Does severe traumatic closed head injury impair sense of humour?

Abstract

It is now known that closed head injury (CHI) impairs interpersonal skills, disturbs and/or blunts mood and compromises emotional discriminativeness. This study tried to test whether sense of humour is also impaired or disturbed following CHI. Subjects were 42 CHI patients and 42 normal controls, matched for age, education and paternal occupation. Humour performance measures included time taken to rank jokes according to funniness and to classify them, stability of funniness rankings at re-test and ability to correctly classify jokes into 'mutilated' and 'intact' categories. Non-performance measures included total number of non-verbal vocalizations, and mean percentage of appreciation of the jokes. The CHI patients were highly significantly impaired on all aspects of performance but did not differ from the normals on non-performance measures. However, when vocabulary (WAIS-R) was co-varied out of the analyses only time to rank funniness remained significant. The results were interpreted to suggest a severe impairment of sense of humour, an important cause of which is a narrow lexicon, poor lexical semantic processing, or some other reading dysfunction, some of which probably antedated the CHI. It was concluded that measures of humour, vocabulary, and of pure affective performance such as prosodic and/or facial emotion discrimination could contribute to the rehabilitation process in severe CHI.

Social Regulation of Affective Experience of Humor

“…There are only a few lesion studies of humor appreciation (Docking, Murdoch, & Jordan, 2000; Shammi & Stuss, 1999; Shields, 1991; Braun, Lussier, Baribeau, & Ethier, 1989; Gardner, Ling, Flamm, & Silverman, 1975). They widely report right hemisphere involvement, but the nature of the tests administered, variability in location, and etiology of human lesions preclude these studies from being more specific about component processes and functional anatomy (Shammi & Stuss, 1999; Braun et al, 1989; Wapner, Hamby, & Gardner, 1981).…”

Humour processing in frontotemporal lobar degeneration: A behavioural and neuroanatomical analysis

“…Indeed, functional neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies in the healthy brain have implicated distributed fronto-temporo-parietal cortical and subcortical dopaminergic mesolimbic networks in processing cognitive aspects of humour and associated emotions of surprise and delight ( Goel & Dolan, 2001; Mobbs, Greicius, Abdel-Azim, Menon, & Reiss, 2003; Moran, Wig, Adams, Janata, & Kelley, 2004; Vrticka et al., 2013; Wild et al., 2006 ). Diverse developmental and acquired brain disorders involving this circuitry produce deficits of humour perception, comprehension or emotional response ( Bihrle, Brownell, Powelson, & Gardner, 1986; Braun, Lussier, Baribeau, & Ethier, 1989; Corcoran, Cahill, & Frith, 1997; Eddy, Mitchell, Beck, Cavanna, & Rickards, 2011; Gardner, Ling, Flamm, & Silverman, 1975; Girardi, Macpherson, & Abrahams, 2011; Samson & Hegenloh, 2010; Shammi & Stuss, 1999; Staios et al., 2013 ).…”

Communicative Impairment After Traumatic Brain Injury: Evidence and Pathways to Recovery

“…The discourse of TBI patients may be long-winded, poorly organized and tangential (Glosser, 1993), while some patients may have a lower than normal level of linguistic productivity, resulting in an inability to communicate their basic needs (Hartley & Levin, 1990). From a pragmatic viewpoint, TBI patients encounter difficulties at various levels of comprehension: they cannot go beyond the literal meaning of utterances since they are not able to understand what is implied, as in the case of comprehension of sarcastic utterances (McDonald & Pearce, 1996), humor (Braun et al, 1989;Docking et al, 2000) or commercial messages which require inferential processes in order to be understood (Pearce et al, 1998). TBI patients are also impaired on the production side, to varying degrees of severity: for and producing paralinguistic aspects, remaining attached to the expressed semantic content and neglecting the emotional meaning expressed through other modalities, such as, for example, prosody.…”