The Psychologist April 2013

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Have you heard the one about… … the psychology of humour, comedy and laughter?

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments £5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

big picture centre careers 292 new voices 308 looking back 310

this is improbable 260 laughter 264 interview – Wiseman meets Herring 270 opinion: no laughing matter 272

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letters can we be lobbyists for social change?; retirement; intelligence; abortion; unpaid posts; #overlyhonestmethods; humour and health; and more

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news and digest 246 towards an activity map of the brain; new open access psychology journal; the divided brain; anorexia; the cognitive and social benefits of video games; and nuggets from the Society’s free Research Digest service, this month on the psychology of humour YUE MINJUN – FROM THE EXHIBITION L’OMBRE DU FOU RIRE AT FOUNDATION CARTIER, PARIS

How many psychologists does it take… …to explain a joke? Christian Jarrett investigates the psychology of humour This is improbable Marc Abrahams, Guardian columnist and founder of the Ig Nobels, or research to make you smile and think Laughter – the ordinary and the extraordinary Is laughter a universal emotion?

Sophie Scott investigates Rich pickings Richard Wiseman interviews the comedian Richard Herring Opinion: No laughing matter Mike Page does his bit for the planet in his own inimitable style

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april 2013

THE ISSUE American author E.B. White once said: ‘Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process, and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.’ Well, given the audience of fine and pure scientific minds that we have, I thought we would risk it.

I am quite a comedy buff, so it is to my chagrin that we have always struggled to do ‘funny’ in The Psychologist. I’ve been in enough late-night conference bars to know that psychologists are a funny lot, but it’s not easy to capture that in print. This month we have a bash, with a collection of pieces about humour, comedy and laughter, which will hopefully raise the odd smile to boot. In editing it all, I laughed out loud a fair few times, proving I am not agelastic (word of the month, courtesy of Larry Stern on p.310).

If what you read inspires you to make a contribution to The Psychologist yourself, entertaining or otherwise, why not have a look at www.thepsychologist.org.uk/ contribute. The months are flying by faster than a speeding cabinet minister and your publication needs you!

Dr Jon Sutton

reviews how to think like Sherlock Holmes; Uta Frith on Desert Island Discs; big questions from little people; Derek; Barbican Weekender; and much more

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society 276 meet the Trustees; Annual Conference preview; Spearman Medal; and more

new voices 308 comedy and psychology – a personal perspective. Rob Bailey with the latest in our series for budding writers (see www.bps.org.uk/newvoices)

careers and appointments 292 we hear from Stephanie Davies on her work with Laughology, and Elizabeth Sullivan on gallows humour

looking back the Worm Runner’s Digest – Larry Stern on an extraordinary satirical and subversive journal

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one on one

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…with comedian, blogger and neuroscientist Dean Burnett

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Witty people considered particularly suitable for a fling What is humour for? Of all the explanations, among the better supported is the idea that it acts as a mating signal. Research with heterosexuals suggests that men, in particular, use humour to show-off their intelligence and good genes to women. A similar but alternative proposal is that wit is used by a male or female joker to convey their sexual interest to a person they find attractive.

A new study finds some support for the latter theory, in that wittier people were seen as particularly attractive for a short-term fling.

In a departure from the field’s reliance on questionnaires, Mary Cowan (University of Stirling) and Anthony Little used real spontaneous humour, which they created by recording 40 undergrad psychology students (20 of them men) as they explained to camera which two items they’d take to a desert island, and why, choosing from: chocolate, hairspray, or a plastic bag. These ‘actor’ participants weren’t told that the study was about humour, but nonetheless 19 of them gave the appearance of trying to be funny in their answers.

Next, 11 ‘rater’ participants (five of them men) were played audio recordings of the actors’ explanations, and their task was to rate them for funniness, and to rate the attractiveness of each actor for a short-term relationship (dates and onenight stands) and for a long-term relationship.

After scoring the audio, the rater participants did the same for a simple head-shot photo of each actor, and then again for the full video version of their explanations.

A key result is that attractive actors (based on the rating of their photo) were judged to be funnier in the video than in the audio, which suggests their physical attractiveness led them to be considered more funny.

Wit also boosted attractiveness. Across audio, photo and video, men who were considered funnier also tended to be considered more attractive for both short and long-term relationships, but especially short-term. The link between perceived In Personality and Individual Differences funniness and attractiveness was not so strong for the female actors, although funniness did still go together with higher perceived attractiveness for short-term relationships. A follow-up study found that funniness ratings were very similar to ratings for perceived flirtatiousness, and that this perceived flirtatiousness explained the link between funniness and appeal for a fling.

Male wit may be more attractive for shorter rather than longer relationships, the researchers surmised, ‘because it nurtures an impression of not being serious or willing to invest in a mate’.

Female wit, on the other hand, may be perceived by men as attractive for short-term relationships because it is taken as a sign that ‘that she will be receptive to his advances’.

The use of authentic humorous displays is to be applauded, but the study is hamstrung by several weaknesses. Above all, the sample of rater participants was tiny. Also, the attractiveness ratings all tended to be low. This may be because the male and female raters (no information about their sexual orientation is given) were asked to judge the attractiveness of both men and women.

For a study about people’s judgements of attractiveness in a relationship context, it also seemed strange that no information was given about the gender and attractiveness of the researchers, who may have inadvertently influenced the participants’ behaviour and judgements.

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The jokes toddlers make In the British Journal of Developmental Psychology Few sounds can be as heartwarming as a chuckling toddler.

Often they’re laughing at a joke you or someone else has performed, but what about their own attempts at humour? To find out, Elena Hoicka and Nameera Akhtar filmed 47 parent–child pairs (just five involved dads) playing for 10 minutes with various toys. The kids were English-speaking and aged between two and three years.

Coding of the videos revealed seven forms of humour performed by the toddlers: using objects in an unconventional way (e.g. brushing a pot); deliberately mislabelling things (e.g. holding a cat but saying ‘here’s a fish’); making deliberate category errors (e.g. making a pig go ‘moo’); breaching taboos (e.g. spitting and saying ‘that’s disgusting’); performing funny bodily actions (e.g. falling back and putting their legs in the air); tickling and chasing; and playing peekaboo.

There were signs of maturing humour abilities.

The three-year-olds more often made conceptual humour than the two-year-olds, and they showed a trend towards more label-based humour. Two-yearolds depended predominantly on object-based humour.

Moreover, whereas the twoyear-olds were just as likely to copy or riff off their parent’s jokes as to make their own original attempts at humour, the three-year-olds most often came up with original jokes.

There was also good evidence that the toddlers were

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being deliberately humorous and not just making mistakes.

When engaged in a funny behaviour versus an unfunny act, they were four times as likely to look and laugh at their parent, twice as likely to laugh without looking, and three times as likely to smile and look.

‘Children only increased smiling in combination with looks to parents, indicating parents should share their humour,’ the researchers said.

An online survey of 113 British parents (nine dads) about their children’s humour largely supported the observational data, producing an extended timeline of humour-production. Before one year, infants mainly produced humour through peekaboo; from one year they graduated onto chasing and tickling and funny body movements; from two years they started objectbased, conceptual and taboobased jokes; and from age three they started label-based jokes.

The authors said the results showed that ‘toddlers produce novel and imitated humour, cue their humour, and produce a variety of humour types’.

The new psychology of awkward moments In Group Processes and Intergroup Relations The fascination of socially awkward moments certainly hasn’t been missed by comedy writers. Millions of us have cringed our way through series like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office. In contrast, psychology before now has largely neglected to study this fundamental part of social life.

In a new exploratory study, Johsua Clegg proposes a model. Social awkwardness, he posits, is what we feel when the situation threatens our goal of being accepted by others. The feeling prompts us to direct our attention inwards, to monitor our behaviour and attempt to behave in a way that will improve our chances of achieving acceptance.

Clegg invited 30 undergrad participants (13 men) into a carefully prepared room in groups of three. Each trio sat facing each other on chairs arranged in a triangle. They knew they were being filmed through a two-way mirror.

There was also a table with a microphone and five cookies on.

The material in this section is taken from the Society’s Research Digest blog at www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog, and is written by its editor Dr Christian Jarrett. Visit the blog for full coverage including references and links, additional current reports, an archive, comment and more.

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For the first three minutes, the participants were given no instructions. Then another participant (actually a stooge working for Clegg) arrived with a chair and sat down with them.

Three more minutes passed, a researcher appeared and instructed the trio to begin an ice-breaker task (the stooge exited at this point). After three minutes discussion he would ask each of them to introduce each other to the group. Once this was done, the participants left the room and moved to another where they watched back the footage of themselves.

They used a slider box, like the kind used in audience research, to indicate how awkward they were feeling during the social interactions on a moment-bymoment basis.

Clegg noted those moments that participants recorded a dramatic increase in social awkwardness and he crosschecked with the videos to see what was happening at the time.

