The Palgrave Handbook of Humour Research

Elisabeth Vanderheiden Claude-Hélène Mayer

Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of Humour

Research

ISBN 978-3-030-78279-5 ISBN 978-3-030-78280-1 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78280-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or informa-tion storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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EditorsElisabeth VanderheidenGlobal Institute for Transcultural ResearchRömerberg, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany

Claude-Hélène Mayer Department of Industrial Psychology and People ManagementUniversity of JohannesburgJohannesburg, South Africa

Kulturwissenschaftliche FakultätEuropa Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany

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1 Editorial: The Handbook of Humour Research—Psychological, Cultural and Social Perspectives 1Elisabeth Vanderheiden and Claude-Hélène Mayer

Part I Humour in Cultural Contexts 13

2 Predicting Self-Esteem Using Humor Styles: A Cross-Cultural Study 15Julie Aitken Schermer, Eva Boyanova Papazova, Maria Magdalena Kwiatkowska, Radosław Rogoza, Joonha Park, Christopher Marcin Kowalski, Marija Branković, Marta Doroszuk, Truong Thi Khanh Ha, Dzintra Iliško, Sadia Malik, Samuel Lins, Ginés Navarro- Carrillo, Oscar Oviedo-Trespalacios, Jorge Torres-Marín, Anna Włodarczyk, Sibele Dias de Aquino, Tatiana Volkodav, and Georg Krammer

3 The Use of Humour to Deal with Uncomfortable Moments in Interaction: A Cross-Cultural Approach 41Kerry Mullan and Christine Béal

4 Humour as a Strategy to Talk About and Challenge Dominant Discourses of Social Integration: A Case Study of Adolescent German Turkish Descendants in Germany 67Yesim Kakalic and Stephanie Schnurr

Contents

vi Contents

5 The Position of Humour in Social Crises: When and What Does Turkish Society Laugh at? 89Ayşe Aslı Sezgin and Tuğba Yolcu

6 Humour as Cultural Capital in Transitions 113Mariana Lazzaro-Salazar

7 Nigerian Cultural Concept of Humour and its Use as a Coping Strategy 131Felix-Kingsley Obialo

8 Interrogating the Phenomenon of Suffering and Smiling by Nigerians: A Mixed Methods Study 149Onwu Inya and Blessing Inya

Part II Humour in History and Politics 171

9 Humor as a Defense Mechanism: Dismantling Holocaust Symbols and Icons in Israeli Culture 173Liat Steir-Livny

10 Geopolitics of Humour and Development in Nepal and Afghanistan 189Rupak Shrestha and Jennifer Fluri

11 Humour and Politics: A Discursive Approach to Humour 205Maria Aldina Marques

12 White Laughter, Black Pain? On the Comic and Parodic Enactment of Racial-Colonial Stereotypes 227Matthias Pauwels

Part III Humour in the Workplace 243

13 Risky Business: Humour, Hierarchy, and Harmony in New Zealand and South Korean Workplaces 245Barbara Plester and Heesun Kim

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14 Resilience as Moderator Between Workplace Humour and Well-Being, a Positive Psychology Perspective 263Rudolf M. Oosthuizen

15 Humour as a Coping Strategy for Employees in Remote Workspaces During Covid-19 289Claude-Hélène Mayer and Lolo Jacques Mayer

Part IV Humour over the Lifespan 309

16 Humour as a Resource for Children 311Doris Bergen

17 Humour in Romantic Relationships 325Maria Nicoleta Turliuc, Octav Sorin Candel, and Lorena Antonovici

18 Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Humor Appreciation and Function Across the Lifespan 341Jennifer Tehan Stanley and Jennifer R. Turner

19 ‘West of Hollywood’: Humor as Reparation in the Life and Work of Walter Becker 363James L. Kelley

Part V Humour in Pedagogical Contexts 381

20 Humour in Adult Education 383Elisabeth Vanderheiden

21 Humour in Mathematics Teaching: A Study in Portugal and Spain 419Luís Menezes, Pablo Flores, Floriano Viseu, Susana Amante, and Ana Maria Costa

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Part VI Humour in the Context of Medicine, Therapy and Counselling 439

22 The Positive Effect of Humour and Amateur Dubbing on Hospitalised Adolescents 441Margherita Dore, Laura Vagnoli, Francesca Addarii, Elena Amore, and Rosanna Martin

23 The Covid-19 Pandemic as an Opportunity for Positive Psychology to Promote a Wider-Ranging Definition of Humour and Laughter 459Freda Gonot-Schoupinsky and Gülcan Garip

