Academic Research: SarCHASM

Can movement affect how well we can understand sarcasm?

Project

As a follow up to The Oscars, we expected that engaging in synchronous movement would increase the occurrence of sarcastic comments and comprehension of those comments.  Using the sarcasm identification data from The Oscars, I matched the timestamps of all of the identified sarcastic comments produced by the participant and their partner.  I compared the cases of sarcasm where both participants agreed that a comment was sarcastic, as well as cases where only one participant identified a comment as sarcastic, across the synchronous and asynchronous movement groups.

Results

When all of the comments had been matched, I found that synchronous movement did not enhance sarcasm comprehension, despite increasing the amount of sarcasm the participants reported.  Additionally, I was surprised to find that people who participated in a conversation do not agree on what is sarcastic!  This suggests that sarcasm is not objective, but is more of a "feeling" shared between two people in a conversation.

This work has been developed into the article The Sarchasm: Sarcasm Production and Identification in Spontaneous Conversation in the scientific journal Discourse Processes. Download the article here.

Collaborators

This work would not have been possible without my collaborators, Trevor D'Arcey, Alina Larson, and Jean E. Fox Tree, pictured here with Allison Nguyen and myself.