Moments of feeling awkward fell into distinct situational categories, which we can probably all relate to. These included times when participants didn’t know what was expected of them or what the social rules were (such as when they first sat down in the room without instructions); when a social norm was broken (e.g. one person interrupted another; someone infringed on another’s personal space); a social standard wasn’t obtained (e.g. a person stumbled with their speech, there was a long silence); norms around eating

were broken (e.g. spilling food from mouth while eating); negative social judgements were made by one person towards another, either explicitly or implicitly (e.g. by pulling a face); when names were forgotten or people weren’t recognised; and when social processes were made explicit, such as during the ice-breaker task.

There were also five kinds of moment when social awkwardness plunged. This included: when people were sharing common interests, when one person helped another, when one person was positive about another, and humour. It’s notable that a lot of the humour was actually about social awkwardness – joking about it seemed to make it go away.

The study is a tentative first step but Clegg argues it raises all sorts of interesting avenues for future investigation. Perhaps most significant is the similarity of participants’ descriptions of social awkwardness to typical accounts of full-blown social anxiety – they talked about feeling ‘pressured’, ‘anxious’, ‘nervous’ and ‘crazy’. In attempting to understand problematic social anxiety, Clegg said psychology has tended to focus on the individual, on traits like shyness and attention to the self. His new psychology of awkward moments, focusing on understanding the situations that trigger social discomfort in all of us, and how people deal with it, could provide new insight into why and how socially anxious people come to feel awkward nearly all of the time.

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How many psychologists does it take… …to explain a joke? Christian Jarrett investigates the psychology of humour and comedy

A

references

joke shared can unite a room of strangers. Successful comics can entrance an entire stadium: a sea of faces revelling in the ecstasy of a mind tickle. What’s going on? Deconstructing humour is like explaining a joke; for an experience that has such an inscrutable, subjective quality, to ask how it works suggests you don’t get it. But psychologists can’t ignore humour – it’s

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Azim, E., Mobbs, D., Jo, B. et al. (2005).

Sex differences in brain activation elicited by humour. PNAS, 102, 16496–16501.

Bennett, M.P., Zeller, J.M., Rosenberg, L. & McCann, J. (2003). The effect of mirthful laughter on stress and natural killer cell activity. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 9, 38–45.

Bozikas, V.P., Kosmidis, M.H., Giannakou,

fundamental to our mental and social lives – and so, with philosophers and anthropologists, they’ve taken on the challenge of explaining the inexplicable.

The theories Many have tried to capture what all funny material and experiences have in common.

An idea championed since Aristotle and

M. et al. (2011). Humor appreciation of captionless cartoons in obsessivecompulsive disorder. Annals of General Psychiatry, 10, 31.

Bressler, E.R., Martin, R.A. & Balshine, S. (2006). Production and appreciation of humor as sexually selected traits.

Evolution and Human Behavior, 27, 121–130.

Brown, W.S., Paul, L.K., Symington, M. & Dietrich, R. (2005). Comprehension of

endorsed by Thomas Hobbes is that humour is a way of expressing one’s superiority over another person or group.

This chimes with the content of many stand-up acts, and it received support recently from the observations of a retired unicycling dermatologist. Wherever he’s practised his hobby (and other unicyclists from Scandinavia to New Zealand have documented the same), Sam Shuster reports that he’s attracted attempts at derisive humour, particularly from other men. ‘Lost a wheel?’ is their favoured putdown.

Humour as a derogatory device is also acknowledged in a 32-item scale developed by psychologists about a decade ago. ‘The Humor Styles Questionnaire’ distinguishes between two positive types of humour (affiliative and self-enhancing) and two negative (aggressive and self-defeating). The aggressive or sexual nature of jokes also caught Freud’s attention and it was his contention that humour acts as a release of nervous energy.

Evolutionary biologists, meanwhile, have noted the universality of laughter and humour across human cultures, as well as the links between adult humour and play, and between laughter and tickling.

Darwin called mirth the ‘tickling of the mind’.

Today the most popular theories highlight that humour, whether derived from puns, anecdotes or beyond, always involves the recognition of an incongruity, followed by its resolution (see box, ‘A typical joke dissected’), which produces a pleasurable feeling of funniness – sometimes, but not always, accompanied by laughter. The roots of the incongruityresolution models actually date back at least as far as Kant, who described the ‘sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.’

humor in primary agenesis of the corpus callosum. Neuropsychologia, 43, 906–916.

Cann, A. & Calhoun, L.G. (2001).

Perceived personality associations with differences in sense of humour: Stereotypes of hypothetical others with high or low sense of humour.

Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 14, 117–130.

Corcoran, R., Cahill, C. & Frith, C.D.

(1997). The appreciation of visual jokes in people with schizophrenia: A study of 'mentalizing' ability.

Schizophrenia Research, 24, 319–327.

Dunbar, R.I., Baron, R., Frangou, A. et al.

(2012). Social laughter is correlated with an elevated pain threshold.

Proceedings of The Royal Society, B, 279, 1161–1167.

Fry, W.F. Jr & Savin, W.M. (1988). Mirthful laughter and blood pressure. Humor:

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All the aforementioned theories have their strengths and weaknesses, the most glaring of which is that they tend to describe, rather than explain.

In 2011 Matthew Hurley at Indiana University and his co-authors, the philosopher Daniel Dennett and Penn State University psychologist Reginald Adams Jr, attempted to combine the best bits of previous models whilst adding a much-needed dose of explanatory insight.

Writing in Inside Jokes, Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer The Mind (MIT Press), the authors describe the way our minds endlessly anticipate what’s going to happen next, creating a multiplying spread of mental spaces in which we make assumptions about other people’s intentions and perspectives. The drawback to this arrangement is that it creates a Sisyphean task – to patrol these spaces and correct any misapprehensions. Hurley and his co-authors propose that humour evolved as a way to ensure this correction process is carried out. Mirth is the reward we get any time a presumption is debunked. Jokes are ‘super-normal stimuli’ that target a system that evolved to ensure the mind fact-checks its predictions.

‘Unlike other theories,’ says Hurley, ‘ours not only describes which types of events have the capacity to be funny but it also answers what the cognitive and survival benefits to having a trait like humour are.’

Of course some topics make us laugh more than others; and for many jokes or sketches to work, the recipient needs a certain amount of background knowledge about the world, or in some cases to recognise and share the beliefs and prejudices of the comic (reflected in the anticipatory and representational processes of the Hurley model). In fact, laughter can act as a signal of shared understanding, helping tighten ingroup bonds.

Consistent with this, a study by Robert Lynch confirmed the popular

International Journal of Humor Research, 1, 49–62.

Gelkopf, M., Gonen, B., Kurs, R. et al.

(2006). The effect of humorous movies on inpatients with chronic schizophrenia. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders, 194, 880–883.

Greengross, G., Martin, R.A. & Miller, G. (2012). Personality traits, intelligence, humour styles, and humour production ability of professional

A typical joke dissected There are two cupcakes in the oven. One cupcake says, ‘Boy, it's hot in here!’ And the other cupcake says: ‘OH MY GOD! A talking cupcake!’

The joke throws us early because we don’t expect cupcakes to talk or have feelings. So we correct this misconstrual and set up a representation of a fictional world in which cupcakes talk; we might even start to empathise with the cake’s perilous situation. But this new perspective is shattered abruptly by the incredulous response of the second cupcake, forcing us to return to our initial parsing of the situation – a correction that comes with a rewarding shot of mirth. An extra wave of pleasurable absurdity derives from our detection of the paradoxical fact that the second cupcake talks whilst being simultaneously shocked by the verbosity of its neighbour.

belief that we find things funny that we think are true – the foundation of much observational and risqué humour.

Undergrads from diverse backgrounds completed tests of their implicit beliefs on race and gender, and they were videoed watching a 30-minute tape of the standup comic Bill Burr. The students laughed more at those sections of the performance that reflected their implicit beliefs.

‘Laughter may serve as a signal that we share the joke teller's beliefs, biases or preferences,’ Lynch wrote.

A mental erogenous zone As soon as the sense of humour evolved, it became a central feature of our social and emotional lives – a mental erogenous zone, ever vulnerable to titillation and manipulation. Wit, in turn, became a signal. According to a 2001 paper, we make assumptions about funny people, inferring that they are also interesting, friendly and intelligent. It’s no surprise that evolutionary psychologists studying humour in everyday life have also uncovered consistent evidence that it has become part of the mating game. Men and women both value a sense of humour in

stand-up comedians compared to college students. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, 6(1), 74.

Greengross, G. & Miller, G. (2009). The Big Five personality traits of professional comedians compared to amateur comedians, comedy writers, and college students. Personality and Individual Differences, 47, 79–83.

Greengross, G. & Miller, G. (2011). Humor

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potential partners, research has found, but they differ in how they like that trait to manifest.

Consider a survey of over one hundred undergrads by Eric Bressler at Westfield State College in the USA and his colleagues. The women said they wanted a male partner who would be both receptive to humour and funny.

Men, by contrast, were only concerned that potential partners would laugh at their jokes. Christopher Wilbur and Lorne Campbell at the University of Western Ontario added to this by analysing hundreds of online dating profiles, discovering that men were more likely than women to boast about being funny, whilst women were more likely to say that they were looking for a witty date. A follow-up showed that women were more attracted to a man’s dating profile when his introductory joke amused them; male attraction to a woman, by contrast, was unrelated to whether or not they found the joke in her profile funny.

