Sarcastic comments are most commonly used to criticize someone (e.g., uttering, You're early! to a colleague who arrived late to a meeting), but they can also be used to praise (e.g., saying, You're such a terrible tennis player! to a friend who claims to not be able to play tennis, yet wins an important competition). Sarcasm is a specific form of irony, which is used when the target of the comment is a person (Kreuz & Glucksberg, 1989), and is the focus of this paper. Irony and sarcasm are forms of nonliteral language that are often used to communicate the opposite of what is literally said. In terms of textual devices, results showed that emoticons had a larger influence on both comprehension and emotional impact than punctuation marks. Results showed that sarcastic criticism was rated as less negative than literal criticism, and sarcastic praise was rated as less positive than literal praise, suggesting that sarcasm serves to mute the positive or negative nature of the message. The current research uses a rating task to investigate the influence of textual devices (emoticons and punctuation marks) on the comprehension of, and emotional responses to, sarcastic versus literal criticism and praise, for both unambiguous (Experiment 1) and ambiguous (Experiment 2) materials. The role of textual devices commonly used to accompany written sarcastic remarks is also unclear. One debate concerns whether this kind of language serves to enhance or mute the positive or negative nature of a message. Most theorists agree that sarcasm serves some communicative function that would not be achieved by speaking directly, such as eliciting a particular emotional response in the recipient.
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