The authors discuss assortative mating, the tendency--important for increased genetic variation--of individuals to mate with the phenotypically similar at rates greater than chance. Influenced by many factors--physical characteristics like height and weight and demographic elements like behavior and attitudes, economic status and education, church…

Research about playfulness in adults has viewed it as something that emanates from personality and other individualized characteristics, and therefore many previous studies adopted a trait approach to predict playfulness, largely ignoring gender differences. The author conducted a facet-level analysis of the so-called big-five personality…

Language play is a key component of many children's popular graphic novels. The authors analyze the sound and word play in Dav Pilkey's illustrated Captain Underpants series. They argue that Pilkey's literary devices fall into two main areas of hyperbole and linguistic creativity and that Pilkey's language shifts the reader into a carnivalesque…

Traditionally, Black communities have used humor to talk back to those in power while avoiding what the author calls "the dominant gaze." She argues that Black humor acts as a resistance, especially when considered through the lens of play. Drawing from cultural play literature, critical race studies, and the literature about Black…

The episodic structuring of ancient novels gives rise to the impression that they are not a serious genre in contrast to other genres like tragedy. Episodic plots tend to imply a playfulness not bound to causality but instead a spontaneity that includes the freedom to reinvent themselves. The author argues that novels like Longus's "Daphnis…

The author uses the inscriptions and images on several ancient Greek vases to consider how social context, the meanings of play-related words, and particular features of the Greek language contributed to the ability to signal and perceive playfulness. He emphasizes the importance of the lexical range of some Greek words and how expectations linked…

Bernie DeKoven is both a play theorist and a play practitioner. He is the author of "The Well-Played Game" (reissued in 2013 by MIT Press) as well as "Junkyard Sports," "Power Meetings," and "Connected Executives" and of the compact disc "Recess for the Soul," an assemblage of monologues about…

For many centuries and in many cultures, jesters recited tales of heroic exploits, but they did more than simply recount past events--they amused, cajoled, and spun tales that transported listeners to the edge of mysterious, unmapped territories. Through the transformative power of play and the imagination, they reworked what was already…

This article asks why adults play dress-up and investigates the role of object play in the making of magical thinking and the reforming of adult identity. The author looks at a wide spectrum of narratives and their genres--the fairy tale "Cinderella," the film comedy "Some Like it Hot", the epistolary novel "Pamela", the film melodrama "Now,…

Bowen White is a physician. He founded the Department of Preventive and Stress Medicine at the Baptist Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1983 and later established the center's Department of Wellness and Health Promotion. White is also a clown who goes by the name of Dr. Jerko. For years he mixed these dual interests, skills, and egos…

The author offers the thesis that hunter-gatherers promoted, through cultural means, the playful side of their human nature and this made possible their egalitarian, nonautocratic, intensely cooperative ways of living. Hunter-gatherer bands, with their fluid membership, are likened to social-play groups, which people could freely join or leave.…