All laughter is nervous: An anxiety-based understanding of incongruous humor

Mirth may alleviate negative feelings that could be aroused by a humor stimulus. Pity and embarrassment have been advanced as anxieties that could be caused by cruel and obscene humor in the absence of mirth. Incongruity, however, remains an explanatory challenge for arousal/anxiety-based interpretations of humor. In order to find ways that incongruity could be provocative, this paper analyzes similarities between the external stimuli of mirthful responses and the external stimuli of paranoid responses, which both demonstrate ambiguity and uncanniness. It is posited that mirth deactivates a fearful reaction to incongruity, suppressing suspicion and delusions that could be triggered when a surreal event is interpreted in a non-playful way. While extreme incongruity may arouse discomfort in any perceiver, it is argued that paranoid individuals have a higher sensitivity, due in some cases to early, traumatic exposure to an incongruous stimulus that resisted mirthful deactivation. These observations are presented without theoretical commitment, but with emphasis on the explicatory potential of the play and false alarm theories.

Interstimulus Interference Effect with Stroop-Type Stimuli

The interstimulus interference in reacting to Stroop-type stimuli was investigated. Two aspects of the interstimulus organisation were analysed: the serial structure of the items in the test sheets and the spatial structure of the items on different test sheet types. More difficult serial structures were expected in cases where the correct colour-naming response to an incongruous combination was the suppressed word-naming response of either the previous or the next incongruous stimulus. Variation in the spatial organisation of the items was aimed at causing different opportunities for perceiving several adjacent items at once. As a third factor the study included not a characteristic of the test material, but a related cognitive style variable—the field dependence/independence, measured by a version of the Gottschaldt embedded figures. Every test condition (printed words in incongruous colours) was matched with a control condition (patches of colour) in a double-mirror design. A factorial design of 2 × 3 × 3 was applied and the data were processed with the aid of a three-way ANOVA. The results confirmed the importance of the interstimulus organisation of multiple Stroop-type stimuli. It is inferred that the extent to which perceptual and, in particular, selective-attention processes affect Stroop colour naming performance might be only a fraction of the whole interstimulus and intrastimulus interference effect.