Abstract
The sense of humor has a positive influence on mental and social functioning of humans by supporting interpersonal competences and effective coping with difficult situations. The aim of this study was to present research conducted to this date and concerning processing of humoristic content by people with schizophrenia in relation to cognitive deficits associated with this illness and their neurobiological background. Understanding of humor and its effective use require many linguistic and extralingustic skills, including processing of signals from social environment, such as correct recognition of emotional messages, understanding of a context of a humoristic situation, or drawing correct conclusions on a mental status of other people. An efficient use of the metaphorical language allows experiencing amusement resulting from inaccuracies, different semantic interpretations, irony, and sarcasm. A tendency for excessive concretism reflected in problems with understanding nonliteral content and semantically complex language structures, as well as other cognitive deficits observed in schizophrenia patients, frequently hinder the use of humoristic messages. Better understanding of mechanisms controlling the effective use of humor may help to develop therapeutic tools to improve the communication efficiency of schizophrenia patients, as well as positively influence their social functioning.
Highlights
Understanding of the metaphorical language and its use may be considered an issue quite distant from the subject of a sense of humor
The results obtained in studies of Herold et al [21] were partly different, as they noted clear problems with a correct understanding of irony in schizophrenia patients in remission, while their ability to understand metaphors was the same when compared to a control group of healthy subjects
This was confirmed, among others, by Bozikas et al [38] by demonstrating a reduced ability of schizophrenia patients in noticing and appreciating humor presented in a graphic form, and correlation of the relevant results with exacerbation of positive and negative illness symptoms evaluated with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) scale
Summary
Understanding of the metaphorical language and its use may be considered an issue quite distant from the subject of a sense of humor. It is possible to understand and create jokes without a correct use of the metaphorical language, but in that case the scope of events and contents that may be found funny is limited In such case, a situation when somebody slips on a banana peel may still appear funny, but a play on words with a funny overtone becomes unclear. The most widely known right-hemisphere competences are related to the speech pragmatics [10, 11], within which skills such as understanding of jokes, sarcasm, irony or indirect requests can be distinguished These observations led to the concept that, apart from classic left-hemisphere language-related regions, the right hemisphere plays an important role in processing of the symbolic metaphorical language. Original metaphors were processed as fast as original literal expressions, and this suggests that maybe it is not serial processing that is the most important in the process of understanding of new expressions, but the left-hemisphere semantic integration
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