How humor is experienced: An embodied metaphor account

Tingting Xu,Meichun Liu,Xiaolu Wang

doi:10.1007/s12144-022-02918-1

Tingting Xu, Meichun Liu + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02918-1

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Abstract

AbstractThe 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.

Highlights

IntroductionThe classical view of cognition holds that people’s concepts of the world are represented by abstract and amodal symbols in the mind (Fodor, 1975)
Varieties of embodied conceptual metaphors of humor were found in the Chinese CCL corpus
In accord with our expectation, universal bodily experience of humor contributes to a set of embodied humor metaphors similar to what was found in English and German (e.g., HUMOR IS FORCE), and unsurprisingly, some special humor metaphors were born by Chinese culture (e.g., HUMOR IS AN ENTITY)

Summary

Introduction

The classical view of cognition holds that people’s concepts of the world are represented by abstract and amodal symbols in the mind (Fodor, 1975). In recent decades, this view has been challenged by theories of embodied and grounded cognition, which posit that people’s knowledge of the world is fundamentally grounded and anchored in multiple bodily ways such as simulations, situated actions, and bodily states (Barsalou, 1999, 2008; Gibbs, 2005; Glenberg, 1997; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Under this experientialist view of cognition, language understanding is suggested to be fundamentally rooted in people’s sensorimotor and emotional experiences. Neurophysiological studies among both healthy and lesioned participants have provided supportive evidence indicating the activation in somatosensory brain areas during tactile, olfactory, gustatory, sound knowledge processing (Goldberg et al, 2006; Trumpp et al, 2013) and somatotopic activation in the brain premotor and motor areas during action verb comprehension (de Vega et al, 2014; Fernandino et al, 2013; see Pulvermüller & Fadiga, 2010 for a review)

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