Virgin soil in irony research: Personality, humor, and the “sense of irony”.

Abstract

he aim of the paper is fourfold: (a) show why humor scholars should study irony, (b) explore the need for considering interindividual differences in healthy adults' irony performance, (c) stress the necessity for developing tools assessing habitual differences in irony performance, and (d) indicate future directions for joint irony and humor research and outline possible applications. Verbal irony is often employed with a benevolent humorous intent by speakers, but can also serve as a means of disparagement humor. In both cases, encoding and decoding activities entailing irony need to be considered in the context of the psychology of humor. We argue that verbal irony performance can be considered a phenomenon native to the realm of humor and individual differences. We point out that research has widely neglected the meaningfulness of variance in irony performance within experimental groups when looking at determinants of irony detection and production. Based on theoretical considerations and previous empirical findings we show that this variance can be easily related to individual-differences variables such as the sense of humor, dispositions toward laughter and ridicule (e.g., gelotophobia), and general mental ability. Furthermore, we hypothesize that there is an enduring trait determining irony performance we will label the sense of irony. The sense of irony possibly goes along with inclinations toward specific affective and cognitive processing patterns when dealing with verbal irony. As an application, novel irony performance tests can help to study psychological and neurophysiological correlates of irony performance more feasibly, that is, in nonclinical groups. The aim of the paper is fourfold: 1) show why humor scholars should study irony; 2) explore

A New Test for Irony Detection: The Influence of Schizotypal, Borderline, and Autistic Personality Traits

“…Thus, perhaps not despite but rather because of the more elaborate, ecologically valid narrative of the video sequence and the resulting text messages of different forms of irony, the stereotypical occupation might just not have been so central than in short written text vignettes without much more other information. This would be in line with the results of Bruntsch et al (13), who, taking an extreme position, considered most contextual information simply as “noise” that distracts rather than serves as an additional resource for interpretation. The present research could not control for this hypothesis because all the stimuli were embedded in one stereotypical context.…”

“…Previous research has repeatedly linked mentalization or ToM abilities to impairments in irony comprehension, particularly in investigating reasons for decreased irony comprehension in clinical populations, with the most research available for autism (1, 30, 106, 109), schizophrenia (59, 110–112), and related personality traits in healthy populations (10–12, 113). Bruntsch et al (13) emphasized a high interindividual variance in irony comprehension even in healthy populations and suggested several personality traits (schizotypy, histrionic self-presentation, sense of humor, self-esteem, and gelotophobia) as potential explanations for this variance. These findings raise the question as to what degree personality traits or psychopathologic characteristics are distinct from or overlap with mentalizing abilities in irony processing.…”

“…Among this group of healthy individuals, performance was not associated with general intelligence, serving as a preliminary result for discriminant validity. The result suggests that it may not be a particular executive form of ability, but the individual's proneness or character constellation affecting the recognition of irony (13). However, in future studies it would be eligible to integrate a more detailed validity analysis, e.g., comparing the current test with other paradigms addressing executive functions and more elaborated intelligence tests than the one addressed in this study, even though it has been shown to be correlate well with premorbid intelligence within clinical samples (76).…”

“…As a possible reason for the heterogeneous results, this research draws further attention to a natural variance in irony comprehension. Apart from the symptom-related impairment of irony comprehension in clinical populations, differences in accuracy in detecting ironic remarks have also been found in healthy individuals, although to a much lesser degree (13). A possible suggestion implies a time-stable cognitive accuracy in detecting irony.…”

When Sugar-Coated Words Taste Dry: The Relationship between Gender, Anxiety, and Response to Irony

“…Given the multiple definitional problems and operational challenges resulting from lack of any specific measure of irony, it is not surprising that research on irony brings conflicting and contradictory results. However, differences in irony perception might also result from the simple fact that we differ in how we see the world, what we like about it and how we describe it; this may explain why there is systematic variance in irony detection performance (Bruntsch et al, 2016 ). Previous research by Milanowicz ( 2013 ) showed that that men would use irony with the aim to amuse others, to make fun, and to be perceived as funny, but women would rather use ironic comments to show their disapproval and smuggle in more anger and meanness.…”