Where does a child's sense of humor come from? That depends on how you define humor and where you look to find it. A recent blog post from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society reports:
Humor can be a very complex and hard concept for some kids to grasp, said [Jessica Black, PhD,] of the Graduate School of Social Work Boston College, speaking yesterday about her poster on this new work at the CNS meeting in Boston. It requires people to both detect and resolve incongruities and to find amusement – involving many regions of the brain, including those that process cognitive computations and those that process emotions.
Black and others, including Allan Reiss, MD, the study's director, and Pascal Vrticka, PhD, both of Stanford, studied how different brain regions were activated as children watched a video with funny, positive or neutral content. Twenty-two children ages 6 to 13 were asked to rate their ability to create and appreciate humor. Then, researchers examined their brain activity using fMRI scans.
The CNS blog post continues:
In general, the researchers found greater brain activity in children who rated themselves low on the sense of humor scale. The systems related to detecting incongruities and those involved in language and working memory had to ramp up to process the funny videos, as did the arousal network that is usually more active when processing negative emotional information. Interestingly, the brain activity related to social processing was lower in these children, suggesting perhaps more difficulty in being able to think about the mental state of others.
Their results suggest that children with a low sense of humor may require more cognitive effort to process humor, Black said. The data also imply that children with a low sense of humor may experience stress and increased levels of arousal during social interactions involving humor.
Previously: A closer look at the way our brains process humor, Humor as a mate selection strategy for women? and Making kids laugh for science: Study shows how humor activates children’s brains
Photo by Maria del Carmen Gomez
