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Appreciation
of Humor Doesn't Change With Age Public release
August 25, 2003 Older
adults still enjoy a good laugh
but ability to comprehend
complex humor diminishes in later years A
Canadian study of humor in older adults has found that appreciation and
emotional reactiveness to humor doesn't change with age. Older adults
still enjoy a good laugh. However,
the ability to comprehend more complex forms of humor diminishes in later
years. The
findings are published in the September issue of the Journal of the
International Neuropsychological Society. Lead researcher Dr. Prathiba
Shammi, a psychologist with Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, conducted
the study with the supervision of Dr. Donald Stuss, psychologist and
Director of The Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest. The research was
part of Dr. Shammi's doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto. Shammi
and Stuss captured world attention in 1999 for their landmark study
(published in the journal BRAIN) showing the 'right' frontal lobe plays a
pre-eminent role in our ability to appreciate humor. They found that
subjects with right frontal damage -- from stroke, tumor or head trauma --
not only had difficulty getting punch lines, but preferred slapstick
humor. In
this current study, a second phase of the earlier study, Shammi and Stuss
explored the effects of normal aging on humor comprehension and
appreciation. Humor
'comprehension' is defined as the ability to cognitively or intellectually
understand humorous material, which may be assessed by the ability of the
responder to select appropriate punch lines to jokes or provide
appropriate logical reasoning as to why a stimulus is humorous. Humor
'appreciation' is the affective or emotional response to humorous stimuli
(such as smiling, laughing) once the humor has been cognitively processed
and understood at some level. "The
good news is that aging does not affect emotional responses to humor --
we'll still enjoy a good laugh when we get the joke," says Dr. Shammi.
"This preserved affective responsiveness is important because it is
integral to social interaction and it has long been postulated that humor
may enhance quality of life, assist in stress management, and help us cope
with the stresses of aging." However,
results from the study also suggest that the ability to comprehend more
complex forms of humor may diminish in our later years. Why? The cognitive
abilities required for humor comprehension include abstract reasoning,
mental flexibility and working memory -- all are complex, higher mental
functions believed to be associated with the frontal lobes. Biological
evidence suggests that the brain's frontal functions may be the first to
deteriorate with aging. While scientists continue to debate this evidence,
it may explain why older adults can have difficulty understanding more
complex forms of humor. Participants
in the study included 20 healthy older adults (average age 73)and 17
healthy younger adults (average age 28), all right-handed and
conversationally fluent in English. They were asked to complete three
separate humor tests: appreciation of humorous verbal statements; joke and
story completion; and nonverbal cartoon appreciation. In
the first test, participants were presented with 21 humorous and seven
neutral written statements and asked to pick out the humorous ones.
Examples of humor statements included: (i) Sign in a tailor shop --
"Please have a fit upstairs"; and (ii) Sign in a hotel --
"Guests are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid". An
example of a neutral statement included: (i) Sign in a hotel --
"Visitors are requested to turn off the lights when they leave the
room". In
the second test, participants were asked to select the correct punch lines
for 16 incomplete joke stems. Each joke stem had four different endings of
which only one was the correct (humorous) punch line. The four different
endings included the funny correct ending (FC), the logical
straightforward ending (SF), the slapstick humorous non sequitur ending (HNS),
and the unrelated non sequitur (UNS). For example: The neighbor 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
neighbor answered -- 'Fine, you won't be wanting your golf clubs, I'll
just borrow them' (FC); 'Oops!' as the rake he walked on barely missed his
face (HNS); 'Oh well, can I borrow it when you're done, then?' (SF); and
'The birds are always eating my grass seed' (UNS). In
the third test, participants looked at 10 different cartoon drawings. Each
cartoon consisted of a series of four similar drawings, only one of which
had a funny detail. Participants were asked to select the correct funny
version. Researchers
found that the older adults performed just as well as their younger
counterparts in the first simple test: differentiating humorous from
neutral verbal statements. However, older adults made significantly
greater errors in the other two more cognitively challenging tests:
selecting the correct punch lines to joke stems AND selecting the correct
funny cartoon from an array of cartoons. A
series of neuropsychological tests were also administered to assess
cognitive abilities in abstract reasoning, mental flexibility and working
memory. Researchers compared these tests to performance on the humor tests
for the older group only and found a "significant co-relation"
between the decline in these cognitive abilities and a higher error rate
on selecting correct punch lines and funny cartoons. Despite
these deficits in humor 'comprehension', older adults did not differ from
the young in terms of their affective responses (i.e. appreciation of
humor). They reacted appropriately with a smile or laugh when they
understood the humor. This suggests that, while cognitive abilities
thought to be mediated by dorsolateral frontal regions related to humor
may deteriorate with aging, affective processing related to orbital and
medial prefrontal regions may remain intact. The
authors caution against over-interpreting the results of this preliminary
study. Although the results suggest a difficulty with processing complex
humorous material with age, many factors such as cohort differences in the
type of humor preferred, social setting, and health all contribute to our
response to humorous situations. The
study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Baycrest
Centre for Geriatric Care is an academic health sciences centre affiliated
with the University of Toronto. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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