Abstract
To investigate the potential relationship between white matter (WM) microstructure and humor styles, diffusion tensor images of brain WM and humor style tendencies were obtained from thirty healthy adults. Using connectivity efficiency measures from graph theoretical analysis and controlling for the influence of gender, age, educational level, and the big five personality traits, we preliminarily examined the prediction of humor styles from brain network efficiency. The results showed that the local efficiency within particular brain networks positively predicted a self-enhancing humor style and negatively predicted an aggressive humor style. The node efficiency of the left superior temporal gyrus distinguished the benevolent or hostile way that individuals coped with interpersonal embarrassment. These findings from this exploratory study support the hypothesis that WM structure influences humor styles, and provide the initial evidence and implications regarding the relationship between biological mechanisms and mental health for future research.
Highlights
Humor is an advanced function of cognition and is exclusive to humans; it improves social contact and helps people cope with the pressures of life (Long and Graesser, 1988; Lefcourt, 2001)
The repeated measure analysis of variance (ANOVA) results show that the difference in the tendency of the four humor styles was significant [F(3,87) = 53.20, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.65]; individuals had the highest tendency for the affiliative humor style (M = 5.30, SD = 0.79) followed by the selfenhancing humor style (M = 4.58, SD = 0.73), the self-defeating humor style (M = 3.94, SD = 0.83), and the aggressive humor style (M = 3.12, SD = 0.72)
Self-enhancing humor had a positive correlation with clustering coefficients (r = 0.46, p = 0.031); aggressive humor was negatively correlated with clustering coefficients (r = −0.43, p = 0.043), local efficiency (r = −0.46, p = 0.032), and global efficiency (r = −0.51, p = 0.015) and positively correlated with characteristic path length (r = 0.50, p = 0.017); and affiliative humor and self-defeating humor were not related to nodal efficiency
Summary
Humor is an advanced function of cognition and is exclusive to humans; it improves social contact and helps people cope with the pressures of life (Long and Graesser, 1988; Lefcourt, 2001). Humor is a complex concept (Martin, 2001); if people use humor well, it increases the quality of interpersonal situations and mental health, whereas if people abuse humor (e.g., harm or mock others), it can damage their personal social life (Kuiper et al, 2004). The four humor styles included affiliative humor, which improved harmonious social interaction; self-enhancing humor, which maintained mental health; aggressive humor, which led to malicious responses; and self-defeating humor, which was harmful to psychological adjustment. People who favored affiliative humor and self-enhancing humor had personalities with higher levels of openness, extraversion, agreeableness, and selfesteem. People with an affiliative humor style had higher conscientiousness, whereas
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