AM I FUNNY NOW? : The Neurological Basis of Humor Styles

Abstract: The present thesis will provide an overview of how the four humor styles, affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating humor, are connected to different brain areas. The thesis will also include an overview of how humor in general, and especially three factors of humor including, processing, appreciation, and comprehension is connected to different brain areas. The present study found a connection between these three factors of humor and activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). The four humor styles were all connected to activity in the midbrain and nucleus accumbens (NAc), though they were found to differ in other parts of the brain. Affiliative humor and self-enhancing humor are humor styles found to share activation of similar brain areas, whereas self-enhancing and aggressive humor was found to the least extent share activation of the same brain areas. No neural differences in relation to the four humor styles have been found between men and woman, or between cultures.