Saturday 25 July 08:15
- 09:45
Hall: 20 - Room 17 SPT
Chair and Presenter:
Cao Yi
Co-Chair:
Ji Li-Jun
Division: Division 3: Psychology and Societal Development
This symposium examines how humor functions across diverse psychological and social contexts—from workplace stress and financial hardship to cultural norms and artificial intelligence. While humor is often considered a universal human experience, its expression and impact are shaped by situational, cultural, and technological factors. Miao explores how leader humor styles—affiliative versus aggressive—affect employee adaptive performance through job anxiety and security, particularly under conditions of technostress. Jiang introduces financial disadvantage as a novel factor that dampens humor appreciation, showing that economic hardship impairs the cognitive resolution processes essential for "getting" humor. Cao investigates GPT-4o's humor generation capabilities, revealing that AI can outperform humans in humor-based coping and conflict resolution, especially in negative social contexts. The final two presentations focus on cultural influences. Ji presents cross-national evidence that cultural tightness—but not collectivism—predicts lower humor production, highlighting how strong social norms suppress humorous expression across societies. Wu builds on this by demonstrating that cultural tightness constrains creative thinking, which in turn reduces humor production, offering causal evidence for the cognitive mechanisms behind this effect. Together, these talks offer an interdisciplinary perspective on humor, integrating organizational, social, cognitive, and cross-cultural psychology with emerging insights from human-AI interaction. The symposium is highly relevant to applied psychology, with practical implications for leadership, education, mental health, and innovation. Each presenter contributes a distinct lens, making this session timely and impactful for a global audience.