These observations are complemented

by Robert Provine’s analysis of real-life laughing episodes in public places, which he conducted in the 1990s. Among his

ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males. Intelligence, 39, 188–192.

Guéguen, N. (2010). Men’s sense of humor and women’s responses to courtship solicitations: An experimental field study.

Psychological Reports, 107, 145–156.

Janus, S.S. (1975). The great comedians: Personality and other factors.

American Journal of Psychoanalysis,

35, 169–174.

Kohn, N., Kellermann, T., Gur, R.C. et al.

(2011). Gender differences in the neural correlates of humor processing: Implications for different processing modes. Neuropsychologia.

49, 888–897.

Kuhle, B.X. (2012). It’s funny because it’s true (because it evokes our evolved psychology). Review of General Psychology, 16, 177–186.

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findings – women tended to laugh a lot more than men, especially in mix-sex groups. In France, meanwhile, Nicholas Guéguen found that women were three times more likely to share their phone number with a male suitor who they’d just heard tell a funny joke to friends.

Taking these results all together many experts conclude that women have evolved to be humour appreciators and men humour producers – their wit like the mating song of a canary. This makes sense in terms of wider evolutionary theory, whereby the female of our species is the more selective partner, with men having to compete. By this view, women use men’s humour to judge their genetic fitness, in terms of intelligence, creativity and other advantageous traits.

Supporting this, Gil Greengross and Geoffrey Miller assessed 200 male and 200 female undergrads and found that intelligence was related to the ability to be funny (as measured by the challenge of writing witty cartoon captions), and to

number of sexual partners, and that men tended to be funnier than women.

Moreover, in a cross-cultural study of married couples, Glenn Weisfeld and his team found that men in the UK, China and Turkey (but not Russia) made their wives laugh more often than the reverse, and that perceived spousal wit was associated with other perceived favourable traits, such as kindness and dependability.

Not surprisingly, the invidious suggestion that men are funnier than women hasn’t been accepted without challenge. Last year Laura Mickes and her team at the University of California, San Diego invited 16 men and 16 women to write humorous cartoon captions, and then asked them to rate each others’ efforts. Both genders, but men particularly, found the male-penned captions slightly funnier. However, in a memory test, it was shown that both genders tended to misattribute funnier captions to male authors, thus showing the influence of cultural bias and expectation.

‘The jury is still out about an innate superior ability for males to produce humour,’ says Mickes.

She believes the picture is complicated by the ways boys and girls are encouraged to behave, and the fact that males may up end practising humour a lot more than women. Men tend to dominate the stand-up circuit (see box, ‘The psychology of stand-up’) and that too may influence people’s beliefs about gender and humour.

The laughing brain

In France women were three times more likely to share their phone number with a male suitor who they’d just heard tell a funny joke to friends

Lynch, R. (2010). It's funny because we think it's true: Laughter is augmented by implicit preferences. Evolution and Human Behaviour, 31, 141–148.

Martin, R.A. (2002). Is laughter the best medicine? Humor, laughter, and physical health. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 216–220.

Martin, R.A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G. et al. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to

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The challenge of explaining humour is fraught with such philosophical and cultural complexity, so it’s understandable that many researchers have taken refuge with the more concrete task of mapping out the neural correlates of humour processing. These studies have

psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality 37, 48–75.

Matarazzo, K.L., Durik, A.M. & Delaney, M.L. (2010). The effect of humorous instructional materials on interest in a math task. Motivation and Emotion, 34, 293–305.

Mickes, L. Walker, D.E., Parris, J.L. et al.

(2012). Who’s funny: Gender

uncovered activation that reflects the twin aspects of humour – the intellectual job of resolving an ambiguity or reframing a situation, followed by reward. That was the basic pattern reported by Joseph Moran and his colleagues at Dartmouth after they used fMRI to scan the brains of people watching episodes of The Simpsons and Seinfeld. Time locking brain activity with the funny moments in the sitcoms revealed increased activity in left inferior frontal and posterior temporal cortices before and during a joke (i.e. humour detection), followed by increases in insular cortex and the amygdala afterwards (i.e. mirth).

Psychologists have also used brain scanners to tackle the vexed issue of gender differences. In one typical study, Eiman Azim and his co-workers at Stanford University School of Medicine scanned the brains of 10 men and 10 women whilst they rated verbal and nonverbal cartoons. More activity was observed in the left prefrontal cortex of the female participants, indicative of executive processing, and there was more activity in the reward-related regions of female brains, such as the nucleus accumbens. This was despite the fact that men and women rated the cartoons as equally funny and responded to them with equal speed.

Another study, conducted by Nils Kohn at RWTH Aachen University, scanned men and women whilst they viewed cartoons, but these researchers looked specifically at brain activation differences when the participants found the cartoons funny. This showed that in women, humour appreciation was associated more strongly with activity in emotion-related regions than it was in men. At first blush this seems consistent with the idea of women as humour appreciators, but Kohn is sceptical.

He thinks it may have more to do with cultural influences. ‘There is ample evidence to support the claim that men tend to automatically regulate their emotions, while women “listen” to their feelings,’ he says.

Brain imaging has also been linked

stereotypes, humor production, and memory bias. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 19, 108–112.

Moran, J.M., Wig, G.S., Adams, R.B. Jr et al. (2004). Neural correlates of humor detection and appreciation.

Neuroimage, 21,1055–1060.

Mora-Ripoll, R. (2010). The therapeutic value of laughter in medicine.

Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 16, 56–64.

Morgan, A.J. & Jorm, A.F. (2008). Selfhelp interventions for depressive disorders and depressive symptoms: a systematic review. Annals of General Psychiatry, 7, 13.

Provine, R.R. (2000). Laughter: A scientific investigation. New York: Penguin.

Samson, A.C. & Hegenloh, M. (2010).

Stimulus characteristics affect humor processing in individuals with Asperger syndrome. Journal of Autism

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recently with the question of whether and how sense of humour varies with personality. Andrea Samson and her colleagues compared the brain activation of their participants as they viewed two types of cartoon joke: resolvable, and nonsense cartoons that can’t ever be fully resolved. This showed that people who scored highly in ‘experience seeking’ (they agreed with statements like ‘people should dress in individual ways even if the effects are sometimes strange’) showed greater brain activation in response to nonsense cartoons compared with other participants, consistent with past research showing that experienceseekers prefer nonsense humour. Other research on personality has uncovered intuitive patterns: that people with extravert, open personalities tend to favour affiliative styles of humour; that self-defeating humour correlates with neuroticism; and aggressive humour with low agreeableness.

When humour fails Humour appreciation depends on multiple complex cognitive processes, and in yet another line of enquiry psychologists are using tests of sense of humour as a way to cast new light on neurological and psychological conditions. Given that humour often involves understanding other people’s perspectives, an obvious target for this kind of research is the autism spectrum disorders (ASD), which are associated with difficulties with perspective-taking.

In a study typical of the genre, Andrea Samson and Michael Hegenloh asked 19 people with Asperger’s syndrome and 108 controls to rate the funniness of different types of cartoon, including some that were deliberately unfunny. The Asperger’s group were just as proficient at distinguishing the funny from unfunny cartoons, and both groups derived the same amount of enjoyment from visual puns. However, differences emerged for cartoons involving perspective-taking or social cues – the control group enjoyed

and Developmental Disorders, 40, 438–447.

Samson, A.C., Hempelmann, C.F., Huber, O. & Zysset, S. (2009). Neural substrates of incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor.

Neuropsychologia, 47, 1023–1033.

Shammi, P. & Stuss, D.T. (1999). Humour appreciation: A role of the right frontal lobe. Brain, 122, 657–666.

Shuster, S. (2012). The evolution of humor

The psychology of stand-up Most of us only manage fleeting moments of wit, if that. To stand before an audience of strangers who expect you to be non-stop funny must be terrifying. When Zarinah Agnew of UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience strode out on stage for the Bright Club – an initiative that challenges academics to be a stand-up for the night – she says it was the ‘unfunniest feeling’ she’s ever experienced (see Big Picture, December 2011): ‘An immediate concern is that the amount of adrenaline howling round your body is going to cause you to actually fall on your face,’ she recalls. ‘Then suddenly, like a toddler on a bicycle with recently removed stabilisers finding themselves accelerating down a hill – there's no stopping you now! Would I do it again? Not on your nelly.’

So what kind of a person travels incessantly from one city to another, baring their sense of humour to rooms full of strangers night after night? Back in the 70s and 80s researchers used psychoanalytic methods of dubious scientific validity, such as the Thematic Apperception Test, finding evidence supporting the myth of the sad clown. Samuel Janus, for example, found that 80 per cent of the top comedians he assessed had had psychotherapy; that they were sad, angry, depressed people who used humour as a coping strategy.

