Uncover the Offensive Side of Disparagement Humor: An fMRI Study.

Angela Bartolo,Francesca Benuzzi,Daniela Ballotta,Patrizia Baraldi,Paolo Frigio Nichelli,Luca Nocetti

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.750597

Abstract

Disparagement humor is a kind of humor that denigrates, belittles an individual or a social group. In the aim to unveil the offensive side of these kinds of jokes, we have run an event-related fMRI study asking 30 healthy volunteers to judge the level of fun of a series of verbal stimuli that ended with a sentence that was socially inappropriate but funny (disparagement joke -DJ), socially inappropriate but not funny (SI) or neutral (N). Behavioral results showed disparagement jokes are perceived as funny and at the same time offensive. However, the level of offense in DJ is lower than that registered in SI stimuli. Functional data showed that DJ activated the insula, the SMA, the precuneus, the ACC, the dorsal striatum (the caudate nucleus), and the thalamus. These activations suggest that in DJ a feeling of mirth (and/or a desire to laugh) derived from the joke (e.g., SMA and precuneus) and the perception of the jokes’ social inappropriateness (e.g., ACC and insula) coexist. Furthermore, DJ and SI share a common network related to mentalizing and to the processing of negative feelings, namely the medial prefrontal cortex, the putamen and the right thalamus.

Highlights

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the neural substrate of humor, in both basic neuroscience and clinical studies
While the former considers disparagement humor as a benign means of expressing socially unacceptable impulses, the superiority theory sustained that humiliation is the central component of humor: in Neural Basis of Disparagement Humor the process of getting fun from ridiculousness, our own sense of superiority receives an unexpected boost, humor acts as a sort of instrument that inflates our own ego and deflates that of others, “humor entangled with hatred encourages a sense of moral superiority” (Sakki and Martikainen, 2021, p. 610)
This fMRI data are in line with the behavioral results that showed that participants considered disparagement jokes (DJ) stimuli as less offensive than Socially inappropriate response (SI) stimuli, suggesting that participants try to resolve a moral fight during the processing of DJ stimuli, as these are funny and at the same time offensive

Summary

Introduction

There has been increasing interest in the neural substrate of humor, in both basic neuroscience and clinical studies. Psychoanalytic and superiority theories, as they focus on context, are supposed better providing an explanation to disparagement humor (Ferguson and Ford, 2008) While the former considers disparagement humor as a benign means of expressing socially unacceptable impulses, the superiority theory sustained that humiliation is the central component of humor: in Neural Basis of Disparagement Humor the process of getting fun from ridiculousness, our own sense of superiority receives an unexpected boost, humor acts as a sort of instrument that inflates our own ego and deflates that of others, “humor entangled with hatred encourages a sense of moral superiority” It follows that the inability to anesthetize hearth could make the joke not funny at all

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Discussion

Conclusion