Playful Teasing Research Articles

Emotional responses to ridicule and teasing: Should gelotophobes react differently?

AbstractThe present study examined the hypothesis that gelotophobia blurs the emotional responses between ridicule and good-natured teasing. Ridicule should induce negative feelings and teasing happiness and surprise in individuals not suffering gelotophobia. Gelotophobes will discriminate less between the two. Their responses to teasing will be similar to ridicule. A sample of adults (N = 105) specified which emotions they would experience in nine scenarios of social interactions pre-selected to represent bullying ridicule or good-natured teasing. Ridicule elicited strong responses of shame, fear and anger, and other negative emotions but low happiness and surprise. Responses of gelotophobes and non-gelotophobes were highly parallel, with the exception that among extreme gelotophobes stronger shame and fear were displayed than among non-gelotophobes. Good-natured teasing seemed to elicit happiness and surprise and low levels of negative emotions among the non-gelotophobes. Among the gelotophobes, however, it was the negative emotions; primarily shame, fear, and anger that were exhibited as the emotional response pattern. In fact, the emotion profile to good-humored teasing was highly similar to the profile in response to the bullying-ridiculing situations. Gelotophobes' perceptions do not discriminate between playful teasing and good-natured teasing. They do not identify the safe and non-threatening quality of the teasing situations. Treatment of gelotophobes should, therefore, involve helping them to identify the play-signals, i.e., the meta-message that the interaction is playful, for fun and that no harm is intended.

Norms for Teasing among College Students

When engaging in playful teasing, understanding the norms for acceptable teasing is critical. The present study surveyed beliefs concerning prescriptive and descriptive norms for teasing among 101 male and 88 female college students. Participants viewed a number of topics as unacceptable for teasing and indicated that a high percentage of common topics for teasing were more closely associated with the teasing of one sex. Both sexes expected men to experience being less upset by teasing, and to be more likely to reciprocate the teasing.

Dumb Love (review)

Reviewed by: Dumb Love Deborah Stevenson Johnson, Kathleen Jeffrie Dumb Love. Brodie/Roaring Brook, 2005163p ISBN 1-59643-062-1$16.95 Ad Gr. 6-9 Carlotta is, she knows, a born writer, and she's not going to be put off by snotty classmate Andrea (who brazenly steals Carlotta's romantic hero and hooks him up with her own soppy heroine) or insulting classmate Walker (who, it's rumored, once ate a cockroach to impress a girl). Her literary hero is actually modeled on Pete, a senior who is her true love, but who hasn't apparently realized it yet; to make sure he figures it out, Carlotta cheerfully manipulates heaven, earth, the odd passerby, the romances of several other people, and anything else that gets in the way. The story is humorous but slight, with a great deal of random event occurring for effect rather than out of any credible cause. Carlotta, however, is a magnificent heroine, comic yet admirable; she's ruthlessly indifferent to nuance, smugly satisfied with her big, zaftig frame, and thoroughly convinced of the rightness of her view of the world, even as it turns out that view is slightly incorrect (it's Walker, not Pete, who holds the key to her heart). Secondary characters may not be memorable, but they're entertaining, and it's diverting to watch them line up to Carlotta's (and the reader's) satisfaction. There are echoes of Carol Lynch Williams' My Angelica (BCCB 2/99) in the playful teasing of the romance genre and the heroine who writes it, but Carlotta gives this fizzy outing an audacious charm all its own. Copyright © 2005 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Playful Teasing: Kiddin' on the Square

This discourse analytic study examines teases among diverse staff to show how social justice commitments play out in actual meetings in a homeless advocacy organization. Before considering specific teases, I discuss the relationship between informality and teasing in this workplace setting. The analysis then focuses on 13 examples which show how social justice commitments get challenged in everyday practice: (1) The egalitarian commitment for all to voice opinions comes into tension with avoiding time-consuming meetings; (2) volunteering to share work can come into tension with doing one's fair share; (3) the more egalitarian work practice where staff take responsibility for setting their own work deadlines can, in practice, come in tension with the more hierarchical director's setting a deadline for them; (4) staff differ in job positions as well as economic and educational backgrounds and whether or not they have experienced homelessness. Teases provide a playful reminder of their egalitarian relationships, that despite staff differences no one is better than anyone else; and (5) race matters so much that in talk a simple reference to color—black or white anything—can provide an opportunity to celebrate blackness in this organization.

The effects of mothers' teasing: Do Japanese infants read their mothers' play intention in teasing?

AbstractThe focus of this study was whether an infant can understand the playful intention in the mother's teasing behaviour. The mother's teasing behaviour can elicit playful interaction with the infant on the one hand, or can result in the infant's distress. In other words, teasing may function as the turning‐point in mother‐infant interaction. Thus it was hypothesized that the consequence of mothers' teasing behaviour would be positive or negative depending on the success or failure in communication of both mothers' play intention with play signs and infants' interpretation of the play signs. Subjects were 20 mothers and their infants aged from 10 to 13 months (M = 11 months) who were observed during 10 minutes of free play with toys that evoke minor surprise and/or fearfulness. Results showed that about one‐third of mothers' teasing behaviour elicited the infant's enjoyment. Especially, mothers' playful teasing accompanied by a smile or laugh led most successfully to infant enjoyment. In contrast, mothers' pretence teasing elicited no particular response from infants. These data suggest that around their first birthday infants develop some understanding of the play intention latent in mothers' teasing behaviour.

Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls: Reading as an Act of Will

The nimbleness Bronson attributes to Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls' may be less an intellectual agility than a formal demonstration of the limitations of the intellect itself. The poem's well-acknowledged resistance to interpretation or, to state it perhaps more accurately, its over-obliging accomodation of a multitude of interpretations, at times mutally exclusive yet equally possible, lends to the Parliament a disconcerting fascination. The poem may well be a presentation of choices or points of view concerning a particular subject. To read the poem in this way is to take it as an example of what Delany has termed Chaucer's pluralistic impulse, the equipoise of multiple perspectives with judgement suspended.2 If we wish to explore these perspectives, however, we must identify the poem's subject. We must make at least a tentative commitment to the poem's principal thematic concerns. Committing ourselves, we commit the author and narrator as well to a formulated position which may, in fact, be antithetical to the process which the Parliament describes. To say with Bennett, Burlin, and a host of other readers that the Parliament is about love or the idea of love limits the poem to a level of discourse and displaces in our reading the act of telling with the content of the told.3 The poem becomes a tract which says something regardless of the degree to which that something is ambiguous or multivalent. I wish to call such a subject-oriented reading into question and to suggest a manner in which the Parliament may be read not as subject and content but as process and act. The narrator of the Parliament does not present us with his understanding but with his struggle to understand, a struggle which terminates in dissatisfaction and irresolution. We have in the poem a record of an intellectual experience, the quest for an unidentified certeyn thing to lerne. The narrator's failure to identify the object of his quest may be taken as a playful teasing of the reader's interest, but I believe we may be justified in feeling that this teasing is taken too far. We are, after all, never told what the narrator seeks, only that he fails to find it. It may be that the object of the quest is not as important to the poem as the fact of the quest itself. If we see a specified subject as relatively unimportant, the experience which the narrator records may assume a position central to our reading of the poem. If we are not to be told what the Parliament is about, we may feel free to concentrate upon what the poem, in fact, is. I would suggest that the Parliament of Fowls is a quest for a point of resolution, a point never attained and perhaps unattainable. The narrator within the poem