More recently, Gil Greengross and colleagues used modern personality tests to compare professional stand-up comics (nearly all men) with undergrad students and comedy writers. They uncovered evidence that comics’ private selves are quite distinct from their public personas, with the comedians scoring higher on introversion than either the students or writers. ‘Perhaps comedians use their performance to disguise who they are in their daily life,’ the researchers said. The comedians also scored high in openness, but relatively low in Chris Rock conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism.

What about the secret to their funniness? Barry Kuhle at the University of Scranton recently analysed the content of the jokes told by Chris Rock – one of the most popular comedians of the modern era. Rock’s material covers issues that speak across time and culture – mate preferences, conflict between romantic partners, mate attraction tactics, parenting, infidelity and more. ‘Intentionally or not,’ Kuhle concluded, ‘his comedy is based on a sophisticated appreciation and invocation of humans’ evolved psychology.’

these more than visual puns, but the Asperger’s group didn’t share this heightened appreciation. In their explanations of the cartoon humour, the Asperger’s group also tended to focus on irrelevant details (although these details might well have been a source of humour for them).

‘We were able to show that not all humour is impaired in individuals on the autism spectrum’ says Samson, who’s now based at the Department of Psychology, Stanford University, ‘however, difficulties in mentalising and a pronounced focus in

from male aggression. Psychology Research and Behavior Management, 5, 19–23.

Stevens, J. (2011). Stand up for dementia: Performance, improvisation and stand up comedy as therapy for people with dementia; a qualitative study. Dementia, 11, 61–73.

Strick, M., Holland, R.W., van Baaren, R.B. & van Knippenberg, A. (2012).

Those who laugh are defenseless:

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

detail-oriented processing affected sense of humour in individuals with ASD.’ Problems understanding jokes that involve perspective taking have also been documented in patients with schizophrenia (Corcoran et al., 1997) and in patients with major depression (Uekermann et al., 2008). But not all psychiatric conditions are associated with sense-of-humour effects. For instance, based on their appraisal of non-captioned cartoons, Vasilis Bozikas and colleagues at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki found no humour appreciation

How humor breaks resistance to influence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 18, 213–223.

Suits, K., Tulviste, T., Ong, R. et al. (2012).

Differences between humor comprehension and appreciation in healthy children and children with epilepsy. Journal of Child Neurology, 27, 310–318.

Uekermann J., Channon S., Lehmkämper C. et al. (2008). Executive function,

mentalizing and humor in major depression. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 14, 55–62.

Vuorela, T. (2005). Laughing matters: A case study of humour in multicultural business negotiations. Negotiation Journal, 21, 105–130.

Weisfeld, G.E., Nowak, N.T., Lucas, T.W. et al. (2011). Do women seek humorousness in men because it

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differences between 25 patients with OCD and controls.

Other humour research is focused on neurological conditions and brain damage. To highlight just a few examples: children with focal epilepsy tended to find jokes less funny than controls, and they more often rated jokes either completely unfunny or very funny (Suits et al., 2012); patients born with a missing or malformed corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves that links the two hemispheres) struggled with narrative jokes but responded normally to cartoons (Brown et al., 2005); and a study of 21 patients with focal brain damage showed it was right-hemisphere lesions, more than other lesion sites, that were most often associated with a loss of humour appreciation (Shammi & Stuss, 1999).

Conclusion Humour is as fundamental to our social and mental lives as breathing to our bodies, it may be able to help and heal (see box), and yet it continues to defy simple explanation. Countless theories have been proposed over the centuries, all of them lacking in some way.

Matthew Hurley and his co-authors believe theirs is the most convincing account to date, offering dozens of testable hypotheses to inspire new research. ‘At the least, I hope researchers begin to think of mirth primarily as an emotional event which helps to control cognitive events,’ says Hurley. ‘That alone will change how humour researchers see their topic so that instead of looking at when humour happens – such as during disparagement, or during surprise, or after incongruity – they will look at why it happens, and at what behaviours it motivates.’

Meanwhile the controversy over gender differences in humour ability and appreciation is likely to rumble on. In as yet unpublished work Mickes is looking into the possibility that men try harder

signals intelligence? A cross-cultural test. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 24, 435–462.

Wilbur, C. & Campbell, L. (2011). Humor in romantic contexts: Do men participate and women evaluate? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(7), 918–929.

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Can humour help and heal?

Although much research has concentrated on the ways wit is used in romantic situations, other studies have explored its applications in schooling, business and health. Consider a study of maths teaching materials by a team at Northern Illinois University. Kristina Matarazzo and her colleagues found that humour boosted interest in a new task for those who started out with little maths enthusiasm, but actually dented task interest for those students who were keen on maths from the outset.

In the world of business, research shows humour is an essential part of negotiations. In 2005 Taina Vuorela at the Helsinki School of Economics sat in on sales meetings held by a company that manufactures and sells engines for use in power plants. She observed the role played by power – of the chief buyer, for example, she noted ‘the quality of his quips did not deserve the level of laughter they received… the sellers seemed to be showing their Laughter has some respect.’ Vuorela also saw how humour was used positive effects on certain strategically, as a way to express frustration without aspects of health causing offence. Humour is also used by advertisers to encourage positive associations with their brands. In a paper published last year, Madelijn Strick and her team at Radboud University, Nijmegen showed that humour has a distracting effect, reducing people’s natural resistance to aggressive marketing.

The area where the use of humour has been investigated more than any other is surely health. Studies have shown variously that laughter can help lower blood pressure (Fry & Savin, 1988), increase pain tolerance (Dunbar et al., 2012), and boost the immune response (Bennett et al., 2003). There’s also evidence for humour’s psychological benefits – reducing depression symptoms (Morgan & Jorm, 2008), lowering psychopathology and aiding social competence in psychotic patients (Gelkopf et al., 2006), and fostering selfesteem and memory improvements for dementia patients (Stevens, 2011).

However, many of these sorts of findings need to be treated with caution – sample sizes are often small with inadequate controls. In a critique of the field published in 2002 Rod Martin at the University of Western Ontario said there was a need to distinguish between types of laughter and different humour styles, and that more research was needed on the mechanisms underlying humour benefits. In a more recent review published in 2010, Ramon Mora-Ripoll, (medical scientific director at Organizació ´n Mundial de la Risa, Barcelona) wrote ‘there are not enough research findings to conclude that laughter is an all-around healing agent, but there is sufficient evidence to suggest that laughter has some positive, quantifiable effects on certain aspects of health.’

than women to be funny, with initial results backing this idea. ‘We’re also investigating whether males have a lower threshold for saying and doing humorous things,’ she says. ‘While the same humorous things may spring to the minds of both males and females, the females may inhibit the very thoughts that males may express.’

And researchers investigating conditions like autism show us that humour research isn’t only an end itself, but also offers new paths to understanding long-standing mysteries.

Andrea Samson, who’s coordinating a journal special issue on humour in ASD (forthcoming in Humour: The International Journal of Humour Research), says that studying humour in ASD will help us to better understand positive emotions and their associated cognitive processes in ASD. ‘It will also allow us to use ASD as a model to learn more about humour,’ she

says. ‘If we understand which affective, cognitive, and social impairments in individuals with ASD are associated with particular difficulties in appreciating and producing humour, we might understand better the components and abilities that contribute to a good sense of humour in general.’

One last thing… I can’t let you leave this article on the psychology of humour without a joke about psychologists. So here goes… Did you hear about the two behaviourists who were lying in bed after making love? One of them said to the other, ‘That was good for you, how was it for me?’ We’d love to hear your psychologist jokes, e-mail psychologist@bps.org.uk or Tweet @psychmag.

I Dr Christian Jarrett is The Psychologist’s staff journalist. chrber@bps.org.uk

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BIG PICTURE

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This grotesque figure is the homunculus (‘little man’ in Latin).

The graphical representation of how the cortex is devoted to different areas of the body, first drawn by Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in the 1940s, has become a classic example of topographic mapping. It has been used as a model of plasticity, and of self-organisation in neural systems, but even now it is not fully understood.

Francis McGlone, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Liverpool John Moores University, has big questions for the little man. ‘Why are hands next to mouth, and feet next to genitals?

Martha Farah at the University of Pennsylvania thinks it’s due to the mechanisms of self-organisation in combination with the flexed posture of the limbs in the fetal position. And why is it always the hom-unculus and not the hermunculus?’

Professor McGlone is particularly interested in what alternatives would look like.

‘The homunculus is a map of the

sensory body. What would a map of the sensuous body look like, and where would it be located? Is there a pleasure hom/hermunculus lurking somewhere?’

Recent research from Professor McGlone’s group has identified a system of nerves in the skin that love to be stroked – sensuously! ‘When body sites such as the face, the arms and the torso are gently stroked, people report different levels of pleasure depending on where they are touched. Interestingly, for the “self-touchers” amongst us, these “pleasure nerves” are not found in the palmar skin of the hand, so when touching oneself it’s as if the sensory hand were exciting the sensuous body!

Tickling its fancy…’

As for the genitalia, Professor McGlone says they are ‘all over the place, depending on which version of the “little man” you are looking at. And even those few studies that have tried to locate them in the “little woman” cannot agree where they are! Sound familiar?’