24 On the Relationships Between Humour, Stress and Flow Experience—Introducing the Humour-Flow Model 479Marek Bartzik and Corinna Peifer

25 Working with Humour in Psychotherapy 497Aakriti Malik

Index 511

ix

About the Editors

Elisabeth Vanderheiden is a pedagogue, theologian and intercultural medi-ator. She is the CEO of the Global Institute for Transcultural Research and the President of the Catholic Adult Education of Germany. Her latest publi-cations focused on shame as resource as well as mistakes, errors and failure and their hidden potentials in the context of culture and positive psychology 1.0 and 2.0. In a current project, she investigates life crises and their individual coping strategies from different cultural viewpoints. Other current research interests include Ikigai—especially in the context of adult education and counselling—and Design Thinking.

Claude-Hélène Mayer (Dr. habil., PhD, PhD) is Professor in Industrial and Organisational Psychology at the Department of Industrial Psychology and People Management at the University of Johannesburg, an adjunct professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, and a senior research associate at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. She holds a PhD in Psychology (University of Pretoria, South Africa), a PhD in Management (Rhodes University, South Africa), a Doctorate (Georg- August University, Germany) in Political Sciences (socio-cultural anthropol-ogy and intercultural didactics) and a Habilitation (European University Viadrina, Germany) in Psychology with focus on work, organizational and cultural psychology. She has published several monographs, text collections, accredited journal articles and special issues on transcultural mental health

Notes on Editors and Contributors

x Notes on Editors and Contributors

and well-being, sense of coherence, shame, transcultural conflict management and mediation, women in leadership in culturally diverse work contexts, con-stellation work, coaching and psychobiography.

Contributors

Francesca Addarii graduated in School and Community Psychology from the University of Bologna in 2016 and is attending the psycho-analytic school at the Istituto Freudiano (Rome). Her research interests include psychology in healthcare settings, paediatric oncology and humour. She coordinates a psycho- educational project titled La scacchiera di Onnon, which aims at pro-moting children’s well-being and soft skills by playing chess at school. She is the author of the monograph Alla scoperta del Paese degli Scacchi (Erickson, 2020) and the book series Il coraggioso viaggio della Cura and Teenroom (Bristol Meyer Squibb), which support children and adolescents with cancer.

Susana  Amante is professor at the Polytechnic of Viseu—School of Management and Technology (Portugal). She holds a PhD in English Philology. Her research areas of interest are literatures and cultures (especially of English-speaking countries), gender studies, children’s literature, didactics of languages, languages and entrepreneurship, and translation studies.Susana Amante has evaluated and certified textbooks of Portuguese and English lan-guages for middle school students and has proven work experience as a trans-lator. She is (co)author of several national and international papers and has presented various talks at national and international events. She is the peda-gogical coordinator of the “Co-Creation-based learning” Project.

Elena Amore is a freelance psychologist who works with children, adoles-cents and adults. She carries out research and training activities in the field of developmental and hospital psychology, chronicity and humour. She has pub-lished on the use of non-pharmacological techniques to reduce pain and dis-tress and on the use of therapeutic games in the paediatric hospital setting.

Lorena Antonovici is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași. Throughout her academic career, she studied the influence of humour in the domain of romantic relationships. Her results were published in the Journal of Experiential Psychotherapy, Romanian Journal of Artistic Creativity and the Romanian Journal of Social Psychology.

xi Notes on Editors and Contributors

Marek  Bartzik is a research assistant in the “Care for Joy” project at the University of Lübeck and also a change manager in the public sector. His research focus is on the field of applied positive psychology and particularly on humour and flow experience in the working context. After completing his Master’s degree in Business Psychology, Marek Bartzik gained practical experi-ence in human resources development and change management in the pub-lic sector.

Christine Béal is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 and a member of Praxiling, a CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) Research Lab specializing in linguistics and communica-tion. Her field of expertise is French linguistics, interactional linguistics and cross-cultural pragmatics. Her work is based on naturally occurring data (spontaneous talk between work colleagues, meetings, job interviews and friends) in French and English. She has focussed on terms of address, speech acts, politeness, rituals and routines, turn-taking and conversational humour.

Doris  Bergen is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Miami University. Her research has included the study of play development, effects of technology- augmented toys on childhood play, children’s humour development and eval-uation of early childhood programmes. She, also, is a Miami University Distinguish Scholar, having published 14 books and over 70 refereed articles and book chapters.

Marija Branković, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade.

Octav Sorin Candel is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași. His main research interests are in couple and family psychology and psychometry. He published multiple articles in journals such as Personality and Individual Differences, European Journal of Dental Education, Romanian Journal of Applied Psychology and Journal of Psychological and Educational Research.

