Humour appreciation: a role of the right frontal lobe

Abstract

Humour occupies a special place in human social interactions. The brain regions and the potential psychological processes underlying humour appreciation were investigated by testing patients who had focal damage in various areas of the brain. A specific brain region, the right frontal lobe, most disrupted the ability to appreciate humour. The individuals with damage in this brain region also reacted less, with diminished physical or emotional responses (laughter, smiling). Performance on the humour appreciation tests used were correlated in a distinct pattern with tests assessing cognitive processes. The ability to hold information in mind (working memory) was related to both verbal (jokes) and non-verbal (cartoon) tests of humour appreciation. In addition, the demands of the specific type of humour test were related in a logical manner to cognitive processes, verbal humour being associated with verbal abstraction ability and mental shifting and cartoon humour being related to the abilities to focus attention to details and to visually search the environment. The ability of the right frontal lobe may be unique in integrating cognitive and affective information, an integration relevant for other complex human abilities, such as episodic memory and self-awareness.

Reciprocal neural response within lateral and ventral medial prefrontal cortex during hot and cold reasoning

“…Reasoning with neutral content resulted in greater activation in L/DLPFC cortex (over and above the neutral baseline) than reasoning with emotionally salient content (over and above the emotionally salient baseline). Consistent with this role, the L/DLPFC has been implicated in a series of "executive" cognitive tasks including the WCST (Drewe, 1974;Stuss et al, 2000), Tower of London (Fincham et al, 2002;Rowe et al, 2001;Shallice, 1988), the Stroop task (Perret, 1974;Weekes and Zaidel, 1996), design fluency (Jones-Gotman and Milner, 1977), cognitive estimation (Smith and Milner, 1984), planning and design (Goel and Grafman, 2000;, and tasks (like humor appreciation) requiring the "breaking of mental sets" (Goel and Dolan, 2001a;Shammi and Stuss, 1999).…”

Executive function, mentalizing and humor in major depression

“…They compared semantic and phonological jokes that were rated as funny with jokes that were not, and reported activation in medial ventral PFC and bilateral cerebellum, which co-varied significantly with funniness ratings. In addition, the findings of the lesion study by Shammi and Stuss (1999) suggested a contribution of the PFC to humor processing. The observed humor processing deficits in the present investigation may thus be linked to PFC dysfunction in major depression, as shown by recent studies (Veiel, 1997).…”

“…More recently, investigations have focused on the contribution of the prefrontal cortex to humor processing (Wild et al, 2003). Shammi and Stuss (1999) reported that patients with prefrontal lesions rated the jokes to be less funny and selected more nonsensical endings (i.e., those involving incongruity detection but no resolution). Heath and Blonder (2005) reported that patients with damage to the right hemisphere involving the frontal lobes responded less strongly to humor compared to patients with damage to the right hemisphere without frontal involvement.…”

“Laughing” rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy?

“…Recent evidence suggests that the frontal lobes help instigate laughter, and the right frontal lobes may be especially important for the appreciation of humor [85]. A remarkable recent discovery is the induction of hearty laughter, accompanied by true mirth, during presurgical stimulation of a frontal cortical area (i.e., the supplementary motor cortex), that has long been recognized as important in the initiation of movement.…”