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When Sugar-Coated Words Taste Dry: The Relationship between Gender, Anxiety, and Response to Irony.

ABSTRACT: This article approaches the question of mocking compliments and ironic praise from an interactional gender perspective. A statement such as "You're a real genius!" could easily be interpreted as a literal compliment, as playful humor or as an offensive insult. We investigate this thin line in the use of irony among adult men and women. The research introduces an interactional approach to irony, through the lens of gender stereotype bias. The main question concerns the impact of individual differences and gender effect on the perception and production of ironic comments. Irony Processing Task (IPT), developed by Milanowicz (2016), was applied in order to study the production and perception of ironic criticism and ironic praise in adult males and females. It is a rare case of a study measuring the ability to create irony because, unlike most of known irony research, it is not a multiple choice test where participants are given the response options. The IPT was also used to assess the asymmetry of affect (humor vs. malice) and impact of gender effect in the perception of ironic comments. Results are analyzed in relation to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) scores. The findings reveal the interactional relationship between gender and response to irony. Male responses were consistently more ironic than female's, across all experimental conditions, and female responses varied more. Both, men and women used more irony in response to male ironic criticism but female ironic praise. Anxiety proved to be a moderate predictor of irony comprehension and willingness to use irony. Data, collected in control and two gender stereotype activation conditions, also corroborates the assumption that the detection of compliments and the detection of criticism can be moderated by the attitude activation effect. The results are interpreted within the framework of linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) and natural selection strategies.

SUBMITTER: Milanowicz A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5742492 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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When Sugar-Coated Words Taste Dry: The Relationship between Gender, Anxiety, and Response to Irony.

Milanowicz Anna A Tarnowski Adam A Bokus Barbara B

Frontiers in psychology 20171219

This article approaches the question of mocking compliments and ironic praise from an interactional gender perspective. A statement such as "You're a real genius!" could easily be interpreted as a literal compliment, as playful humor or as an offensive insult. We investigate this thin line in the use of irony among adult men and women. The research introduces an interactional approach to irony, through the lens of gender stereotype bias. The main question concerns the impact of individual differ ...[more]

PMID: 29326634

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Project description:Little research has focused on whether there are individual differences among children in their sensitivity to sweet taste and, if so, the biological correlates of such differences.Our goal was to understand how variations in children's sucrose detection thresholds relate to their age and gender, taste genotype, body composition, and dietary intake of added sugars.Sucrose detection thresholds in 7- to 14-year-old children were tested individually using a validated, two-alternative, forced-choice, paired-comparison tracking method. Five genetic variants of taste genes were assayed: TAS1R3 and GNAT3 (sweet genes; one variant each) and the bitter receptor gene TAS2R38 (three variants). All children were measured for body weight and height. A subset of these children were measured for the percentage of body fat and waist circumference and provided added sugar intake by 24-hour dietary recall.Sucrose thresholds ranged from 0.23 to 153.8 mM with most of the children completing the threshold task (216/235; 92%). Some children were biologically related (i.e., siblings), and for the genetic analysis, one sibling from each family was studied. Variants in the bitter but not the sweet genes were related to sucrose threshold and sugar intake; children with two bitter-sensitive alleles could detect sucrose at lower concentrations (F(2,165) = 4.55, p = .01; rs1726866) and reported eating more added sugar (% kcal; F(2, 62) = 3.64, p = .03) than did children with less sensitive alleles. Age, gender, and indices of obesity also were related to child-to-child differences in sucrose threshold; girls were more sensitive than boys (t(214) = 2.0, p = .05), older children were more sensitive than younger children (r(214) = -.16, p = .02), and fatter (r(84) = -.22, p = .05) or more centrally obese children (r(84) = -.26, p = .02) were more sensitive relative to others.Inborn differences in bitter sensitivity may affect childhood dietary sugar intake with long-term health consequences. There may be a more complex interplay between the developing bitter and sweet taste systems than previously understood.

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When Sugar-Coated Words Taste Dry: The Relationship between Gender, Anxiety, and Response to Irony.

Publications

When Sugar-Coated Words Taste Dry: The Relationship between Gender, Anxiety, and Response to Irony.

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