Women and Men Get to the Joke Differently

Men and women process Blondie and Dagwood differently, just as they do with Charlie Brown and Lucy. Beetle Bailey too.

MRI scanning of men and women shows that their brains process cartoons slightly differently—especially when the joke is funny. But the differences don’t show up in behavior. Both sexes find pretty much the same things funny and, for a given joke, tend to give it an equivalent humor rating.

Male and female brains arrive at that identical behavior in different ways, according to Eiman Azim and colleagues at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Science research at the Stanford School of Medicine here.

When men and women read a funny cartoon—or an unfunny one, for that matter—“there are lots of pockets throughout the brain that are activated,” says Azim, a doctoral student at Harvard, who conducted the study as an undergraduate under the direction of Allan Reiss, M.D., director of the center.

Most of those regions are the same, Azim and colleagues reported in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but there are two key differences:

Women tend to have more activity in the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting greater emphasis on language and executive functions.
Women have more activity in the right nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a dopamine-rich region implicated in processing reward and prediction of reward.

One way of interpreting those two findings, Dr. Reiss said, is that because women use more analytical machinery in deciphering the humor, they may not be expecting the joke to be as rewarding as men do.

When—contrary to expectation—the joke turns out to be a laugh riot, their reward center kicks into high gear.

That idea is supported, Azim said, by another finding—that when the joke isn’t funny, there’s no change in the activation of the NAcc in women. But when men meet an unfunny joke, they actually depress the level of NAcc activity.

Interestingly, he said, in women—but not in men—the level of activity in the NAcc is directly related to how funny the joke is felt to be.

The researchers studied the issue by using functional MRI to scan the brains of 10 women and 10 men while they were shown a series of 70 cartoons, which had previously been rated as either funny or not funny by a panel of participants of similar age and background.

Forty of the cartoons were rated not funny.

While being scanned, the subjects rated each cartoon as funny or not, and afterwards were asked to rate the funny ones on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 being the funniest.

The researchers found:

Males and females agreed on what was funny. Of the 30 cartoons previously rated as funny, females found 82.33% funny (plus or minus 23.68%), and males found 82.67% funny (plus or minus 27.92%).
When they were asked after the scan how funny the cartoons were on a 1-to-10 scale, males and females showed no significant differences.
Response time—the amount of time between seeing the cartoon and rating it funny or not—was equivalent.

While the data are a preliminary look at how men and women process humor, Azim said studies such as this are starting to reveal how men and women process cognitive and emotive information differently.

In the long run, he said, it may have clinical implications in understanding, for instance, why women are twice as likely to suffer from depression as men.

A related study, also under the direction of Dr. Reiss and also published online in PNAS, suggests that personality traits—such as extroversion and introversion—can affect how humor is processed.

Taken together, the two studies imply that “humor taps into several neural systems associated with gender or personality,” Dr. Reiss said, and may help to explain individual differences in sense of humor.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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