What Makes Things Funny? An Integrative Review of the Antecedents of Laughter and Amusement.

Despite the broad importance of humor, psychologists do not agree on the basic elements that cause people to experience laughter, amusement, and the perception that something is funny. There are more than 20 distinct psychological theories that propose appraisals that characterize humor appreciation. Most of these theories leverage a subset of five potential antecedents of humor appreciation: surprise, simultaneity, superiority, a violation appraisal, and conditions that facilitate a benign appraisal.

Longitudinal changes in clinical outcome measures in COL6-related dystrophies and LAMA2-related dystrophies.

Objective: To identify the rate of change of clinical outcome measures in children with 2 types of congenital muscular dystrophy (CMD), COL6-related dystrophies (COL6-RDs) and LAMA2-related dystrophies (LAMA2-RDs).

Methods: Over the course of 4 years, 47 individuals (23 with COL6-RD and 24 with LAMA2-RD) 4 to 22 years of age were evaluated. Assessments included the Motor Function Measure 32 (MFM32), myometry (knee flexors and extensors, elbow flexors and extensors), goniometry (knee and elbow extension), pulmonary function tests, and quality-of-life measures.

Comparison of sitting and supine forced vital capacity in collagen VI-related dystrophy and laminin α2-related dystrophy.

Background: Progressive, restrictive, respiratory insufficiency is the major cause of morbidity and mortality in Congenital Muscular Dystrophy (CMD). Nocturnal hypoventilation precedes daytime alveolar hypoventilation, and if untreated, may lead to respiratory failure and cor pulmonale. CMD consensus care guidelines recommend screening for respiratory insufficiency by conventional and dynamic (sitting to supine) pulmonary function testing (PFT) and evaluating for sleep disordered breathing if there is more than 20% relative reduction from sitting to supine FVC(L) (ΔFVC).

Differentiating what is humorous from what is not.

After 2.5 millennia of philosophical deliberation and psychological experimentation, most scholars have concluded that humor arises from incongruity. We highlight 2 limitations of incongruity theories of humor.

Too close for comfort, or too far to care? Finding humor in distant tragedies and close mishaps.

Humor is ubiquitous and often beneficial, but the conditions that elicit it have been debated for millennia. We examine two factors that jointly influence perceptions of humor: the degree to which a stimulus is a violation (tragedy vs. mishap) and one's perceived distance from the stimulus (far vs.

Values and preferences: defining preference construction.

Extensive research in the values and preferences literature suggests that preferences are sensitive to context and calculated at the time of choice. This has led to the view that preferences are constructed. Recent work calls for a better understanding of when preferences are constructed and when they are not.

Further evidence for mixed emotions.

Emotion theorists have long debated whether valence, which ranges from pleasant to unpleasant states, is an irreducible aspect of the experience of emotion or whether positivity and negativity are separable in experience. If valence is irreducible, it follows that people cannot feel happy and sad at the same time. Conversely, if positivity and negativity are separable, people may be able to experience such mixed emotions.

Comparing gains and losses.

Loss aversion in choice is commonly assumed to arise from the anticipation that losses have a greater effect on feelings than gains, but evidence for this assumption in research on judged feelings is mixed. We argue that loss aversion is present in judged feelings when people compare gains and losses and assess them on a common scale. But many situations in which people judge and express their feelings lack these features.

Benign violations: making immoral behavior funny.

Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance from the violation.

Feeling close: emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance.

The results of 6 experiments indicate that emotional intensity reduces perceived psychological distance. People who described events emotionally rather than neutrally perceived those events as less psychologically distant, including embarrassing autobiographical events (Experiment 1), past and future dentist visits (Experiment 2), positive and negative events (Experiment 3), and a national tragedy (Experiment 6). People also perceived an event (dancing in front of an audience) as less psychologically distant when they were in a more emotionally arousing social role (of performer) than in a less emotionally arousing social role (of observer; Experiment 4).

Krabbe disease treated with hematopoietic stem cell transplantation: serial assessment of anisotropy measurements--initial experience.

Purpose: To prospectively compare diffusion-tensor magnetic resonance (MR) imaging anisotropy measurements of white matter (WM) regions in early and late treatment groups of Krabbe disease patients treated with stem cell transplantation.

Materials And Methods: The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board and was compliant with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; informed consent was obtained from the families of all patients. Patients with early-onset Krabbe disease (four girls and three boys) underwent diffusion-tensor MR imaging before and after stem cell transplantation.

Peritumoral brain regions in gliomas and meningiomas: investigation with isotropic diffusion-weighted MR imaging and diffusion-tensor MR imaging.

Purpose: To retrospectively measure the diffusion-weighted (DW) imaging characteristics of peritumoral hyperintense white matter (WM) and peritumoral normal-appearing WM, as seen on T2-weighted magnetic resonance (MR) images of infiltrative high-grade gliomas and meningiomas.

Materials And Methods: Seventeen patients with biopsy-proved glioma and nine patients with imaging findings consistent with meningioma and an adjacent hyperintense region on T2-weighted MR images were examined with DW and diffusion-tensor MR imaging. Apparent diffusion coefficients (ADCs) were measured on maps generated from isotropic DW images of enhancing tumor, hyperintense regions adjacent to enhancing tumor, normal-appearing WM adjacent to hyperintense regions, and analogous locations in the contralateral WM corresponding to these areas.

The agony of victory and thrill of defeat: Mixed emotional reactions to disappointing wins and relieving losses.

Because of counterfactual comparisons, good outcomes that could have been better (i.e., disappointing wins) and bad outcomes that could have been worse (i.

Evaluation of normal age-related changes in anisotropy during infancy and childhood as shown by diffusion tensor imaging.

Objective: The first purpose of this study was to compare the degree of anisotropy in compact white matter and noncompact white matter in each of three pediatric age groups using diffusion tensor imaging. We hypothesized that anisotropy would be higher in compact white matter than in noncompact white matter in each age group. The second purpose of our study was to compare the increase in anisotropy over time in compact versus noncompact white matter during early childhood.