Image from Science Photo Library, with commentary from Francis McGlone. E-mail ‘Big picture’ ideas to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk.

Funny little man, seriously big points

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FEATURE

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This is improbable Marc Abrahams, Guardian columnist and founder of the Ig Nobel prizes, on research to make you smile and think

I

t can be tempting to assume that ‘improbable’ implies more than that – implies bad or good, worthless or valuable, trivial or important. Something improbable can be any of those, or none of them, or all of them, in different ways.

Something can be bad in some respects and good in others.

Improbable is, simply: what you don’t expect.

I collect stories about improbable things, things that make people laugh, then think. The research, events and people in this article defy any quick attempt at judgement (bad-or-good? worthless-or-valuable? trivial-orimportant?). But don’t let that stop you from trying.

Do ethicists steal more books?

references

‘One might suppose that ethicists would behave with particular moral scruple’, begins the little monograph published in the journal Mind, looking you straight in the eye while grinning and snorting, textily. The two co-authors, philosophy professors who specialise in ethics, thus embark on what they call a ‘preliminary investigation’ of their fellow ethics experts.

Eric Schwitzgebel, of the University of California, Riverside, and Joshua Rust, of Stetson University in Deland, Florida, surveyed almost 300 attendees of a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Tell us, they asked in a variety of ways, about the ethical behaviour of ethicists you have known.

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Clark, R.D. III & Hatfield, E. (1989).

Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers. Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, 2, 39–55.

Clark, R.D. III & Hatfield, E. (2003). Love in the afternoon. Psychological Inquiry, 14, 227–231.

Karev, G.B. (1993). Arm folding, hand clasping and dermatoglyphic asymmetry in Bulgarians.

Anthropologischer Anzeiger, 51, 69–76.

Schwitzgebel and Rust offered candy to anyone who agreed to complete the survey form. They report that ‘a number of people stole candy without completing a questionnaire or took more than their share without permission’.

The ethics experts in aggregate indicated that in their experience, on the whole, ethicists behave no more ethically than do other persons. The paper pauses for just a moment to suggest a broader context. ‘Police officers commit crimes’, it says. ‘Doctors smoke. Economists invest badly. Clergy flout the rules of their religion.’

Schwitzgebel also wrote a study, on his own, called ‘Do ethicists steal more books?’, which elbowed its way into the face of readers of the journal Philosophical Psychology. He drew up lists of philosophy books – some specifically about ethics, others not. Then, using information available through computer networks, he examined the status of every copy of those books in 19 British and 13 American academic library systems.

Schwitzgebel looked separately at what happened to newish books (Buchanan’s Ethics, Efficiency and the Market; Hurd’s Moral Combat; and suchlike bestsellers), and to older ones (Kant’s Critique of Judgment; Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil; and other beloved masterworks). It was roughly the same story. The ethics books, whether youthful or aged, went missing more often than did the not-quite-so-relentlessly-aboutethics books.

Karev, G.B. (2000). Cinema seating in right, mixed and left handers. Cortex, 36, 747–752.

Lewis, M.B. (2006). Eye-witnesses should not do cryptic crosswords prior to identity parades. Perception, 35, 1433–1436.

Miller Van Blerkom, L. (1995). Clown doctors. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 9, 462–475.

Richter, A. & Zonner, L.A. (1996).

The youthful, ‘relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50 per cent more likely to be missing’. The aged, ‘classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing’. (For those older books, Schwitzgebel looked only at the American libraries, muttering that ‘the British library catalog system proved impractically unwieldy’.)

More recently, Schwitzgebel has written in his blog about what he calls ‘the phenomenology of being a jerk’. He identifies two important components of jerkhood. ‘First: an implicit or explicit sense that you are an “important” person.’

‘Second: an implicit or explicit sense that you are surrounded by idiots.’

To determine whether you yourself might be a jerk, Schwitzgebel suggests, look at those two simple criteria. He adds the almost mandatory thought: ‘I can’t say that I myself show up as well by this selfdiagnostic as I would have hoped.’

Research proposals: Sex with a stranger ‘Gender differences in receptivity to sexual offers’ should be a screamingly famous research report. Yet most people don’t know about it. Or maybe they can’t believe it exists.

It exists.

Published in 1989 in the Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, this 17page sizzler tells a simple story. Five women and four men were sent, one at a time, on to a university campus. Each approached strangers of the opposite sex, and said: ‘I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be very attractive.’ They then invited the strangers to have sex.

This experiment was performed twice, once in 1978, and again in 1982. The results were the same. As the report describes it: ‘The great majority of men were willing to have a sexual liaison with the women who approach them. Not one

Clowning: An opportunity for ministry.

Journal of Religion and Health, 35, 141–148.

Schmidt, S.R. (2002). Outstanding memories: The positive and negative effects of nudes on memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 28, 353–361.

Schwitzgebel, E. & Rust, J. (2009). The moral behavior of ethicists: Peer opinion. Mind, 118, 1043–1059.

Schwitzgebel, E. & Rust, J. (2010). Do ethicists and political philosophers vote more often than other professors? Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1, 189–199.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2009). Do ethicists steal more books? Philosophical Psychology, 22, 711–725.

Weyers, P., Milnik, A., Müller, C. & Pauli, P. (2006). How to choose a seat in theatres. Laterality, 11, 181–193.

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woman agreed to a sexual liaison.’

The study was conceived and directed by two psychology professors, Elaine Hatfield of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Russell D. Clark III of Florida State University. It begins with a declaration: ‘According to cultural stereotypes, men are eager for sexual intercourse; it is women who set limits on such activity.’ It ends with a declamation: ‘Regardless of why we secured these data, however, the existence of these pronounced gender differences is interesting.’

The paper never does exactly explain why they secured the data, but it does supply a list of 59 earlier published studies that they found useful, interesting, or at least worth listing. These include four other sex-related reports by Hatfield and three technical reports from the prestigious US Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.

Fourteen years later, Hatfield and Clark published a study called ‘Love in the afternoon’, in which they tried to explain why they had done the experiment and what happened as a

result. Here is a nutshell version of their explanation: In the spring of 1978, Russ Clark was teaching a small class in experimental social psychology...

Russ dropped a bomb. ‘Most women’, he said, ‘can get any man to do anything they want. Men have it harder. They have to worry about strategy, timing, and “tricks”.’

Not surprisingly, the women in the class were incensed. One woman sent a pencil flying in Russ’s direction.

In one of Russ’s finer moments, he observed: ‘We don’t have to fight. We don’t have to upset one another. It’s an empirical question. Let’s design a field experiment to see who’s right!’

Journal after journal refused to publish their paper, giving harsh comments of which this one is typical: ‘The study itself is too weird, trivial and frivolous to be interesting. Who cares what the result is to such a silly question.’

But Hatfield and Clark were undaunted. As they explain at the end of ‘Love in the afternoon’: ‘The trivial, uninteresting, and morally suspect research of today often turns out to be the “classic study” of tomorrow.’

Ministry of Clowns

Some Ig Nobel winners Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan and Tulio Guadalupe for their study ‘Leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller’.

Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, Norway, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.

Richard Stephens and colleagues at Keele University for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.

Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it’s all too easy to overlook anything else – even a woman in a gorilla suit.

Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli of the University of Rome La Sapienza, and Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, for their report ‘Politicians’ uniquely simple personalities’.

Angelika Richter and Lori Zonner have a funny way of captivating readers. In a study called ‘Clowning: An opportunity for ministry’ they write: ‘Experiences over five years interacting with patients as the clown Jingles and the experiment and experience of one afternoon as the clown Hairie in a hospital led the authors to reflect on the deeper meaning of clowns…

Before sharing further experiences with clowning in ministry, and telling about one afternoon when Jingles and Hairie were on their way through the hospital, let us first describe a common meaning of clowning.’

Richter, a chaplain and minister at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, and her colleague Zonner published their monograph in 1996 in the Journal of Religion and Health.

Clowning, as commonly recognised, is for them just a beginning. Richter and Zonner explain that ‘the clown is recognised universally as a symbol of happiness and creates smiles and laughter. The clown ministry, however, is not just entertainment, nor is it preaching in a costume.’

Looking beyond that research, one sees that clowning ministry is often confined to hospitals, but not to any one country. In Scotland, Olive Fleming

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

Drane of Aberdeenshire proudly administers the yuks. In England, Roly Bain of Bristol is the most prominent of this variety of spiritual clown. The US is bursting with clowns of a ministerial turn.

For anyone wishing to be initiated, resources abound.

Janet Litherland’s book The Clown Ministry Handbook, published in 1982, offers something of a one-stop education.

The table of contents lays out the basics: ‘An overview of the activities of clowns throughout history’; ‘The “where” and “how” of clown ministry’; ‘How to entertain an audience by making a wide variety of objects from balloons’; and more. The final chapter crowns it: ‘Eleven clown ministers tell how they came to be clowns for Christ’.

However, not everyone loves a clown, even a worshipful clown. And sometimes, clownish optimism meets donnish discouragement.