Ana  Maria  Costa is a professor at the Polytechnic of Viseu—School of Education (Portugal). She holds a PhD in American Studies—American his-tory, culture and literature. In addition to the research Ana Maria Costa has been carrying out in the context of American culture and literature, mainly with regard to the work of the novelist Sinclair Lewis, she has recently been undertaking research in the field of Portuguese and World Literature and other Arts, specifically with regard to the role of space as a structuring cate-gory of the narrative.Ana Maria Costa is (co)author of several national and

xii Notes on Editors and Contributors

international papers within the aforementioned study fields. A member of the editorial board of several international scientific journals, she is associate edi-tor of one of them.

Sibele Dias de Aquino is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Psychology at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio, Brazil) and researcher in Laboratory of Research in Social Psychology (L2PS) at the same university. She has a master’s degree in Social Psychology, MBA in Business Communication, and also MBA in Services Marketing. She has a bachelor’s degree in Social Communication, with a degree in Advertising. Research interests include social psychology, specifically persuasive communication, social influence, consumer behavior, and subjective well-being.

Margherita  Dore is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy. She is the author of Humour in Audiovisual Translation. Theories and Applications (2019). She edited one essay collection on transla-tion practice, Achieving Consilience. Translation Theories and Practice (2016); a special issue of Status Quaestionis on audiovisual retranslation (2018); one special issue of the European Journal of Humour Research on multilingual humour and translation (2019) and (with Klaus Geyer) a special issue of InTRAlinea on dialect, translation and multimedia. She (co)authored several papers on humour in translated audiovisual texts and in a range of other con-texts, including stand-up comedy.

Marta Doroszuk is a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Philosophy, Institute of Psychology at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. She is a member of the CogNeS Doctoral School, an international PhD program in Social and Cognitive Neuroscience, and member of Centre for Social Cognitive Studies CSCS. Her main research interests are intergroup relations, facial expression of emotions, and cross-cultural communication.

Pablo  Flores is a professor at the University of Granada—Faculty of Education (Spain). He holds a PhD in mathematics education. His research interest is mathematics education, and his priority lines of research are profes-sional knowledge and development of mathematics teachers, as well as didac-tic resources for mathematics teaching, including humour. He has participated in various research projects in mathematics education, tutored doctoral theses on the subject and taught as a secondary school mathematics teacher. Since 1990, in the Faculty of Education, he has collaborated in the undergraduate training of mathematics teachers. Pablo Flores is (co)author of several national and international journal papers and materials to support the training of mathematics.

xiii Notes on Editors and Contributors

Jennifer Fluri received her PhD in Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies from Pennsylvania State University. She is a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and previ-ously held an associate professorship in Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. She is a political geographer, and her research focuses on gender, geopolitics, international aid/development, conflict and peace building in Afghanistan. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed arti-cles and co-authored a book with Rachel Lehr titled The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements, which was published in 2017 as part of the Geographies of Social Justice series. She is one of four co- authors of the 2017 book Feminist Spaces: Gender and Geography in a Global Context and co-author of Engendering Development: Capitalism and Inequality in the Global Economy, with Amy Trauger. Her research project focuses on Afghan women’s political influence and the diverse experiences of Afghan women’s political activism, funded by the National Science Foundation.

Gülcan Garip is Academic Lead in Psychology at the University of Derby and is interested in the self-management of health and illness, including the role of humour and laughter on well-being.

Freda Gonot-Schoupinsky completed MSc Health Psychology and MBA and created the Laughie laughter prescription. She is interested in the poten-tial of laughter and humour to benefit well-being and personal development.

Dzintra Iliško, Ph.D., is a professor in Institute of Humanities and Societal Sciences at Daugavpils University, Latvia. She is a co-editor of the interna-tional journal Discourse and Communication for Sustainable Education and the author of more than 70 publications. She is a member of international net-works, such as the International Seminar on Religious Education and Values (ISREV) and the European Society of Women in Theological Research (ESWTR). Her research interests are reorienting education towards the aim of sustainable education, sustainability competencies, transdisciplinary research, and inclusive education.

