Ithaca College

Assistant Professor Bill Hudenko and his students Mike Magenheimer, Sean Sunderland, Julia Lyon, and Matti Hautala presented their research in a poster presentation at the annual convention of the Eastern Psychological Association. In addition, Nadine Wells from Professor Barney Beins's research team presented two posters at the convention in Pittsburgh.

Bill Hudenko's poster was entitled "Listeners Prefer the Laughs of Children with Autism." His research team found that listeners rated the laughs of children with autism more positively than the laughs of typically developing children. The results suggest that laughter is a powerful social tool that may one day be used to promote social cohesion in families that have a child with autism.

The other coauthors on the poster were Olivera Stojsin, Lauren Ashley, Karen Yoshida, Joe Fraioli, and Matt Worhach.

The research that Nadine Wells presented investigated potentially offensive humor and people's responses to it. One of the posters was entitled, "A Guy Walks into a Bar: Sense of Humor and Reactions to Offensive Jokes." The results revealed that people can separate their judgments of offensiveness from their judgments of funniness of offensive humor in certain cases. In addition, people predisposed to produce humor tended to see less offense in jokes than people who do not generate humor.

The other research, "Why Did the Man Cross the Road? Sexist Attitudes and Gender-Based Humor," indicated that people who show higher levels of sexist attitudes tend to take less offense at potentially offensive, gender-based jokes than people with lower levels. This pattern held true both for women and for men with sexist attitudes.

The coauthors for these two presentations included Scott D'Annunzio, Tami Harris, Julia Robbins, Hillary Doyle, and Andy Pfadt-Trilling on the first poster; and Libby Gordon, Aliyah Emas, Grace Nutter, Julia Rugg, Caitlin McCarthy, and Danielle O'Reilly on the second poster.

In addition, Barney Beins participated in two symposia. One symposium -- "Report on the APA National Conference on Undergraduate Education in Psychology: A Blueprint for the Future of Undergraduate Education in Psychology" -- involved his participation in the National Conference on Undergraduate Education in Psychology, a weeklong meeting sponsored by the American Psychological Association. The "Council of Undergraduate Psychology Programs Symposium: The Internationalization of the Undergraduate Psychology Major" focused on the internationalization of the curriculum in psychology.