Humor is a “hardwired characteristic of the human species”(Darwin, 1872), plays a major role in human life , it has been used by different areas such as medicine, education, psychology and so on, and explained from different perspectives such as anthropological, ‘superiority’, psychoanalytic and cognitive theory. The cognitive theory is the basis of other theories, explains humor as a perception of incongruity in a safe and playful context, incongruity is the basic element in appreciation and production of humor and the usual response of humor is smile or laughter (McGhee, 1971; Pien&Rothbart, 1980; Schultz, 1972).
Three factors influence the appreciation of humor. One is the level of difficulty of incongruity, jokes must accord well with the cognitive level of children, too difficult or too simple jokes will limit the possibility of humor appreciation(McGhee, 1979).Two is the degree of familiarity of the content of humor, too familiar jokes also inhibit the humor appreciation(Loizou, 2006). Three is culture. Children laugh what they think is funny, humorous smile or laughter is an attribute of thought, and always involves mental thinking(Bergen, 2008,Scruton,1987). As cultural psychology views, culture and mind are inseparable, there are no common rules for how the mind works, so what it’s humorous in one culture perhaps will not be humorous in the other cutlure. For example, Americans show their humor more often and directly, but Chinese young people usually don’t show much of humor, especially in front of their parents and old people. A pie-in-the-face would be funny to Greek, but most of Chinese would not find that funny.
Followed the literature review , most researches of humor in relation to mind focus on its relation to cognitive development, especially on children’s perception of humorous incongruities(Bariaud, 1989; McGhee,1971a, 1971b,1979; Pien & Rothbart 1976, 1980; Shultz,1972, 1976; Sroufe,1972,etc.), retesting cognitive-based humor theories(Chaney,1993; Johnson,1997; Loizou, 2005, 2006; Reddy,1991, 1998, etc ), There is a sparse literature on how humor is related to cognitive developmental level. Literature on humor cross culture focused mainly on the humor styles, humor sense and coping humor of adults (Bell, 2007; Guo, 2007; Maples &Mary Finn, 2001; Nevett &Terence, 1992; Nevo &Yin, 2007; Roome &Dorothy, 2000; Saroglou&Scariot, 2002;Spotts, 1989;Thorson &Powell, 1988, etc.), there is little cross-cultural comparison of children’s humor(Bartsch&Bainum, 2004; McGhee, 1972, 1983).
The purpose of this study was to investigate humorous laughgter of Kindergarten children in relation to cognitive developmental level across Chinese and Greek culture, two questions were examined:1) If the strength of humorous laughter of children is correlated to the level of cognitive development; 2) If the correlation trend between humor and cognitive developmental level is consistent cross Chinese and Greek culture.
Method
Participants: 60 Chinese ( 32 boys, 28 girls, the average age was 5.01 ± .45) and 55 Greek children(26 boys and 29 girls, the average age was 5.12± 0.39) participated the research.
Tasks: The task of cognitive developmental level was based on Toni Linder (2008), The task of humor was developed by the researcher based on McGhee(1989, 2002), it included four types of funny pictures: 1) Transfer or substitution of features; 2) Distortion of sizes; 3) Abnormal behaviors or situations; 4) Mishaps and pranks.
Procedure: The reserach had three steps. The first step was to measure the ability of children’s cognitve development. The second was to rate the collected level of cognitive development. The third phase was to examine humorous laughter, laughter strength was rated 5-1 from “laugh very much” to “neutral expression”.
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