Uncover the Offensive Side of Disparagement Humor: An fMRI Study

Disparagement humor is a kind of humor that denigrates, belittles an individual or a social group. In the aim to unveil the offensive side of these kinds of jokes, we have run an event-related fMRI study asking 30 healthy volunteers to judge the level of fun of a series of verbal stimuli that ended with a sentence that was socially inappropriate but funny (disparagement joke -DJ), socially inappropriate but not funny (SI) or neutral (N). Behavioral results showed disparagement jokes are perceived as funny and at the same time offensive. However, the level of offense in DJ is lower than that registered in SI stimuli. Functional data showed that DJ activated the insula, the SMA, the precuneus, the ACC, the dorsal striatum (the caudate nucleus), and the thalamus. These activations suggest that in DJ a feeling of mirth (and/or a desire to laugh) derived from the joke (e.g., SMA and precuneus) and the perception of the jokes\u2019 social inappropriateness (e.g., ACC and insula) coexist. Furthermore, DJ and SI share a common network related to mentalizing and to the processing of negative feelings, namely the medial prefrontal cortex, the putamen and the right thalamus

Consistency conditions and trace anomalies in six dimensions

Conformally invariant quantum field theories develop trace anomalies when defined on curved backgrounds. We study again the problem of identifying all possible trace anomalies in d=6 by studying the consistency conditions to derive their 10 independent solutions. It is known that only 4 of these solutions represent true anomalies, classified as one type A anomaly, given by the topological Euler density, and three type B anomalies, made up by three independent Weyl invariants. However, we also present the explicit expressions of the remaining 6 trivial anomalies, namely those that can be obtained by the Weyl variation of local functionals. The knowledge of the latter is in general necessary to disentangle the universal coefficients of the type A and B anomalies from calculations performed on concrete models.Comment: 16 pages, LaTe