How humor is experienced: An embodied metaphor account

Abstract

The study explores the humor-body association from the perspective of embodied cognition. According to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, abstract concepts tend to be understood with concrete experiences through embodied mappings. Therefore, the current study attempts to investigate how humor, an understudied abstract concept, is perceived in the Chinese context by means of textual analysis and a behavioral experiment. Firstly, 6,500 entries of the corpus data related to laughter and humor in Chinese were used for the textual analysis. Extensive uses of embodied humor metaphors were found, which provided important linguistic evidence for the interaction between laughter, humor, and body. Secondly, a behavioral study was conducted based on some frequently-used embodied metaphorical expressions of humor (e.g., pěngfù dàxiào 捧腹大笑, meaning ‘to hold one’s sides laughing’) identified in the corpus. Specifically, the participants were instructed to either do embodied metaphor or non-metaphor actions as bodily primes (i.e., ‘holding one’s belly while bending forward and backward repeatedly’ vs. ‘turning one’s upper body from side to side with both hands on the back’) or perform no actions before completing the subsequent joke rating task and the mood rating task. Results showed that the participants who were primed with the embodied metaphor actions rated the jokes higher than those in the control groups who were primed with non-metaphor actions or had no primes. Also, there was no significant difference in the mood ratings across the groups. These findings suggest that embodied humor metaphors indeed affect humor experience and shape how humor is conceptualized. The current study supports not only the embodied view of humor understanding but also the conceptual metaphor account of abstract reasoning, which sheds new light on the theoretical development of the embodiment of abstract concepts.

A Study of the Use of Iconic and Metaphoric Gestures with Motion-Based, Static Space-Based, Static Object-Based, and Static Event-Based Statements

“…The results reported in Table 3 are significantly in line with this view. This suggests that, in terms of mechanisms of embodied understanding, metaphorical and literal statements are similar [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. Some examples of similarity between the embodied/gestural realization of each metaphorical category and the embodied/gestural realization of its corresponding literal category have been shown in Figure 1 .…”

A Study of Using Metaphoric and Beat Gestures with Motion-Based and Non-Motion-Based Metaphors during Retelling Stories

“…For example, making a pushing gesture or imagining pushing movements facilitated the understanding of the metaphorical phrase push the argument. Evidence supporting the idea of embodied metaphor comprehension has been provided by a number of other studies [30][31][32][33][34][35]. Gibbs [36] has advanced the idea of embodied metaphor comprehension and argued that metaphor production and comprehension are a part of a dynamicalecological process and "must always be characterized as embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended" (p. 33).…”

Humor experience facilitates ongoing cognitive tasks: Evidence from pun comprehension

“…Previous research on embodied cognition has demonstrated that certain bodily postures or status could influence how people perceive verbal humor (Strack et al, 1988;Kaspar et al, 2016). In a recent study exploring the humor-body association, Xu et al (2022) abstracted the most frequent metaphors concerning humor and laughter based on a large-scale corpus investigation. They then primed the participants with some of these metaphors by asking them to perform related actions (e.g., "holding one's belly while bending forward and backward repeatedly, " corresponding to the Chinese idiom "捧腹大笑") before they rated the materials containing jokes.…”