Blessing Inya is a lecturer at the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Oye-Ekiti, and a prospective PhD student. She has her MA from the University of Ibadan. She has published book chapters and journal articles on lexico-semantics, gender discourse and humour. She is interested in discourse analysis and linguistic gender studies. Her paper on humour includes “Conversational Humour in a Nigerian Radio News Programme: A Case Study of Lati inu aka aka Biodun/Kayode”. European Journal of Humour Research 6 (4) 75–94 (Co-authored 2018).

xiv Notes on Editors and Contributors

Onwu  Inya is a lecturer in the Department of General Studies, Federal University of Technology, Akure. He obtained his BA in English from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in 2007 and an MA in English from the University of Ibadan in 2011. He then obtained PhD in English language from the University of Ibadan in 2018. He is interested in pragmatics, metaphor, legis-lative discourse and humour. His papers have appeared in Linguistik Online, Theory and Practice in Language Studies and in a number of edited volumes. His papers on humour in the Nigerian contexts include the following: “Pragmatics of Humour in a Nigerian University’s Departmental Chat Rooms”. In Taiwo, R., Odebunmi, A., and Adetunji, A. (eds) Analyzing Language and Humor in Online Communication. United States of America: IGI Global. pp. 190–206; (2016); “Conversational Humour in a Nigerian Radio News Programme: A case study of Lati inu aka aka Biodun/Kayode”. European Journal of Humour Research 6 (4) 75–94 (Co-authored 2018).

Yesim Kakalic is a PhD student at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the identity construction of German-Turkish adolescents with a particular interest in social integration. Yesim also has an MSc in Intercultural Communication from the University of Warwick and a Bachelor’s degree in International Business from Dokuz Eylül University.

James L. Kelley After receiving his education at three American universities, scholar James L. Kelley settled in to a life of researching and writing about, among other things, the fascinating lives of creative people. His first two books are A Realism of Glory: Lectures on Christology in the Works of Protopresbyter John Romanides (2009) and Anatomyzing Divinity: Studies in Science, Esotericism and Political Theology (2011). His third book, Orthodoxy, History, and Esotericism: New Studies (2016), is a history of esoteric influences on Western religious culture.

Truong  Thi  Khanh Ha, Ph.D., is an associate professor in Faculty of Psychology, VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. Her doctorate is from Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, in 2006. One of her research interests currently focuses on improving the subjective well-being of Vietnamese children and adolescents.

Heesun Kim has completed her PhD in Management at the University of Auckland (New Zealand). She is positioned as an assistant professor in Management, Yonsei University Mirae Campus. Heesun’s research involves Korean workplaces and culture, humour and workplace relationships and has recently published in high-quality journals, such as Journal of Management Inquiry, Frontiers in Psychology and Asian Studies Review.

xv Notes on Editors and Contributors

Christopher  Marcin  Kowalski is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. His main research interests are dark personality traits and rumination.

Georg  Krammer, Ph.D., is University College Professor of Educational Measurement and Applied Psychometrics at the University College for Teacher Education Styria in Graz, Austria.

Maria Magdalena Kwiatkowska, Ph.D., student and research assistant in the Faculty of Christian Philosophy at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Poland.

Mariana Lazzaro-Salazar (PhD in Linguistics) is a researcher at the Centro de Investigación de Estudios Avanzados, Vicerrectoría de Investigación y Postgrado, Universidad Católica del Maule (Chile), where she is also the vice- president of the Ethics Committee and a lecturer in the PhD Programmes of Education and of Psychology. She is also a research associate of the Language in the Workplace Project, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Mariana is a discourse analyst whose research has focused on healthcare com-munication. Some of her recent work includes Clinicians’ Narratives in the Era of Evidence-Based Practice and book chapters such as “Ethnographic methods” in De Gruyter Handbook of Methods in Pragmatics.

Samuel Lins, Ph.D., is Professor of Social Psychology and researcher of the Laboratory of Social Psychology in the Center for Psychology at the University of Porto (CPUP). He graduated in psychology and management, and his research interests include consumer psychology and behavior. His recent research projects are focused on how the group processes (social comparison, social identity, and social influence) trigger impulse buying.

Aakriti Malik is a clinical psychologist working at the Acute Inpatient Unit at Middlemore Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand. She specializes in work-ing with adolescents, adults and families dealing with concerns on the anxiety, mood, addictions, trauma, grief, psychosomatic and the personality spectrum. In her work with clients in psychotherapy, Aakriti focuses on creating a safe, enriching and a non-pathological space for them to find their true potential. Additionally, she has worked as a lecturer teaching undergraduate students in academic institutions of India and Malaysia. A graduate of NIMHANS, Bangalore, India, Aakriti’s publications include articles and book chapters in Indian and international journals on bullying, psychological management in oncology and exploring various themes in the client–therapist dyad in psychotherapy.

xvi Notes on Editors and Contributors

Sadia  Malik, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Sargodha, Pakistan.

