Scientific paper synopsis and overview

¶ … neural processes involved in the detection and appreciation of humor. The authors argued that humor detection and humor appreciation are two distinct and separate cognitive processes that are likely to rely on separate neural processes in the brain. The authors have further delineated these two topics by describing humor detection as the cognitive processes involved in understanding a joke, "getting it" or detecting the play of humor in a specific interaction. Humor appreciation, on the other hand, refers to the affective response to humor, or the emotional enjoyment that comes from the experience of a hilarious moment. Because cognitive processes and emotional responses represent separate processes in the brain, the authors wanted to investigate further to determine whether or not humor detection and appreciation are separate functions in the brain, or if they are served by similar pathways.

Hypothesis

The authors informally hypothesized that humor detection would involve neural pathways that are critical to "understanding and resolving ambiguities between situational expectations and surprising outcomes" (Moran et al., 2004, p.1055) and that humor appreciation would be linked more closely with areas of the limbic system, known to be responsible for emotional responses. The hypothesis is considered informal because it was not directly stated by the authors, only merely implied within their introduction, as their approach to the question was more exploratory in nature.

Methods

The study made use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of participants while they viewed a full-length episode of either Seinfeld or the Simpsons. The study was divided into two experiments. For the first experiment, the sample consisted of 12 participants, 5 men and 7 women, ranging in age from 22 years to 34 years. These participants watched full-length episodes of Seinfeld. The second experiment consisted of a sample of 13 subjects, 6 of whom were men and 7 of whom were women, all ranging in age from 22 years to 46 years. The participants in the second experiment watched a full-length episode of the Simpsons. All participants reported that they had watched and enjoyed these television shows previously, but that they had not previously viewed the episodes that were being used in the study. In fMRI studies it is sometimes necessary to exclude participants due to excessive movement during the scan, but this was not the case in either of the experiments for this study.

The materials used in the study were the television episodes. The episodes were recorded without commercials and were each approximately 22 minutes in length. Individuals viewed the episodes through a mirror and listened to the audio portion of the episode through headphones that were compatible with being in an MRI machine. Humorous moments were defined as those that contained laughter, and these were detected by the use of three independent coders who recorded the onsets and offsets (with respect to running time) of laughter during each episode. Because the Simpsons does not include a laugh track, one was created by showing the episode to 82 participants separately and recording the times when they laughed and then amalgamating the results.

While watching the episodes, participants had their brains scanned using whole-brain imaging that focused on both anatomical and functional features. A 1.5 T. GE Signa Scanner was used for the experiment. High-resolution 3-D spoiled gradient recovery sequence was used to provide anatomical images of the brain. Gradien spin-echo, echo-planar sequence which is sensitive to blood-oxygen level-dependent contrast (T2*) was used to collect the functional brain images.

Conclusion

The analysis of the data provided evidence that humor detection and humor appreciation do indeed use separate neural pathways within the brain. Humor detection was linked with increased activity in the left inferior frontal cortex and the posterior temporal cortex. Humor appreciation, however, showed increased brain activity in separate areas, including the bilateral regions of the insular cortex as well as the amygdala, well-known for its role in emotional processing and responding. Thus, in order for humans to appreciate humor, and derive the emotional benefits from a funny situation, they must first cognitive process the situation in a way that makes sense of the humor, or rather detects the humorous situation.

The areas related to humor detection have previously been linked to language tasks that involve retrieval and appraisal of semantic knowledge, which is relevant to the situation. Thus it makes sense that they are involved in the understanding and resolving of incongruities between what an individual expects to happen based on the storyline, and what actually happens (to create the funny situation). Humor appreciation, on the other hand, requires an "after-the-fact" emotional response to the understanding of the situation. The inability to "get a joke" is socially construed as the lack of an emotional response to a funny situation, and is usually the result of not understanding what is funny in a certain situation. This can now be considered a failure in humor detection, thereby not allowing for the involvement of the limbic system in the generation of an emotional response -- or the appreciation of humor.

Relevance