One crucial property of verbal jokes is that the punchline usually contains an incongruency that has to be resolved by updating the situation model representation. In the standard pragmatic model, these processes are considered to require cognitive effort. However, only few studies compared jokes to texts requiring a situation model revision…

We report a study that uses retrospective analysis to understand the relationships between American and Chinese participants' utterances during a conversation and the moment-by-moment feelings and reactions they subsequently described. Intercultural and intracultural pairs of Chinese and American participants talked about a fictional crime story…