Maria Aldina Marques has a PhD in Language Sciences, specialization in Portuguese Linguistics (2000), with a dissertation on Aspects of the Functioning of Parliamentary Political Discourse—the enunciative organiza-tion in the Government Interpellation Debate. She is associate professor (with “agregação”) of the Department of Portuguese and Lusophone Studies at the Institute of Arts and Human Sciences of the University of Minho. She has several publications on Portuguese and foreign books and journals. Her main research interests, within a theoretical framework of linguistic discourse anal-ysis, are political discourse, media discourse and scientific discourse.

Rosanna Martin is a psychologist and psychotherapist specializing in psy-chotherapy for children and adolescents. Since 2006, she has been a member of the Psychology Service Unit at Meyer Children’s Hospital. She cooperates with other departments such as Infectious Diseases, International Adoptions, Gastroenterology and Oncology. She is also interested in the treatment of somatic symptom disorders and eating disorders among 0–3-year-old chil-dren. Since 2020, she has been the coordinator of the Pediatric Hospital Psychology Services at Meyer Children’s Hospital.

Lolo  Jacques  Mayer is an emerging young scholar, writer, actor and researcher. His interests are exploring the human mind, machine learning, 4IR, programming and smart technologies. Besides that he enjoys statistics, mechanics and the sciences. Additionally, he holds talks on social, cultural and racial issues and presents autoethnographical accounts in his talks against racism and discrimination. From 2018 to 2020, he was a member of Mensa in Germany.

Luís Menezes is a professor at the Polytechnic of Viseu—School of Education (Portugal). His main research interests are mathematics teaching practices and teacher education. Particularly, his interests pertain to the role of communica-tion in the mathematics classroom and the processes of construction and knowledge transfer. He was part of the team that developed the national mathematics curriculum for basic education (2007). Having previously coor-dinated the “In-service Teacher Education Programme in Mathematics (PFCM—Viseu)”, a national project involving primary and middle school teachers, he has been coordinating, since 2015, the HUMAT research project “Humour in mathematics teaching”. Luís Menezes is (co)author of several articles published in national and international journals and curriculum mate-rials to support mathematics teachers’ training.

xvii Notes on Editors and Contributors

Kerry Mullan is Associate Professor and Convenor of Languages at RMIT University. She teaches French language and culture, and sociolinguistics. Her main research interests are cross-cultural communication and differing inter-actional styles, particularly those of French and Australian English speakers. She also researches in the areas of intercultural pragmatics, discourse analysis, language teaching and conversational humour.

Ginés Navarro-Carrillo, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Jaén, Spain.

Felix-Kingsley  Obialo is a Catholic priest, creativity practitioner and an adjunct of the University of Ibadan School of Business and Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. His research interests include creativity, innovation, change leadership, humour and entrepreneurship.

Rudolf  M.  Oosthuizen received a BA degree (Cum Laude) from the University of Pretoria in 1992 and obtained a BA (Honours) in Psychology at the same university in 1993. In 1999, an MA degree in Industrial and Personnel Psychology was conferred on him by the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education. In 1999, he registered as Industrial Psychologist with the Health Professions Council of South Africa. In 2005, he completed a DLitt et Phil in Industrial and Organisational Psychology at the University of South Africa (Unisa). Currently, Rudolf is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Organisational Psychology at the University of South Africa and an Adjunct Professor in the School of Psychology and Counselling at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia.Rudolf is the manager of the MCom IOP programme, and he is responsible for the lecturing of honours subjects and the supervision of mas-ter’s and doctoral students. He has presented conference papers at national and international conferences and published articles in accredited scientific journals. His fields of interests are (1) career psychology, career development and management from an individual, group and organizational perspective in the twenty- first century world of work; (2) positive psychology, with the focus on salutogenesis and well-being, sense of coherence, locus of control, self-efficacy, the hardy personality and learned resourcefulness; (3) employment relations and the improvement of the quality of employment relations in organizations and in society in general; and (4) the 4th Industrial Revolution (smart technology, artificial intelligence, robotics and algorithms).

Oscar Oviedo-Trespalacios, Ph.D., is a strategic senior research fellow in the School of Psychology and Counselling at Queensland University of Technology (QUT, Australia) with expertise in applied psychology and human

xviii Notes on Editors and Contributors

factors. Oviedo-Trespalacios has extensive experience in researching behav-iour in international research projects in more than 30 countries, and his research is widely reported in international media, including the ABC, the New York Times, The Independent, the Men’s Health Magazine, and The Washington Post.

Eva Boyanova Papazova, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Institute for Research in Education, Bulgaria. She has majored in Psychology at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, and defended her Ph.D. degree at the Institute of Psychology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. For over 15 years, she worked in the Department of Psychology at IPHS, BAS. Her main research interests are in the areas of developmental and educational psychology. She is an author and co-author of two monographs and more than 50 scientific publications in Bulgarian and English.