Linda Miller Van Blerkom, of Drew University in New Jersey, published a study in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, where she cautioned that ‘small children are frequently afraid of clowns, whose bizarre appearance suggests the dangers of the unknown and uncanny, and whose performances dramatise common childhood fears’.

To clown-lovers, Miller Van Blerkom’s work may sound flat, lifeless, sterile. But the Economic and Social Research Council warned in 2007 that even twodimensional artwork of clowns, affixed to a wall of a hospital, can be problematic.

Citing research performed by Penny Curtis of the University of Sheffield (and which it sponsored), the Council issued

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an alert to hospitals, in 2007, with the headline ‘Children’s Wards – Don’t Send in the Clowns’. The most chilling detail: ‘All children disliked the use of clowns in the décor, with even the oldest children seeing them as scary.’

Take a seat in Bulgaria

Karev experiment, at least publicly, until 2006. In that year, a German research quartet took the stage.

Peter Weyers and colleagues at Bavarian Julius-Maximilians University repeated Karev’s experiment, but with some twists. The original cinema diagrams showed the film screen at the top of the page. But here, some diagrams showed the screen at the bottom of the page, or on one side. Looking at these diagrams, people had no real preference for sitting with the screen to their left or to their right.

The Germans published a report in the journal Laterality. There could be many reasons, they said, why the Bulgarians opted for the right. Top of the list: the odd fact that most people

When people walk into a cinema, where do they choose to sit? The question has vexed several brain researchers.

The topic arose in Bulgaria. Bulgarian cinema receives less global attention than its counterparts in other developed countries. Bulgarian cinema audiences receive correspondingly little scrutiny.

This attention deficit was addressed, slightly, in the year 2000, when George B. Karev of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences conducted his study ‘Cinema seating in right, mixed and left handers’.

At the time, Karev was best known for his 1993 report ‘Arm folding, hand clasping and dermatoglyphic asymmetry in Bulgarians’. The cinema seating study, dealing as it does in questions of left versus right, in some respects builds on the earlier work.

Karev made some diagrams showing the seat locations in five different cinemas. He blocked off the seats in the middle, and asked people to tell him which of the open seats they would select. Most chose seats on the right side. This was especially true among people who, in answer to another question, said they were rightCinema – which side are you on? handed.

Why this general preference for the right side? Most probably, Karev says, it’s because: (a) films pack an emotional habitually turn to the right when entering wallop; (b) one side of the brain is better a room. at handling emotions; and (c) That’s how things stand, for now, on experienced film-goers learn to sit where the mental and cinematic significance of that side of their brain will have the best choosing sides in Bulgaria or elsewhere. vantage point.

The journal Laterality, by the way, is The response of the scientific edited by Chris McManus, Professor of community was immediate, if minuscule.

Psychology and Medical Education at Professor Sergio Della Sala of the University College London. McManus University of Aberdeen suggested that was awarded the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize ‘one possible way to find out if Karev is in biology for the short treatise ‘Scrotal correct would be to ask people to sit in a asymmetry in man and in ancient room exempt from any emotional content sculpture’, which he wrote soon after – example a large waiting room, a lecture graduating from medical school. The theatre, even possibly the House of journal Nature published the article in Lords?’ Della Sala made this comment in 1976, and featured it on their front cover. the form of a press release. The press release announced two things: that Crosswords and lineups Karev’s study had just been published; Crossword puzzles are a threat to the and that Della Sala was the new editor of criminal justice system. Indeed, they the journal that published it. The journal may have been doing damage for decades, is called Cortex. causing guilty persons to be set free and That was about the extent of the innocent ones to become enmeshed in scientific community’s reaction to the

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hellish entanglements with the courts and jails. A 2006 study by Michael B. Lewis, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University, published in the journal Perception, reveals that the danger comes mostly from one variety of crossword puzzle.

Lewis has no qualms identifying the culprit. Beware, he warns, of the so-called cryptic crossword puzzle. Accordingly, the study is called ‘Eye-witnesses should not do cryptic crosswords prior to identity parades’.

Once you know what to look for, cryptic crosswords are easy to recognise.

The regular, or ‘literal’, crossword, Lewis writes, ‘is a task where words must be filled within a grid where the clues to these words are literal definitions’.

Cryptic crosswords ‘use a similar grid but the clues involve double meanings and sometimes involve anagrams or uncommon ways of thinking about words’.

Cryptic crosswords enter the picture in seemingly innocuous ways. Police or court officials may – through a toxic mix of good intentions and ignorance – be tempted to introduce them exactly where they can do harm. Lewis explains: ‘The identification of an offender by a witness to a crime often forms an important element of a prosecution’s case. While considerable importance is placed by jurors on the identification of the offender by a witness (such as a suspect being picked out from an identity parade), research tells us that these identifications can often be wrong and sometimes lead to wrongful convictions.’

‘It would be undesirable’, he writes, ‘to have witnesses doing something before an identity parade that would make them worse at picking out the offender…

Consider what witnesses may do before an identity parade. It is possible that they might be doing something to pass the time (eg read or do a puzzle). It is possible that some of these potential activities may lead to a detriment in face processing.’

Determined to determine whether reading or doing a puzzle can lead to a detriment in face processing, Lewis did an experiment. In his words: ‘The tasks tested within the experiment presented here were: reading a passage from Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code; solving a sudoku puzzle; solving a literal crossword; solving a cryptic crossword’.

Sixty volunteers took part. They looked at some faces, ‘then engaged in their puzzle or read the passage for 5 minutes’. Lewis then began to test their

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memory of the faces. ‘Between each test item, however, participants continued with their puzzle or read the text for 30 seconds.’

Sudoku and literal crosswords seemed not to affect how well the volunteers identified the faces. But, according to Lewis, when the volunteers did cryptic crossword puzzles, they became less reliable at recognising faces: ‘In doing a cryptic crossword, one typically has to suppress the immediately obvious meaning of a word within the clue in favour of less obvious and more cryptic meanings. The suppression of the obvious features of the face, the obvious global letter, or the obvious literal meaning of a word may provide the device by which face-recognition performance is affected.

This observation, however, does not explain how such suppression has such a detrimental effect on face recognition.

That is, the question of what the mechanism is by which any of these tasks influences the supposedly modular facerecognition system is not addressed here.’

The study hammers home its message: ‘The practical implication of this research is, as the title suggests, that eyewitnesses should not do cryptic crosswords before an identity parade.’

The Nudist Research Library The American Nudist Research Library has a fairly simple motto: ‘Dedicated to preserving nudist history with a comprehensive archive of nudist material’.

Like all specialist libraries, it operates with a limited budget. Thus, the library covers only what it needs to.

The institution marked its 25th anniversary in 2004. The celebratory material explained that ‘the Library was established in 1979 to preserve the history of the social nudist movement in North America and throughout the world.

It is a repository of material rather than a circulating library. Visitors may read or view most of the collection as long as they are in the Library.’

The facility is in Kissimmee, Florida, on the grounds of Cypress Cove Nudist Resort, just a few miles from Disney World. Visitors are welcomed, whether or not they come equipped with clothing.

A library is a good place to conduct research. This particular library may be a good place to settle an ever-so-slight controversy in the field of cognitive science. Cognitive scientists, some of them, want to know how looking at nude bodies can affect a person’s memory.

Dr Stephen R. Schmidt, a professor of psychology at Middle Tennessee State University, tried to settle the question by

showing nude photographs to a group of volunteers. He conducted a series of experiments, which he subsequently described in a report called ‘Outstanding memories: The positive and negative effects of nudes on memory’.

Schmidt exposed his volunteers to carefully selected photographs, which he presented in various orders and paced at different time intervals. Here is a partial list of the photos: woman pumping gas; man climbing a mountain; woman sitting at a window reading a newspaper; man stacking wood; woman playing a cello.

Some – but not all – of the men were nude. Ditto for the women.

This was a sophisticated follow-up to much earlier experiments that were done by psychologists Douglas Detterman and Norman Ellis. Detterman and Ellis embedded a photo of male and female nudes, which they obtained from an issue of Sunbathing magazine, into a series of black-and-white line drawings of common objects, and then showed the lot of them to volunteers. The result: ‘Not surprisingly, memory for the nudes was much better than memory for [other items] – approaching 100% correct.

However, the presence of the nudes caused amnesia, in that memory for items immediately preceding and following the nudes was poor.’

The point of this research? To tease out the subtle nature of why some memories are retained and others forgotten. Why nudes? Because, says Schmidt, ‘nudes (rather than other emotional stimuli) seem to provide reliably strong effects’.

Live nudes would seem to provide more reliably strong effects than one would get from photographs of nudes.

The American Nudist Research Library has nudes of both varieties, a bounty that should be of interest to scientists.

And it may be instructive to librarians elsewhere who lament that people don’t visit libraries the way they used to.

The psychology of repetitive reading A typical adult knows almost nothing about the psychology of repetitive reading.

This is not surprising. Research psychologists, as a group, know little about the subject, though some have attempted to close the gap.

