Volume 36, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Festschrift for Willibald Ruch: Individual differences, measurement and theories for the psychology of humour and beyond; Guest Editors: Sonja Heintz, Jennifer Hofmann, Tracey Platt and René T. Proyer

This introduction to the “Festschrift for Willibald Ruch” outlines his impressive achievements in humor research, especially in the areas of measurement, individual differences as well as models and theories. Though mostly focusing on the psychology of humor and the sense of humor, Willibald also pioneered interdisciplinary and cross-cultural humor studies. This Festschrift comprises seven invited commentaries and eight articles, which expand areas of research that Willibald significantly shaped and advanced, including humor appreciation, comprehension and production, cheerfulness, dispositions towards laughter and being laughed at, as well as comic styles and humor dimensions.

In this first part of the “Festschrift for Willibald Ruch”, we collated seven commentaries, from board members and attendees of the Humour Summer School, Colin Cooper, Alyona Ivanova, Martin D. Lampert, Rod A. Martin, Paul E. McGhee and Frank ‘Appletree’ Rodden.

Computational research underscores the complex abilities underlying humor. Two decades of work have achieved substantial progress in some areas, notably systems that make jokes; detecting and generating laughter; and using irony in interactions. Sophisticated evaluations clarify both strengths and limitations. The achievements illuminate specific abilities, but also expose unsolved problems. The way humor pervades life is harder to match than self-contained episodes. Learning techniques are powerful, but providing the data they need is daunting. The medium is no longer simply verbal, but other modalities present deep challenges, such seeing the humor in a situation. There are real applications, but the most striking still depend on human support. Achievements and limitations together underscore the scale of the challenges involved in understanding humor.

The aim of this experimental study was to clarify whether affective states with different arousal and valence levels influence the perceived funniness and aversiveness shown as a response to humor stimuli. We used the International Affective Picture System , IAPS (Lang, Peter J., Margaret M. Bradley & Bruce N. Cuthbert. 1999. International Affective Picture System (IAPS): Technical manual and affective ratings . Gainesville, FL: The Center for Research in Psychophysiology, University of Florida) and followed a mixed factorial design. Affective state differed between four groups: 1) neutral group; 2) negative valence-moderate arousal group; 3) positive valence-moderate arousal group; and 4) negative valence-high arousal group. We measured pre- and post-perceived funniness and aversiveness in response to humorous material. Participants were 80 psychology students who were randomly assigned to one of four induction conditions. The results showed that, regardless of the type of valence, affective states with moderate arousal levels did not affect humor appreciation. However, the perceived funniness response was significantly lower in the negative valence-high arousal group. Perceived aversiveness responses were not affected by valence or arousal level. Results are discussed in relation to several current theories on the role of affective state in humor appreciation.

Humor comprehension and appreciation are two basic domains of humor research and central stages in humor processing. In the present study, 238 Italian adults rated 20 jokes to investigate how a humor comprehension task influences subsequent funniness ratings. Additionally, the relationships between humor comprehension and funniness were investigated for the total set of jokes, for individual jokes, and for jokes with different contents (neutral or tendentious) and difficulty (elementary or advanced). Comparing participants who performed only the funniness ratings with participants who first performed a humor comprehension task showed that funniness scores were reduced in the humor comprehension condition. Humor comprehension and funniness were positively related at the level of individual jokes, while these effects were less pronounced in the analyses across jokes. Overall, advanced-neutral jokes showed the most pronounced differences. The study thus showed that the level of analysis (individual jokes vs. aggregating across jokes), content and difficulty of jokes should be taken into account when relating humor comprehension and appreciation. Additionally, it should be considered that humor comprehension tasks can bias humor appreciation ratings. Hence, the measurement and interplay between these humor domains deserves more attention in research.