Joonha Park, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Management, NUCB Business School, Japan. She has studied conceptions of what it means to be human across cultures and dehumanization in intergroup relations in her gradu-ate years at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Before joining NUCB Graduate School, she worked as a research fellow at the University of Tokyo, where she investigated within-cultural differences in relational self in East Asia. Research interests include psychological well-being, moral values in crisis, multi-culturalism and acculturation, dehumanization, and environmental psychology.

Matthias Pauwels is a cultural and political philosopher employed as a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Philosophy of North-West University. He conducts a book project on the entanglements of aesthetics and politics in the South African postcolony, parts of which have already been published as arti-cles in both South African and international journals. Dr. Pauwels obtained his BA and MA degrees in Philosophy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and his DPhil degree in Philosophy at the University of Pretoria with a thesis on the relation between aesthetics and politics in the work of contemporary French philosopher Jacques Rancière. He also holds an MSc degree in Architecture from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium). Previously, Dr. Pauwels lived in the Netherlands for many years where he was co-founder and co-director of the independent theoretical research office BAVO. His key publications include the co-edited volumes Cultural Activism Today: The Art of Over- Identification (2007) and Urban Politics Now: Re-Imagining Democracy in the Neoliberal City (2007), as well as the co-authored monograph Too Active to Act: Cultural Activism after the End of History (2010).

xix Notes on Editors and Contributors

Corinna Peifer is Professor of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Lübeck, Germany. Her research is located at the interface between Work and Organizational Psychology and Psychophysiology, and she is particularly interested in flow experience, how it relates to stress and well- being, and in protective factors such as humour. Corinna Peifer is founding member of the European Flow-Researchers’ Network (EFRN), Country Representative Germany for the European Network for Positive Psychology (ENPP) and Vice-President of the German Association of Positive Psychology Research (DGPPF).

Barbara Plester is a senior lecturer in the Department of Management and International Business at the University of Auckland. Although this is a seri-ous job, she laughs a lot because her research explores workplace humour, fun, play, organizational culture, food rituals, psychological well-being at work and critical perspectives of organizational life. Barbara belongs to the Organization Studies group and teaches Organizational Behavior, Organizational Theory and Human Resource Management (HRM) infused with humour stories, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She serves on the University of Auckland Education Committee—concerned with teaching and learning in her university. Prior to her academic career, Barbara worked in Publishing and Information Technology companies and has practi-cal experience in Sales, Marketing and HRM, where she was once accused of laughing too much at work!

Radosław  Rogoza, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, Poland. He is the author of over 50 pub-lished papers, principal investigator of two research grants, and recipient of international awards granted by the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences and the Association for Research in Personality. His research interests include personality and individual differences, especially narcissistic traits within the dark side of personality.

Julie  Aitken  Schermer, Ph.D. (formerly Harris), is a professor in the Departments of Management and Organizational Studies and Psychology at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. She is a section editor of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, and is the past-president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences.

Stephanie Schnurr is an associate professor at the University of Warwick. Her main research interest is professional communication with a particular focus on leadership discourse. Stephanie has published widely on the multiple functions of humour, identity construction, the role of culture, and gender in

xx Notes on Editors and Contributors

a range of professional and medical contexts. She is also the author of The Language of Leadership Narratives (with Jonathan Clifton and Dorien van de Mieroop, 2020), Language and Culture at Work (with Olga Zayts, 2017), Exploring Professional Communication (2013) and Leadership Discourse at Work (2009).

Ayşe  Aslı  Sezgin is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Sciences at Çukurova University, Faculty of Communication. Ayşe Aslı Sezgin completed her PhD at Gazi University, Ankara/Turkey. Her research interest lies in the area of new media, communication technologies, social media, political communication, media literacy, news literacy, media and humour.

Rupak Shrestha is a PhD Candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. He researches primarily questions of sovereignty, territory, ethnicity in rela-tion to borders, (im)mobilites and placemaking. He is interested in under-standing how certain populations are rendered powerless through state mechanisms, and in the ways in which the rendered powerless navigate, coun-teract and resist the dispossession of their bodies, land and memory in their everyday lives. The central node of his research lies in understanding how sovereignty is realized every day. For his dissertation, he is researching the processes through which Tibetans-in-exile exercise and negotiate political life in Nepal through engagements with politics of indigeneity, against the inten-sification of China’s politics of development and practices of extra-territorial sovereignty. He is also engaged with visual methodologies to emphasize other ways of seeing, knowing and being in the world.