Human beings can be induced to read repetitively. In one experiment, a scientist named Paolo L. Fir* asked 200 subjects to read a repetitive essay. The essay consisted of a single paragraph repeated several times. Each subject was told beforehand that the essay was highly

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repetitive. The result was surprising.

Ninety-two percent of the subjects read the essay completely from beginning to end.

Fir began his experiment by recruiting several dozen people, whom he asked to be his research subjects. A typical adult knows almost nothing about the psychology of repetitive reading. (This is not surprising. Research psychologists, as a group, know little about the subject, though some have attempted to close the gap.) So Fir sat his subjects down in a room, and explained that human beings can be induced to read repetitively. In one experiment, he told them, a scientist asked 200 subjects to read a repetitive essay. The essay consisted of a single paragraph repeated several times. Each subject was told beforehand that the essay was highly repetitive. The result was surprising. Ninety-two percent of the subjects read the essay completely from beginning to end.

After giving his subjects that background information, Fir described his own experiment in great detail. The experiment was based on a book he had read. The book was based on the idea that human beings can be induced to read repetitively. In one experiment, a scientist asked 200 subjects to read a repetitive essay. The essay consisted of a single paragraph repeated several times. Each subject was told beforehand that the essay was highly repetitive. The result was surprising. Ninety-two percent of the subjects read the essay completely from beginning to end.

After Fir carried out his experiment, he published a report. Called ‘The psychology of repetitive reading’, it explains that human beings can be induced to read repetitively. In one experiment, a scientist – Fir, in fact – asked 200 subjects to read a repetitive essay. The essay consisted of a single paragraph repeated several times. Each subject was told beforehand that the essay was highly repetitive. The result was surprising. Ninety-two percent of the subjects read the essay completely from beginning to end. *OK, this one is just too improbable.

I Marc Abrahams is Editor and Co-founder of the Annals of Improbable Research. This article is extracted from his book This is Improbable (Oneworld, £8.99) marca.improbable@ gmail.com

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Rich pickings in comedy Richard Wiseman, Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, talks to comedian Richard Herring

R

ichard Herring has spent a lifetime creating and performing comedy.

After graduating from Oxford University he teamed up with fellow comedian Stewart Lee to co-write several critically acclaimed shows, including Fist of Fun, Lee and Herring and This Morning With Richard Not Judy. During the 2000s, Herring has written and performed a new stand-up show almost every year, including the controversial ‘Hitler Moustache’ and ‘Christ on a Bike: The Second Coming’, ‘What is love, anyway?’, and he is currently on tour with ‘Talking Cock 2’. He has made regular appearances on Have I Got News For You, and is described by the British Theatre Guide as ‘one of the leading hidden masters of modern British comedy’.

I have an interest in the psychology of comedy (for example, see www.richardwiseman.com/LaughLab), and I caught up with him to discuss the topic.

There is some research suggesting that professional comedians were funny even when they were children.

Was that true of you?

I certainly tried to be funny from a very young age, and really loved making people laugh. When I was just three or four years old I can remember doing a finger puppet show for my mum and my grandma, and them really laughing. I can vividly remember that wave of laughter and loving it.

Also, I was interested in comedy from a very young age. I am not sure why – perhaps it was because I was the youngest child – but I was certainly obsessed with both sex and comedy when I was a child.

I was also very inquisitive and I questioned everything – including love and religion – and I think that also helps people be funny.

As I grew up I was obsessed with comedy. I was a big fan of Tiswas because it was so anarchic. Coming across Monty Python was an epiphany, and I also loved The Young Ones, and Dudley Moore and

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Like the joke about the guy that goes to the doctor and the doctor says ‘You have to stop masturbating’. The guy says ‘Why?’, and the doctor says ‘Because I am trying to examine you’.

Yes! But as a comedian you don’t consciously think about these sorts of rules. If you over think it, it doesn’t work.

It is like the old idea that analysing a joke is like dissecting a frog – no one laughs and the frog dies. You just go with what works. It is far more about technique and the performance.

Can you talk a little more about technique?

Technique is the way you say things, the words you use, timing, volume, and so on. Again, there are no rules. Often it is scatter gun approach. I just tell stories You know lots of comedians. What and then slowly refine them over time. psychological traits do comedians tend It is a question of doing it again and to have? again. Even changing a word or a pause I have noticed that the best and the worst can make a big difference. performers have the same psychology – I enjoy talking to Barry Cryer about whatever happens, they seem to think comedy, and he often mentions the they are brilliant. The ‘comedy K’. ‘K’ is simply genius comedians will go a funny sound, and so if on stage, no one will you are going to tell a “much comedy is about laugh, and they will still joke, calling a character dancing on the edge of come off and say ‘I was ‘Kevin’ or ‘Keith’ is the abyss of madness” fantastic’. The worst funnier than ‘Simon’. comedians will do Similarly, ‘hammock’ is exactly the same. They a funny word. seem to have an innate confidence.

But again, there are no absolute rules.

Comedians also tend to be control I could come up with rules and then freaks. There is a real autonomy to standsomeone could come along and do the up and you get used to controlling complete opposite and that would be everything. funny too.

It is difficult to generalise, but some How do you come up with your comedians are very insecure. In my material? experience, there is no relationship You can’t force it. Dara O Briain talks between being funny onstage and offstage. about it being like the section in The Lots of comedians are competitive with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where each other, and want to be the funniest you fly by falling and being distracted. If person in the room. I believe that Frank you go out looking for things to be funny, Carson never turned off, but to me that you won’t see it. You just have to let go sounds like a nightmare. and allow your brain go blank. And give Are there any rules of comedy? it time. Sometimes it just pops into your There are some formulas. Surprise is very head. important. Like a magician, you misdirect One day I was just walking along your audience. There are different layers and I thought of the line ‘It is difficult to of it. If you are Stewart Lee and doing a live by mottos. They say “Your enemies’ whole routine about a packet of crisps, enemies are your friends”. That is a throwing in a ‘knock knock’ joke at the problem for me because my enemy is his end will be surprising and so might work own worst enemy.’ well. There is the rule of three – two Often the lines come as part of a normal things followed by something stream of consciousness either when I am unexpected. And also the ‘pull back and writing my blog or talking on stage. If reveal’. you stop and try to think about the rules it simply won’t be funny.

What is the ‘pull back and reveal’?

Other times good material comes That’s where you describe something and out of an onstage slip. In my latest show then reveal that the situation is not what I have a line where I say ‘I had been people would expect. together with my girlfriend for a while, Peter Cook, especially when they performed as Derek and Clive. Looking back, I guess I was into comedians doing sketches, rather than stand-up.

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and we went back to Cheddar in Somerset to meet my parents for the first time.’ One night I added ‘To be fair, I had met them before’ and that got a big laugh.

So I kept it in the set and it always goes down well.

When you think of a joke, can you predict whether an audience will find it funny?

It’s tricky. I guess I know when I have hit something really good. After you have been in comedy for years you simply know when something is going to be very funny. But most of the time it is really difficult.

Sometimes I will really like a piece, but it won’t get a great response. For example, in one of my stand-up shows I used to come out with a very arrogant line, and then say ‘I don’t know the meaning of the word hubris.’ Then I would follow-up with ‘Which is a shame, because straight after this I am taking part in a “Define the meaning of the word ‘hubris’ competition” – I don’t care because I am going to win anyway.’ I always thought that was a great bit, but it often didn’t get anything. It still doesn’t get the laugh it deserves. Maybe the audience don’t know the meaning of the word ‘hubris’.

finding an interesting way of doing it in the show. In the end I asked the audience to vote on whether they wanted to hear the joke, even though it was sick. Almost everyone wanted to hear it. It was interesting – it could have been the most horrible joke ever – and they wanted to hear it. But my point is that the vote changed the context for the joke, and made the situation more interesting.

It’s the same with Jerry Sadowitz.

I don’t mind when he uses certain ‘offensive’ words because there is more to what he is doing. But there are no absolute boundaries. To some Nazis, machinegunning Jews in a pit might have been funny.

It’s odd though, people will happily laugh at ‘offensive’ material, and then hear a joke that touches them personally and suddenly get upset. I used to do a joke about wound fucking and then some material about the Stockwell shooting.

Once, someone complained about the jokes about the Stockwell shooting and I thought ‘What about the wound fucking material, was that OK then?’

You can’t laugh at all of the stuff that offends other people, and then get upset when the comedian does something that you find upsetting.

What is the role of offence in comedy?

Handled in the right way, I think anything can be funny, it is all about context.

A bad comedian will just tell the joke, perhaps to shock people, but for me there it has to be more than that.

In one routine I talked Do you see about the parents of overlaps Madeleine McCann between what praying to God to ask you do and the where their daughter is, subject matter and I talked about what of psychology? kind of God would know What interests where a girl is, but not me and slightly tell her parents until terrifies me they prayed. So there about is humour in the comedy ridiculous logic. I had Comedian Richard Herring is currently touring – is the way another McCann joke, see www.richardherring.com/talkingcock2 that much but I worked on

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of it (for me at least) is about dancing on the edge of the abyss of madness. In accessing the subconscious and trying to deliberately think about everyday things from unusual and unexpected angles there is occasionally an overlap with what would be considered mentally ill behaviour if it wasn’t being done on purpose.

