|
|
|
|
||
|
||
|
|
||
| SEARCH | SUBSCRIBE | ||
|
 |
Senior Laugh Lines Do Smooth Out By Randy Doting HealthDay,Yahoonews, September
5, 2003 Their
aging brains may not always get the joke, but when seniors understand that
something is funny, they enjoy a good laugh as much as younger people do,
says a new Canadian study. "Humor
is possibly something that is relatively well preserved as we grow
older," says study co-author Praphiba Shammi, a psychologist at the
University of Toronto's Baycrest Center for Geriatric Care. Shammi
and a colleague, psychologist Donald Stuss, have studied humor for several
years. In 1999, they reported a link between activity in the creatively
oriented right side of the brain and the appreciation of more complicated
forms of humor. People with damaged lobes in the right side of the brain
had trouble comprehending jokes and preferred slapstick, meaning they'd
probably pick an Abbott and Costello movie over anything by Woody Allen. In
their new study, Shammi and Stuss wanted to understand how appreciation of
humor changes as people grow older. They gave humor tests to 17 young
people (average age 28) and 20 senior citizens (average age 73), then
compared the two groups. Their
findings appear in the September issue of the Journal of the
International Neuropsychological Society. In
one test, called "appreciation of humorous verbal statements,"
the volunteers read English-language instructions found in foreign
establishments and rated how amusing they were. Some were actually funny
("Guests are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid," from
a Tokyo hotel) and some weren't ("Visitors are requested to turn off
the lights when they leave the room"). Another
test explored how well the volunteers understood the typical structure of
a joke, in which there's a "surprise" (the punch line) that
makes sense in the context of the entire scenario created by the joke. In
one example, the beginning of a joke started this way: "The
neighborhood borrower approached Mr. Smith at noon on Sunday and inquired,
'Say, Smith, are you using your lawnmower this afternoon?' 'Yes, I am,'
Smith replied warily." Then
the volunteer had to choose the ending of the joke, choosing from a series
of non sequiturs ("The birds are always eating my grass seed"),
unfunny statements, or the actual punch line ("Fine, then you won't
be wanting your golf clubs. I'll just borrow them"). Finally,
the volunteers looked at several series of four similar cartoons and
decided which one had a specific detail that made it funny. Throughout
the testing, a monitor measured "mirth responses," checking to
see who smiled or laughed ("defined as an audible response
accompanied by smiling"). The
senior citizens scored poorly on the joke completion test, often failing
to pick the correct punch line and choosing the non sequitur or
straightforward answers instead. They were more likely to fail the cartoon
test, too. The
problem with joke comprehension in seniors probably has something to do
with the decline of mental skills as people age, Shammi says. But
the seniors did do better than younger people with brain lesions. And when
they did understand the jokes, the seniors laughed, grinned, snorted,
giggled, guffawed and tittered just as much as their younger counterparts. "They
did make more errors, but overall, the appreciation of humor and the
emotional response to humor is actually intact," Shammi says.
"It suggests that humor as a coping mechanism is available to us as
we grow older." Indeed,
many studies have linked laughter to better health. But Robert Provine, a
professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, is skeptical that
the supposed medical benefits are all they're cracked up to be. "Laughter
is a sign that your life is going well," says Provine, who wrote a
book on the topic called Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.
"But it's a leap to suggest that laughter makes us well or improves
our fitness. After all, laughter is a signal we send to other people, not
a fitness exercise. Is it not enough that we enjoy laughter and the social
situation that produced it? The presumed medicinal properties of laughter
are vastly overpromised." And
what of the study findings that show older people don't comprehend humor
as well as the young? Provine
isn't too concerned. "Only about 10 to 15 percent of laughter is
preceded by something resembling a joke," he says. "If you want
to laugh more, spend time with friends. Don't worry about humor." Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
|