Jennifer Tehan Stanley is Associate Professor of Psychology at University of Akron in Akron, Ohio, USA. She is an experimental psychologist who studies ageing and emotions and has published and presented on age differences in humor styles.

Liat Steir-Livny is a senior lecturer in the Department of Cultural Studies, Creation and Production at Sapir College, and a tutor and course coordinator in the Cultural Studies MA program and the Department of Literature, Language, and the Arts at the Open University of Israel. Her research focuses on the changing commemoration of the Holocaust in Israel from the 1940s until the present. It combines Holocaust studies, Humor Studies, Memory Studies, cultural Studies, Trauma studies and Film studies. She has authored numerous articles and five books: Two Faces in the Mirror: The Representation of Holocaust Survivors in Israeli Cinema (Eshkolot- Magness, 2009, Hebrew); Let the Memorial Hill Remember: The New Commemoration of the Holocaust in

xxi Notes on Editors and Contributors

Israeli Popular Culture (Resling, 2014, Hebrew); Is it O.K to Laugh about It? Holocaust Humour, Satire and Parody in Israeli Culture (2017); One Trauma, Two Perspectives, Three Years (The Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism, University of Haifa, 2018, Hebrew); Remaking Holocaust Memory: Documentary Cinema by Third-Generation survivors in Israel (2019).

Jorge Torres-Marín, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Research Methods in Behavioral Sciences at the University of Granada, Spain.

Maria  Nicoleta  Turliuc is a professor at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași. She is the director of the Well-being, Stress and Resilience Laboratory, and director of the Centre for Personal Development and Professional Formation. She obtained the “Andrew Mellon” postdoctoral grant offered by Maison des sciences de l’homme (MSH, Paris, France) and Council of American Overseas Research Centers (Washington D.C.). She has authored 5 books, coordinated 6 volumes and published more than 50 book chapters in the country and abroad. Also, she is the author of more than 50 articles that have appeared in important international journals (e.g., Journal of Happiness Studies, Journal of Family Psychology, International Journal of Stress Management, Journal of Loss and Trauma, Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, etc.).

Jennifer  R.  Turner is a doctoral student in the Adult Development and Aging programme in the Psychology Department at University of Akron (Akron, Ohio, USA). She is interested in the emotional and social lives of adults across the lifespan.

Laura  Vagnoli is a psychologist in Education and Development at the Paediatric Psychology Services of Meyer Children’s Hospital in Florence (Italy). She’s a co-founder of the international research group Healthcare Clowning Research International Network (H-CRIN+). She is a member of International Society for Humour Studies (ISHS) and co-Editor-in- Chief of the Italian Journal of Humour Research (Rivista Italiana di Studi sull’Umorismo, RISU). She has published extensively on the use of non-pharmacological techniques to reduce pain and anxiety in hospitalized children.

Floriano  Viseu is a professor at the University of Minho—Institute of Education, Braga (Portugal). Inasmuch as his professional activities are con-cerned, he is a teacher and trainer in undergraduate training courses for math-ematics teachers. He conducts research on mathematics teacher education, didactic knowledge of mathematics and the use of technological materials in

xxii Notes on Editors and Contributors

the teaching and learning of mathematics topics. He has tutored doctoral theses in these research areas. He is (co)author of national mathematics cur-ricula, as well as of textbooks on mathematics. He is (co)author of several papers that have appeared in national and international journals, and he has presented talks at national and international conferences.

Tatiana  Volkodav, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Pedagogy and Psychology at Kuban State University in Krasnodar, Russia. She has a background in cross-cultural communication and psychological coun-selling, two professions that she still pursues alongside academic research. Her new research project concerns the individual- and country-level predictors of love, mate attraction, and physical attractiveness in sex/gender and cross-cul-tural contexts.

Anna  Włodarczyk, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Psychology at the Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile.  She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of the Basque Country, and com-pleted postdoctoral fellowships from Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH), focusing on psychosocial effects of participation in collective gath-erings and collective action from the cross-cultural perspective. Research interests cover: coping and emotional regulation, posttraumatic growth, polit-ical psychology, social identity, intergroup relations, gender and positive psychology.

Tuğba  Yolcu is an associate professor at Tarsus University, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Political Science and Public Administration. Her research interest lies in the area of Turkish politi-cal life, constitution and political institutions, politics and state philosophy, and political culture.

