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How humor styles affect humor comprehension and appreciation: A typological approach

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Abstract

There have been many empirical studies on humor styles and humor comprehension and appreciation, but relatively few have directly addressed the relationship between these two topics of humor research, especially studies using a typological approach for humor styles. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine how humor styles are associated with humor comprehension and appreciation using a typological approach. The present study collected the responses of humor styles questionnaires that included ratings of comprehension and funniness of humorous pictures for 962 high school students in Taiwan. The cluster analysis result indicated that there were four humor types of participants: general humor endorsers, humor deniers, positive humor endorsers, and negative humor endorsers. The positive humor endorsers could understand the content of humor pictures better than other types of participants. The general humor endorsers found the humor pictures much funnier than the humor deniers. These findings indicate that humor styles have different associations with humor comprehension and humor appreciation.

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Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the grant MOST-108-2634-F-002-022 from Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan, MOST AI Biomedical Research Center, and the “Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences” and “Chinese Language and Technology Center” of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Program of Learning Sciences, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Ching-Lin Wu

  2. Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Ching-Lin Wu & Hsueh-Chih Chen

  3. Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Taiwan Normal University, Education College Building, Room 612, No. 162, Sec. 1, Heping E. Rd., Da-an District, Taipei City, 10610, Taiwan

    Ying-Fan Yen & Hsueh-Chih Chen

  4. Chinese Language and Technology Center, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Hsueh-Chih Chen

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Correspondence to Hsueh-Chih Chen.

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Wu, CL., Yen, YF. & Chen, HC. How humor styles affect humor comprehension and appreciation: A typological approach. Curr Psychol 42, 16392–16400 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01641-7

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