Social Regulation of Affective Experience of Humor

Abstract

The element of surprise, a necessary condition for the experience of humor, often derives from the fact that the alternative interpretation/resolution offered by the punch line of a joke is physically or socially forbidden. Children's humor typifies violation of physical norms, whereas adult humor typically pushes the boundaries of social norms. Excess norm violation, to the point of offending, can attenuate the experience of humor/mirth. To examine the neural basis of regulation of affective experience of humor by social norms, we scanned 16 normal subjects while they viewed a series of cartoons that varied in funniness and social acceptability. Behavioral results indicated two separate groups of subjects, those who found the cartoons less offensive and those who found them more offensive. In the group that found the jokes more offensive, there was a negative correlation between funniness and social inappropriateness. In this group, the corresponding Humor by Social inappropriateness interaction during functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed enhanced activation in the right hippocampus along with relative deactivation in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). By contrast, the Funniness by Social appropriateness interaction resulted in activation in the VMPFC and relative deactivation in the right hippocampus. These results suggest that the regulation of humor by social norms involves reciprocal response patterns between VMPFC and hippocampus regions implicated in contextual regulation of behavior and memory, respectively.

Coherent with laughter: Subjective experience, behavior, and physiological responses during amusement and joy

“…For example, humorous stimuli (e.g., comedy film clips) have been used to elicit emotional states described as "joy" (Britton et al, 2006;Hubert and de Jong-Meyer, 1991;Johnson and Fredrickson, 2005), "mirth" (Goel and Dolan, 2007), "amusement" (Giuliani et al, 2008), "happiness" (Dawkins et al, 2007), and even "exhilaration" (Ruch, 1995). In addition, positive emotion terms such as "joy" and "mirth" have been used somewhat interchangeably (Panksepp, 2000), and combined descriptors such as "happiness/amusement" (Roberts and Levenson, 2006) and "joy/laughter" (Block et al, 1991) are often used.…”

Do Depressed Patients Lose Their Sense of Humor

“…one might consider the punch line of a joke original but feel offended by the content [28] . Besides, the affective experience related to humor is regulated by social norms and excessive norm violation can reduce the experience of mirth [29] . It is conceivable that the patients, given their current mood state, considered the experience of mirth during the task inappropriate.…”

Finding the Fun in Daily Occupation: An Investigation of Humor

“…Researchers have found that viewing cartoons with written captions or punch-lines activated bilateral temporal lobes; the left posterior temporal lobe processes the semantic component of language and the right temporal lobe processes the alternate meanings (Goel & Dolan, 2007). Moran et al (2004) used dynamic humor stimuli, the comedy television programs Seinfeld and The Simpsons to test humor detection and appreciation.…”

“…Goel and Dolan (2007) using pictorial jokes with punch lines found that the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), basal ganglia, (including nucleus accumbens (NAcc)) and insula are necessary components for the affective experience of humor. Mobbs et al (2003) further suggested that the mesolimbic reward system is also involved.…”

“…As with all uses of humor, there must be sensitivity to the cognitive and emotional capacity of the individual with dementia (Takeda, 2010). Goel and Dolan (2007) asserted that the feeling of mirth originates from the ventromedial prefrontal region which is a dopamine rich reward zone and sustains a strong self-stimulation potential. Midbrain dopamine neurons in animal research have been shown to continue firing with the anticipation of reward, though eventually cease upon absence of the rewarding stimulus (Schultz, Dayan, & Montague, 1997).…”