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Humor styles and self-esteem means for each country sample. (Note that self- esteem scores were multiplied by a value of 10) 25

Fig. 6.1 Humour in cultural transitions 122Fig. 8.1 Recession by Asukwo (n.d.). Credit: BUSINESSDAY 166Fig. 20.1 Position in adult education 390Fig. 20.2 Employment status of participants in adult education 390Fig. 20.3 Duration of activity in adult education 391Fig. 20.4 Relevance of humour in adult education 392Fig. 20.5 Functions of humour in adult education 405Fig. 21.1 Depiction of the main humour functions and their relationship

with Jakobson’s model of communication (Günther, 2003, 18) 422Fig. 23.1 Everyday humour as expressed by laughter; a theoretical frame-

work with examples. Note 1. From the definition for humour as a character strength: Liking to laugh and tease; bringing smiles to other people; seeing the light side; making (not necessarily telling) jokes (Peterson & Seligman, 2004, p. 30). 2. Confirmed humour strength correlates (Niemiec, 2019). Source: FGS (from thesis notes, 2020). 463

Fig. 23.2 Humour–laughter–affect (HuLA) model. Note. The original version (Gonot- Schoupinsky et al., 2020a) includes notes giving more details. Arrows show given or potential bi-directional cause and effect relationships 470

Fig. 24.1 The Humour-Flow Model 485

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Tweet 5.1 Resignation of CHP’s Leader 102Tweet 5.2 The match-fixing scandal in Fenerbahçe Football Club 103Tweet 5.3 Syrian Migration Wave 103Tweet 5.4 Gezi Park Protests 104Tweet 5.5 Increase of inflation 104Tweet 5.6 March 31st power outage 105Tweet 5.7 July 15th coup attempt 105Tweet 5.8 Referendum for a constitutional amendment 105Tweet 5.9 Economic crises 106Tweet 5.10 Shopping bag sale 106Tweet 5.11 Covid-19 pandemic 106

List of Tweets

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Table 2.1 Demographic statistics for the samples across 15 countries 21Table 2.2 Scale descriptives for the four humor style scales and self-

esteem for each country 22Table 2.3 Descriptive statistics for the humor styles and self-esteem

measures for the entire sample 23Table 2.4 Correlations between the humor styles, self-esteem, and

covariates of gender and age 24Table 2.5 Correlations between the humor styles and self-esteem for each

country 26Table 2.6 Predicting self-esteem across 15 countries 32Table 3.1 The speaker/target/recipient interplay 49Table 5.1 The social crises by themes in Turkey (2010–2020) 100Table 5.2 Connor-Davidson resilience scale (Connor & Davidson, 2003,

p. 78) 101Table 8.1 Demographic Characteristics of Participants 153Table 8.2 Bivariate Analysis of Gender (Male and Female) Across

Different Items of ‘Suffering and Smiling’ 157Table 8.3 Bivariate Analysis of Educational Attainment (WAEC, First

Degree/HND, Master’s and PhD) Across Different Items of‘ Suffering and Smiling’ 158

Table 8.4 Bivariate Analysis of Religion (Christianity, Islam and African Traditional Religion) Across Different Items of ‘Suffering and Smiling’ 161

Table 21.1 Categories and subcategories of analysis (authors’ own source) 427Table 21.2 Frequency (%) of teachers on their assessment regarding their

sense of humour, according to nationality (n = 1088) 427

List of Tables

xxviii List of Tables

Table 21.3 Means of teachers’ agreement on items about a person’s sense of humour, according to nationality (n = 1088) 428

Table 21.4 Means of teachers’ agreement on items about what humour is, according to nationality (n = 1088) 428

Table 21.5 Frequency (%) of teachers on the compatibility of mathematics teaching with the use of humour, according to nationality (n = 1088) 429

Table 21.6 Means of teachers’ agreement on items about the compatibility of mathematics teaching with the use of humour, according to nationality (n = 1088) 429

Table 21.7 Frequency (%) of the use of humour in lessons to teach mathematics, according to nationality (n = 1088) 430

Table 21.8 Means of teachers’ agreement on items about the aim of using humour to teach mathematics, according to nationality 430

Table 21.9 Analysis of accounts of the use of humour 431Table 21.10 Categories of analysis of the use of humour in the mathematics

classroom 435Table 22.1 Adolescents’ attendance of the amateur dubbing workshop 447Table 22.2 Adolescents’ reason(s) for attending the amateur dubbing

workshop for the first time 448Table 22.3 Adolescents’ feeling(s) during the amateur dubbing workshop 448Table 22.4 Adolescents’ character choice and preferences 449Table 22.5 Adolescents’ evaluation of the amateur dubbing workshop 451Table 22.6 Adolescents’ limitations and problems experienced during the

amateur dubbing workshop 451