Ruch and colleagues (Ruch, Willibald, Gabriele Köhler & Christoph Van Thriel. 1996. Assessing the “humorous temperament”: Construction of the facet and standard trait forms of the state-trait-cheerfulness-inventory — STCI. Humor 9(3–4). 303–340) postulated high cheerfulness, low seriousness, and low bad mood contribute to exhilaration and enjoyment of humor. Although robust findings have corroborated that cheerfulness is associated with well-being and greatly enhances one’s social desirability, no studies have investigated the effects of social desirability on the assessment of cheerfulness. For this study, 997 undergraduate students completed the State-Trait Cheerfulness Inventory (STCI) and validity measures. Exploratory factor analyses that controlled for social desirability suggest several items on the STCI cheerfulness subscale loaded on social desirability, whereas seriousness subscale items showed few positive loadings on social desirability and bad mood subscale items loaded negatively on social desirability. Despite associations with social desirability, items overall showed strong loadings onto their respective factors. Factor loadings free of social desirability ranged from 0.39 to 0.84 in cheerfulness, 0.49 to 0.76 in seriousness, and 0.50 to 0.81 in bad mood. Cheerfulness, seriousness, and bad mood subscale scores demonstrated partial correlations in the expected directions with well-being when controlling for social desirability, albeit smaller in size but not significantly different. The STCI scores demonstrated strong psychometric properties with good reliability, structural validity, and criterion validity when controlling for social desirability.

The fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia) is an individual differences variable characterized by negative reactions to laughter. Based on the theory of trait-congruent information processing, we conducted a series of experiments to examine a gelotophobia-related memory bias toward laughter in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) paradigm. The DRM is a reliable method to provoke false memories (FM). In Study 1 (101 adults), gelotophobia related positively to FM of the “laughter”-lure in recognition, and greater confidence in that FM ( d  ≤ 0.32). However, findings did not replicate in independent samples of 167 adults and 172 children of the preregistered Study 2. Aggregating the findings across studies indicated that gelotophobia is unrelated to laughter-related FM in the DRM paradigm ( d  ≤ 0.10) and that FM do not account for gelotophobes’ memories of ridicule.

This investigation examines the associations of three dispositions toward ridicule and being laughed at with individuals’ self-reported aversion to making eye contact (EC) across different interpersonal scenarios. Data were obtained in a sample of 226 adults (53.5% women). Our results showed that the fear of being laughed at (gelotophobia) and the joy in laughing at others (katagelasticism) were positively associated with the presence of subjective experiences of EC aversion in both routine (RS) and socially threatening situations (STS). By contrast, the joy in being laughed at (gelotophilia) was unrelated to these mutual gaze-related behaviors. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that gelotophobia gave the best prediction of EC aversion regardless of the type of interpersonal situation (9–23% explained variance) after controlling for the influence of sociodemographics (effect sizes for STS > RS). Katagelasticism did not yield incremental variance in the prediction of any of these EC-related dimensions (<1%), which suggests that its prior correlations emerged due to overlapping variance with gelotophobia. Complementary further analyses revealed a significant interaction between gelotophobia (as a group factor) and the type of interpersonal situation on EC aversion. This revealed that whereas EC aversion in STS would increase as gelotophobia increases, solely gelotophobes—but not medium or lower scorers in gelotophobia—showed difficulties in maintaining EC effectively in RS. Implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the previous literature on EC, social behaviors, and laughter-related dispositions.

This article presents a schema describing the ‘humor transaction,’ that is, the processes by which what is generally called humor is created, communicated, experienced, responded to and used. It describes in three stages the rich creative process shared between a humorist and an audience. This starts with the perception and/or formation of an amusing stimulus by a humorist and passes in a second stage to its communication by the humorist to others and their processing of the stimulus. The third stage captures the range of experiences and responses by the recipient/s, including personal consequences and possible re-use of the humor (which creates further functions and consequences). Although experiencing and using humor are both holistic processes, dependent on synchronization of social behaviors by humorist and recipient, the schema simplifies in order to summarize the general outline of a typical shared humorous ‘transaction’ while allowing for complex detail within each stage. It offers a framework within which scholars and practitioners can locate their different foci of research and application. It aims to assist in developing a shared vocabulary of concepts and terminology to foster exchange across the many disciplines involved in humor research. It provides a linked glossary of relevant terms designed to facilitate interdisciplinary exchange in studying humor.