Drawing on social exchange theory and social information processing theory, this study constructs a moderated chain mediation model to test the impact of leader affiliative humor on employees' bootleg innovation. Based on a sample of 264 employees from Chinese companies, this study used SPSS 26.0 and MPLUS 8.3 to examine the hypotheses. Empirical…

Online learning burnout poses a paramount concern due to its detrimental influence on students' academic cognitive learning and mental health. Aiming to explore the association between teacher humour (content-related and content-unrelated) and online learning burnout, this study surveyed 585 college students enrolled in various online courses. The…

Based on the instructional humour processing theory, this multilevel study explored the relationship between teacher humour and class-related boredom. Teacher humour is measured from the perspectives of both the students and teachers. A total of 1365 middle school students (53.6% female, M = 13.81, SD = 1.07) and 40 matched teachers (47.5% female,…

Effective teaching behaviours of instructors significantly facilitate students' learning and development. This study surveyed 3493 college students in advanced mathematics classrooms across three Chinese universities. A multilevel mediation model examined the relevance of instructional clarity and teacher humour to academic engagement. The results…

This study explores uses of the quote-and-reply (Q&R) function in WeChat through conversation analysis. Analyzing 7 naturally occurring chat samples, the research identifies 3 primary interactional practices: sequence-jumping, which enables responses to non-adjacent turns across temporal gaps; response facilitation, where quotes are…

We investigated the effect of culture and social status on sarcasm interpretation. Two hundred U.K. participants and 200 Chinese participants read scenarios in which the final comment could be either literal or sarcastic criticism and the speaker had equal, higher, or lower social status compared to the recipient. Comments were rated on degree of…

In this paper, I revisit a spontaneous "laughter" event in a college classroom in China to decolonize in three steps my/our otherwise naturalized modernity/coloniality assumptions about teaching/teachers, learning/learners, gender, objects, and classroom space toward a Daoist affective ecological imaginary. First, I invoke postcritical…

This study investigates the interactional functions of the "Slightly Smiling Face" (SSF) emoji in Chinese WeChat conversations through the lens of Conversation Analysis (CA). Drawing on 50 naturally occurring chat excerpts involving 12 participants across various relationship types, the study identifies three core uses of the SSF emoji:…

Though previous research has established a strong link between resilience and cognitive creativity, few studies have extended this association to social creativity. The underlying mechanisms of the influence of resilience on social creativity remain unknown. Therefore, the current study introduced sense of humor and positive mood to explore the…

The impact of aggressive humor on workplace dynamics has been extensively examined; however, its implications for university students remain underexplored. Drawing on frustration--aggression theory, this study aims to uncover the consequences of peer-aggressive humor and its relationship with cyberbullying behavior. We employed a 2 (peer…

Recently, there is a surge of interest in a wide range of learner emotions in the SLA field, underlining a holistic perspective of language learning emotions. The present study examines the relationships between the three prevalent emotions among language learners -- foreign language enjoyment (FLE), foreign language anxiety (FLA), and foreign…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the experience of the weight of a backpack as represented in typical Chinese children's songs through a kind of phenomenological approach. Design/Approach/Methods: The core issue pertaining to Chinese children's songs about backpacks is how the weight sense of backpacks is generated and developed in…

Both creativity and humor are high-level cognitive functions and complex concepts. Although creativity and humor are generally deemed positively correlated, it has been difficult to explicitly identify their relationship with each other. The cognitive process of creativity includes divergent thinking, insight, and remote association, whereas humor…

This paper studies how transnational children and their distantly located but emotionally close family members recreate their relationship using applications for online video calling. The focus is on the interaction of bodies and language, and if/how proximity of any kind is enabled. A critical posthumanist applied linguistics is embraced and…

Corporate mission, a core part of corporate culture, plays an important role in the development and competition of companies. The study of mission statements is beneficial to both companies and stakeholders. This paper explores corporate mission from the perspective of linguistics on the basis of speech act theory and adaptation theory and reveals…