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Note : I had written this blog for 'Your Say' which is a PLOS ONE blogging website. It can be found here:  https://yoursay.plos.org/2023/04/words-have-effects/?fbclid=IwAR0BTcD2XVUWSeEoWKxT0clIvgWztyaJpp5wILe7H6EQBIBPGXUMFftJXog  Following is taken verbatim from my blog above. " Image credit:  Image by  narciso1  from  Pixabay Author:  Priyamvada Modak is a PhD student in Neuroscience and Psychology at Indiana University Bloomington, USA. Her research interests include neuroscience of decision-making in humans, neuroimaging, and neuro-stimulation. Words, in any language, are the basic elements of communication. We combine various words to form sentences and they convey to others what we have in mind. But are words only a medium of communication? Wang and Culotta (2019) looked at data from Airbnb, Twitter, and Yelp, and investigated how single-word substitutions affect perception. In other words, how does the perception of one sentence get affected when...

Note : I had written this blog for SciU which is a science communication platform run by students at IU Bloomington, USA. It can be found at   https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/2023/03/11/what-makes-a-joke-funny-part-2/     Following is taken verbatim from my blog at SciU. " Making others laugh is a tough job, but surely there are a few who have mastered it. So, what is the secret of their success? Is there a formula or a trick to being funny? This blog post tries to answer this question by discussing what psychologists and cognitive scientists (who take humor very seriously :p) have found out.  In  part 1  of “What makes a joke funny?”, I discussed the superiority and relief theories of humor. These are called ‘motivation-based’ theories because their explanation of humor relies on the audience’s motivation to find humor in something. However, these theories are insufficient because they do not explain why people don’t find humor in everything that makes them feel...

Note : I had written this blog for SciU which is a science communication platform run by students at IU Bloomington, USA. It can be found at  https://blogs.iu.edu/sciu/2023/02/11/what-makes-a-joke-funny-part-1/  Following is taken verbatim from my blog at SciU. " Have you ever been to a stand-up comedy show and wondered how someone is able to make other people laugh? Or perhaps you were awestruck by how the writer of your favorite comedy show/movie was able to identify exactly what a whole bunch of strangers will find funny? This blog may be able to quench some of that curiosity. Humor is a human experience that is very effective in elevating one’s mood, building friendships, and easing stress/anxiety. However, humor is also a subjective and complex phenomenon. What one finds funny differs across people, and it is complex because it is hard to point out why something was funny – was it the topic, was it because everyone else was laughing, was it the sentence structure, or was ...