Don't Drink Too Much If You Want To Keep Your Sense Of Humour

Main Category: Alcohol / Addiction / Illegal Drugs
Also Included In: Mental Health;  Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 29 Jan 2007 - 0:00 PDT


Problem drinkers have trouble understanding jokes and they don't always find them funny. Research published in this month's issue of Addiction describes a study of 29 alcoholic patients in a clinic in Bochum, Germany who took a range of tests to measure their mood, intellectual ability, memory and psychomotor skills, and capacity to appreciate jokes. A further task tested their ability to predict and understand other people's behaviour on the basis of their mental states ('mentalizing ability'). The results were matched against those of 29 healthy controls.

For the humour processing test, subjects were given alternative punchlines for jokes, some more coherent and logical than others, and asked to choose the most appropriate. The performance of the two groups differed markedly, with less than 68% of the alcoholic patients choosing the correct punchlines, against 92% of the healthy controls. Alcoholics also fared less well in the working memory tests and the mentalizing ability tests, prompting speculation that deficits in these areas can impact upon a problem drinker's capacity to understand jokes and find them funny.

The ability to reason about the mental states of oneself and others affects one's social skills. People with high scores tend to integrate well into their social setting, while a low score can show that a person has trouble with interpersonal relationships. This, together with a lack of humour, can slow down their rehabilitation and recovery. The authors call for a specially-designed rehabilitation programme to help counter this difficulty.

Example of a joke in the humour processing test

Joke stem

It was Mother's Day. Anna and her brother had told their mother to stay in bed that morning. She read her book and looked forward to breakfast. After a long wait she finally went downstairs. Anna and her brother were both eating at the table.

Alternative endings

- Anna said: 'Hi mom, we didn't expect you to be awake so early'.

- Anna picked up an egg and smashed it on her brother's head.

- Her brother said: 'We have a new teacher at our school'.

- Anna said: 'It's a surprise for Mother's Day. We cooked our own breakfast'.

RUHR-UNIVERSITÄT-BOCHUM
Universitätsstraße 150
44780 Bochum
http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de

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