Humor Appreciation Affect Creative:Cognitive And Social Psychological Perspective

As one of the driving force of human development, creativity is a vital factor to the unceasing progress of a nation, while from individual’s perspective, the level of creativity can be considered as a watershed of talent level. Therefore creativity has always been one of the subjects that foreign and domestic psychologists focus on and research. Previous research shows that not only humor is an important creative personality (Davis,1992), it also has similar or overlapping parts with creativity in the fields of cognitive processing mechanism, emotional experience, brain mechanism and etc (NieQiyang, LuoJin,2012). Also in our daily life, we tend to consider those with a sense of humor usually have better language creativity. They ease tension or make others laugh via unusual expression, leaving others the impression of them possessing relatively high creativity.Humor can be divided into verbal humor and non-verbal humor according its relationship with language. The verbal humor language can be divided into semantic type(such as pun, metaphor, hyperbole humor etc.) and pronunciation type. Most past researches between verbal humor and creativity focus on the study of personality traits or the relations in between which seldom covers the he interaction mechanism between them. This study intends to appreciate the mechanism and the influences verbal humor has on creativity from the perspective of cognition.Study 1 focus on the effect that different words expressing means of humorous language on creativity. It takes single factor between-subject design, whose independent variable is the type of humorous language. By comparing the creativity task completion of pun type, metaphor type and exaggerated type, we found that:1) for the brain teaser puzzles, the scores of pun type group and metaphor type group are obviously higher than the ones by exaggerated type group and control group; 2)for RAT test, the scores of pun type group are obviously higher than the scores of metaphor type group, also the scores of metaphor type group are obviously higher than the ones by exaggerated type group and control group; 3) for item multi-purpose task, the scores by pun type group and metaphor type group are obviously higher than the ones by exaggerated type group and control group.Study 2 investigates whether humor affect creativity through cognitive flexibility. It takes single factor between-subject design, whose independent variable is the type of humorous language. Under one condition(Group 1), let the participants focus on the pun, metaphor and exaggerated humorous languages, while let the participants focus on single means of expressing humorous language under another condition(Group 2), and then do the task of items conform to the degree of judgment following by creative task. The results show that:1) Group 1 scored obviously higher than Group 2; 2) The two groups scored about the same on the the brain teaser puzzles and RAT test; 3) for items’ multipurpose test, the scores of flexibility and uniqueness by Group 1 are obviously higher than Group 2, and cognition flexibility plays a completely intermediary role between the humor and divergent thinking’s flexibility and uniqueness.Study 3 investigates different power distance between teachers and students appreciate the impact on the creative of the humorous language which takes the two factors between subjects design of experiment. One variable is the humor of language that has two level of humor group and control group, while the other variable is power distance between teachers and students that has two levels of high power distance group and low power distance group. After investigating the humorous, language" (or neutral dialogue material), make the subjects accomplish creative tasks. The results showed that: Main effect of power distance between teachers and students is obvious in the RAT test and items’ multipurpose task.