In recent years, several investigations of the medical clowning profession have appeared in the literature. However, few studies have focused on factors associated with turnover among medical clowns early in their careers. The current study examined whether individual differences in humor disposition predicted turnover behavior. Participants were…

Various forms of humor are an important aspect of social interactions, even at an early age. Humor comprehension is a repertoire that is said to emerge between the ages of 7 and 11 years, and this is primarily attributed to a child's level of cognitive development. The behavioral literature has suggested that various forms of complex verbal…

A low level of anxiety is common, as it is a healthy reaction to the unknown for most people. However, unforeseen circumstances such as a pandemic, can heighten anxiety to unhealthy levels thus impacting an individual's ability to function. Germani et al. (2020) states, "Uncertainty and instability are emotions… that generate worries about…

The relevant literature concerning the relationship between humorous intervention and academic performance features conflicting evidence. Authors present evidence that humor is able to directly benefit student academic performance (Ford et al., 2012), while other authors suggest humorous distraction may actually worsen performance (Bieg et al.,…

Humor has received increasing attention in environmental educational research in recent years as it can have a variety of positive effects on learning atmosphere, outcomes, and student-educator relationships. In most cases, humor is used by educators while students act as consumers. However, this does not exploit the full potential of humor for…

Objectives: To examine how the degree of mental illness disclosure and disclosure strategies are associated with psychological and physical well-being among college students. Participants: Participants were 181 undergraduate students from two American universities who self-identified as having been diagnosed with mental illness. Method:…

Using multimodal conversation analysis, this study closely examines moments when an instructor's embodied explanations elicit laughter from his students -- which we refer to as laughing moments -- in an English as a second language classroom. Such laughing moments can exhibit students' attention to the teacher's explanation and also illuminate…

Informed by a theoretical model of satirical uptake, this study investigated processing behavior and comprehension of satirical news articles. Reading times for segments of minimally different satirical and non-satirical texts were collected using within-subjects (Experiment 1) and between-subjects (Experiment 2) designs. Segment reading times and…

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…

Literature reveals that the inclusion of humour in lecture sessions has been accepted differently, especially by adult learners. Previous studies reported that humour was associated with students' engagement, while some studies reported that humour interrupted learning sessions and distracted students' attention from learning. Consequently, this…

This study investigates the function of smiling intensity as a nondiscrete marker of humor in conversation. The smiling intensity of participants in eight conversational dyads was measured relative to the occurrence of humorous and nonhumorous events in the conversation. A relationship was found between higher smiling intensity and the occurrence…

Introduction: This research aims to determine the humour behaviours of school administrators according to teacher perception and to reveal the relationship between humour behaviours and school climate. Methods: The research was carried out in a survey model. The data of the study were obtained from 221 primary school teachers working in Ankara and…

This paper discusses the place of precision in mathematics education by exploring its role in curricular guidelines and in classroom life. By means of a joke on precision delivered by a school student in South Sweden, our study focuses on student participation in mathematical tasks that require precision in processes of measuring and reasoning.…

Background: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) was traditionally described as a disease restricted to the motor system. However, recent findings suggested that it also affects cognition, especially executive functions, social cognition, language and pragmatics. A relevant issue in current research is thus the description of the cognitive…

In this paper, I explore male youth sport coaches' use of humour in relation to the reconstruction of masculinities, contributing to an emergent body of literature on the role of humour in coaching. Three creative non-fiction stories developed from my own coaching experiences in a competitive youth football (soccer) academy are used to examine:…