Is a sense of humour an important ingredient in changing our highly polarised world into a happier and healthier one? Well, it probably helps us to carry on in times of crisis.
I am a consultant psychiatrist currently working at a large psychiatric hospital in Stockholm. For me, looking at life events from a more humoristic perspective helps me to cope with challenging times.
“Humour” and “sense of humour” have always been related to health and wellbeing. We can be “good-humoured” or “ill-humoured” and we can be “in the best of humour” or “out of humour”. The Nigerian-born writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie unexpectedly lost her father during the pandemic lockdown. In her book “Notes of Grief” she writes, “There is laughter in grief”, emphasising her need to laugh and remember her father’s sense of humour.
Most countries and cultures across the world encourage humoristic literature and shows such as stand-up comedy shows in the UK or USA, or the rakugo in Japan (a traditional Japanese comic storytelling). However, people around the world might have different attitudes towards spontaneous humour.
Spontaneous humour is part of day-to-day conversations and can be well-received by the other participants in the conversation. Sometimes, however, it can be misinterpreted and misunderstood.
Spontaneous humour is regarded differently worldwide depending on culture, level of education, and home culture. In Western countries, having a sense of humour is encouraged, and is considered a positive personality trait, while in Eastern Asian societies, attitudes towards the sense of humour are more ambivalent. In some cultures, such as Anglo-Saxonian, self-irony is highly appreciated while in other countries such as Italy, and France regional satire is more encouraged.
Queen Elizabeth’s sense of humour was said to be contagious -The Guardian News
What is humour and sense of humour?
According to the Oxford English dictionary, humour is “the quality in something that makes it funny; the ability to laugh at things that are funny” while a sense of humour is more of “an ability to see the funny side of life”. The origin of the word “humour” is from the Latin “umor”, which means “bodily fluids” such as blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Physicians from ancient Greece and Rome believed that the balance in these four humours determined a person's temperament and health. Later, the word humour was associated with the meaning of mood and temperament.
The sense of humour is a personality trait and a complex social cognitive construct. Both humour and a sense of humour are associated with laughing and are highly beneficial for health. Humour helps us to socialise and communicate our needs, reduces our stress levels, and boosts our psychological and physical wellbeing. Humour and laughter, for example, have been shown to increase heart rate, and enhance endocrine and immune systems. Briefly, the endocrine system is the body's internal messaging system, which uses hormones to contribute to a variety of functions in the body such as metabolism, reproduction, mood, cognition, and stress response (of which the main hormone is cortisol, a “stress hormone”). The immune system is the body’s defence mechanism, and it helps us in fighting infections and other threats.
Interestingly, laughter has been associated with cortisol reduction and augmentation of dopamine and serotonin, two chemicals important for mood regulation. This leads to positive effects such as reduced stress levels, and increased resilience after experiencing a psychologically traumatic event. Humour is also important in a clinical setting, particularly in establishing a good therapeutic alliance between a clinician/ psychotherapist and patient.
Laughter, or humour therapy, is a non-pharmacological intervention with beneficial effects in reducing pain, anxiety, and stress. It can be helpful across different age groups, and it is often used in institutions for palliative care units and nursing homes for older adults with and without major neurocognitive disorders. Clown therapy is a form of laughter or humour therapy often used in paediatric wards with children.
What is going on in the brain?
The underlying biological mechanism of humour and the appreciation of humour is complex and not fully understood. Some studies suggest that some personality traits, such as having a sense of humour, can be influenced by our genetics.
Interestingly, much of the international research efforts are allocated to understanding negative emotions such as fear while positive emotions seem less researched. Fear is probably easier to induce and implicitly study in humans and animal models, while positive emotions such as humour are more complex.
However, research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI - a brain scan looking at which parts of the brain are active) has provided some insights into the neural and physiological mechanisms that underlie humour and the perception of humour.
Several studies have been conducted on patients suffering from conditions which affect the perception of humour such as frontotemporal dementia, autism, schizophrenia or brain traumas. Some studies suggest that patients suffering from depression or severe anxiety have difficulties using their sense of humour although their susceptibility to react to funny or humoristic situations seems unaffected.
Surprisingly, humour is more complex than it might be perceived. I want to give you an overview of this complexity by explaining the main and various areas of the brain involved. Several studies have shown that humour activates a widespread network of brain regions such as the frontal cortex, temporal cortex, amygdala, and the reward system. The frontal cortex is involved in decision-making and cognitive control, and it is thought to play a role in cognitive processes underlying comprehension and the appreciation of humour. The temporal cortex, on the other hand, is involved in processing language and semantic information, which is important for understanding verbal humour. The amygdala is part of a brain region called the limbic cortex. The limbic cortex includes the hippocampus which is involved in storing memories, and the amygdala is involved in processing fear and emotions. The amygdala is also involved in selecting the most relevant information from a stream of inputs and is thought to be involved in detecting basic incongruity, a key element of many types of humour. The reward system, which includes the nucleus accumbens and other brain regions, is activated by humour and laughter. This system is involved in the experience of pleasure and reward and is thought to reinforce the behaviours and cognitive processes associated with humour and laughter.
Our sense of humour keeps us afloat in times of constant crises, and laughing might be a breath of fresh air. I worked in a hospital in the North of Denmark for a few months last year. The whole experience of being in a new country and speaking a new language was somehow refreshing. I wanted to learn more about hygge, the magic of valuing the small things in life, but I ended up binge-watching stand-up comedies and developing my self-irony. Although I am not particularly good at making other people laugh, I often try to laugh at myself and the world around me.
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