven-item tool widely used to assess the use of humor in coping with stressful situations. The beneficial effect of humor in buffering the impact of negative experiences has been investigated in several contexts and populations; for this reason, the CHS has been used in many languages, but its solid validation in Italian is still missing. Our study aimed at building a robust instrument to measure coping humor strategies among Italian health care workers, a category which has been particularly exposed to stressful situations in the last two years. The CHS translated into Italian was administered to a sample of 735 health care workers during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Confirmatory factor analysis and Rasch analysis were performed. As a result, a six-item Robust Italian Coping Humor Scale (RI-CHS) was validated and ready to use for future studies on Italian health care workers’ samples. This study gives evidence that our six-item solution works as a ruler (i.e., an instrument that meets the conditions of fundamental measurement in the context of the human sciences) to measure the degree to which Italian health care workers rely on humor to cope with stress.

Animal Creativity as a Function of Behavioral Innovation and Behavior Flexibility in Problem-solving Situations

A natural approach of animal creativity through insightful problem-solving may offer a panel of how physiological, contextual, cultural and developmental variables related to each other to produce new behaviors. The spontaneous interconnection of acquire behaviors is an Insightful Problem-Solving model based on the new combination and/or chaining of behaviors that were previously and independently trained. This model seems to offer an integrative alternative for the studies of Innovation and Behavioral Flexibility because it allows the research on innovation in a scenario in which the response that solves the problem situation is not available by trial-and-error. Measuring task-appropriateness by behavior flexibility and novelty by behavior innovation under insightful problem-solving paradigm can contribute for the integration of decades of evidence in Cognitive Psychology, Neuro-ethology, Behavior Analysis and Behavioral Neurosciences. The Insightful Problem-Solving allows the independent test of behavioral innovation and behavioral flexibility as it measures the behavioral innovation inside insightful test and tests if the BF depends on variables arranged in the problem-situation and/or on the previous training (e.g. familiarity with access to appetitive stimulus in the pre-test, the number of distinct behaviors trained, and contingency changes in the post-test).

Coronavirus Disease Stress Among Italian Healthcare Workers: The Role of Coping Humor

The study aimed to understand how coping strategies in general and humor-based coping strategies in particular modulate the perception of pandemic-related stress in a sample of Italian healthcare workers during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Italy. A total of 625 healthcare workers anonymously and voluntarily completed a 10-min questionnaire, which included psychometrically valid measurements preceded by a set of questions aimed at determining workers' exposure to COVID-19. The Perceived Stress Scale was used to measure healthcare workers' stress levels, and the Brief COPE Scale and Coping Humor Scale were used to assess participants' avoidant or approach coping style and verify the degree to which they relied on humor to cope with stress. The results show that (1) levels of perceived stress were higher in healthcare workers who were more exposed to COVID-19 (i.e., who came into contact with COVID-19 patients or worked in wards dedicated to COVID-19) in comparison to less-exposed workers; (2) participants who reported a higher use of avoidant coping strategies perceived the situation as more stressful than those who used them less; and (3) healthcare workers who reported higher use of humor-based coping strategies perceived the situation as less stressful in comparison with those who reported less use of coping humor. Such findings expanded other research studies by including coping humor as a potential factor to mitigate the perceived stress related to COVID-19. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for future research and limitations of the study.

Children’s Psychological Representation of Earthquakes: Analysis of Written Definitions and Rasch Scaling

Natural disasters have a potential highly traumatic impact on psychological functioning. This is notably true for children, whose vulnerability depends on their level of cognitive and emotional development. Before formal schooling, children possess all the basic abilities to represent the phenomena of the world, including natural disasters. However, scarce attention has been paid to children’s representation of earthquakes, notwithstanding its relevance for risk awareness and for the efficacy of prevention programs. We examined children’s representation of earthquakes using different methodologies. One hundred and twenty-eight second- and fourth-graders completed a written definition task and an online recognition task, analyzed through the Rasch model. Findings from both tasks indicated that, in children’s representation, natural elements such as geological ones were the most salient, followed by man-made elements, and then by person-related elements. Older children revealed a more complex representation of earthquakes, and this was detected through the online recognition task. The results are discussed taking into account their theoretical and applied relevance. Beyond advancing knowledge of the development of the representation of earthquakes, they also inform on strengths and limitations of different methodologies. Both aspects are key resources to develop prevention programs for fostering preparedness to natural disasters and emotional prevention.

Ultra-high-field fMRI insights on insight: Neural correlates of the Aha!-moment

Finding creative solutions to difficult problems is a fundamental aspect of human culture and a skill highly needed. However, the exact neural processes underlying creative problem solving remain unclear. Insightful problem solving tasks were shown to be a valid method for investigating one subcomponent of creativity: the Aha!-moment. Finding insightful solutions during a remote associates task (RAT) was found to elicit specific cortical activity changes. Considering the strong affective components of Aha!-moments, as manifested in the subjectively experienced feeling of relief following the sudden emergence of the solution of the problem without any conscious forewarning, we hypothesized the subcortical dopaminergic reward network to be critically engaged during Aha. To investigate those subcortical contributions to insight, we employed ultra-high-field 7 T fMRI during a German Version of the RAT. During this task, subjects were exposed to word triplets and instructed to find a solution word being associated with all the three given words. They were supposed to press a button as soon as they felt confident about their solution without further revision, allowing us to capture the exact event of Aha!-moment. Besides the finding on cortical involvement of the left anterior middle temporal gyrus (aMTG), here we showed for the first time robust subcortical activity changes related to insightful problem solving in the bilateral thalamus, hippocampus, and the dopaminergic midbrain comprising ventral tegmental area (VTA), nucleus accumbens (NAcc), and caudate nucleus. These results shed new light on the affective neural mechanisms underlying insightful problem solving.