In the last year I have been improvising a podcast based on my childhood habit of playing myself at snooker and commentating upon it.

It’s a slightly crazy thing to be doing for many reasons, mainly because snooker does not work that well as a spectator sport in an audio-only medium. But also I am an adult now and this is an odd way to behave. But it goes further, as largely by accident the two players of the match (both me remember) have taken on quite different personalities. Me1 is a bit of a slimy goody-goody who likes to think he is modest and sporting, but is transparently self-serving and obsequious.

Me2 is more of a maverick, prone to fits of temper, who doesn’t like to play by the rules, but has some innate decency.

And those characters are both yours?

Yes, they are both aspects of my own personality, but without thinking I can separate them and inhabit them as I play.

It’s the old idea of the angel and the devil on either shoulder with a bit of a twist. In some ways I see Me1 as the image that one would like to project to the world and Me2 is the man I would secretly like to be if society didn’t impose its morality and pressure to conform.

I am doing this for humorous effect and am largely in control of the situation but as the game and the podcast are improvised I find they often say things that I am not expecting. I take on multiple personalities (all me) in the podcast and am aware that there are parallels with schizophrenia, albeit playful and pretend ones. Though I fear that by playing with madness I might tip over the edge, like in the classic Tweedledum episode of the TV series Colditz, in which a prisoner fakes mental illness on order to get sent home, but actually succumbs to it over months of pretence.

Most comedy involves inhabiting a false or exaggerated character of some kind and sometimes comedians do fall over the edge of the cliff (or at least seem to be affected in reality by their fantasy persona). I’d be interested in seeing some research into this, as well has having someone check that I am still sane. And yet I fear that tampering with the delicate balance might throw off the funniness.

I don’t know if I want to be cured.

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channel for emotional expression in their own right (Sauter, Calder et al., 2010). The emotions we were working with in the mid-1990s (fear, sadness, happiness, anger, disgust, surprise) were those previously identified by Paul Ekman and colleagues (Ekman et al., 1969) as expressions of basic emotions – that is, emotions hypothesised to have distinct expressions, Is laughter a universal emotion? Sophie Scott investigates. different neurobiological profiles, be found in all human cultures and have an older evolutionary heritage (Ekman, 1992).

Your heart is racing, you’re uman vocal emotional expression Work by Ekman and his team had struggling for breath. You’re includes both emotionally inflected demonstrated that facial expressions of weakened and vulnerable. Your speech, and non-verbal emotional the ‘basic’ emotions (fear, anger, disgust, body crumples up, you can’t sit or vocalisations, like a scream or a sob. happiness, sadness, surprise) were stand up straight, you can’t look These non-verbal vocalisations are recognised cross-culturally, and people in the eye, and you can’t intriguing as they are unlike speech in neuropsychological work in the 1990s speak. Yet you feel good: rather terms of the ways they are produced, with found evidence for distinct neural systems than running for your life, you’re little or no involvement of the articulators involved in processing facial expressions helpless with laughter. Laughter – (tongue, jaw, soft palate, lips). Instead of at least some of the emotions, such as it’s funny. these vocalisations are dominated by disgust and fear (Broks et al., 1998, effects of changes in breath control, Sprengelmeyer et al., 1996), recognition subglottal pressure, laryngeal tensions of which could be selectively damaged and facial expression (Scott et al., 2009). following brain lesions.

Notably, involuntary production of We generated sets of emotional these non-verbal emotional vocalisations is vocalisations (e.g. Scott et al, 1997) by preserved in patients with bilateral damage giving people scenarios (e.g. ‘someone you to speech motor areas, who are unable to love has died’) and asking them to produce speak or vocalise voluntarily (e.g. non-verbal sounds that expressed how Simonyan & Horwitz, they might feel. Importantly, 2011). This may link we did not give people non-verbal emotional example utterances to “the dominance of these vocalisations to copy – any consistency negative emotions didn’t evolutionarily ‘older’ across talkers was driven by relate to my experience” vocal production their interpretation of the systems, and the emotions, not because they production of were all attempting to model vocalisations that do not need to be learnt identical sounds. We also excluded any Why do humans laugh?

(Scheiner et al., 2004). In terms of their verbalised tokens (e.g. ‘boo-hoo’ or ‘yuck’).

Are humans the only animals that acoustics and production, we have argued We were after stimuli that were laugh? that the basic non-verbal emotional comparable to the facial expressions of expressions have more in common with emotion, which were entirely non-verbal. mammal vocalisations than they do with We replicated some of the effects that human speech (Scott et al., 2009). had been previously demonstrated for the I first became interested in laughter facial expressions of emotion with these Provine, R.R. (2000). Laughter: A scientific as I was working on these non-verbal non-verbal vocal expressions of emotion, investigation. Harmondsworth: expressions of emotion, initially so that finding that there was evidence for distinct Penguin. we could test neuropsychological patients patterns of acoustic properties that https://sites.google.com/site/ laughterlabsks/ with vocal equivalents of tests of facial correlated with ratings of the different expressions of emotion (e.g. Scott et al., emotions (Sauter, Calder et al., 2010), 1997), and more latterly as an interesting and evidence for different neural systems

Laughter – the ordinary and the extraordinary

references

resources

questions

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Amoss, R.T., Martin, N.B. & Owren, M.J. (2011). Physiological arousal and laughter acoustics. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 130(4), 2517.

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relief as candidate positive basic expressions, and as likely to be primarily expressed by the voice (and facially with a smile). As we were already working on vocal expressions of emotion, my (then) PhD student Disa Sauter and I were inspired to test Ekman’s hypothesis of a wider range of positive basic emotions that might be principally conveyed vocally, or perhaps most accurately distinguished from the voice.

We produced stimuli in the same scenario-based method described above, now for the expanded range of potential positive basic emotions, as well as for the negative emotions that I had already been investigating.

Experimentally, we found some evidence for recognition of non-verbal vocal expressions of pleasure, triumph, amusement, sensual pleasure and relief in British English and Swedish listeners (Sauter & Scott, 2007), which suggested that we might refine the original list somewhat (possibly by subsuming ‘contentment’ into ‘sensual pleasure’). However when Disa and Frank tested the recognition of these positive Sophie Scott’s partner, Tom Manly, and their son share laughter emotions by the Himba of North Namibia, a culture ‘The greater part of life uncontaminated by Western is sunshine’ why he thought there was such a negative influences, the only positive vocal When I was first working in this area, bias to the basic emotions that we were all emotional expression which was biI was struck that the basic emotions working with. Ekman explained that he directionally recognised was an expression that we were working with – fear, anger, thought that there would be more positive of amusement, which was always disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness – basic emotions than just ‘happiness’, and expressed with laughter (Sauter, Eisner et were so weighted towards negative he had previously discussed this possibility al., 2010). emotions. Essentially, of the original six, (Ekman, 1992). Importantly, Ekman also These studies provided the first four are negative, surprise is arguably hypothesised that these positive emotions concrete evidence that we could fractionate neutral, or is perhaps a precursor to might be primarily conveyed by the voice, the wider emotional category of ‘happiness’ rather than the face (and of course, by another emotion, and only one into different positive emotions ‘face’ he was referring to still photographs). (happiness) is unambiguously positive. (amusement, triumph, relief, sensual Specifically, Ekman identified the positive Psychology has been criticised by Barbara pleasure) in terms of their vocal emotions associated with sensual pleasure, Fredrickson for having a profound expressions. Furthermore, we had some amusement, triumph, contentment and negative bias (Fredrickson, 2003), and evidence that triumph and sensual associated with different emotions; for example, both vocal and facial expressions of fear are impaired following damage to the amygdala (Scott et al., 1997).

Following several field trips to Namibia

by Disa Sauter and Frank Eisner, also from my lab, we were able to demonstrate that there was bidirectional cross-cultural recognition of the emotions fear, anger, disgust, surprise and sadness by English and Himba people (Sauter, Eisner et al., 2010). Thus, English listeners recognise Himba expressions of fear, anger, disgust, surprise and sadness, and the Himba recognise the English expressions.

It was becoming clear that the basic emotions were not solely associated with facial expressions, but that they were also expressed with non-verbal emotional vocalisations.

Further work has extended this to the body, using both static and dynamic cues, and finding that some basic emotions are well expressed through the body as well as the face and voice (e.g. Coulson, 2004). This is further evidence that it is the emotion, not one particular channel or mode of expression, which is ‘basic’.

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the dominance of these negative emotions certainly didn’t seem to relate to my everyday experience of emotions – both in terms of my own experience, and the emotions expressed by others.

At a meeting at University College London in the late 1990s I had the opportunity to ask Paul Ekman in person

Fredrickson, B.L. (2003). The value of positive emotions. American Scientist, 91, 330–335.

Gazzola, V., Aziz-Zadeh, L. & Keysers, C. (2006). Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans.

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Gervais, M. & Wilson, D.S. (2005). The evolution and functions of laughter and humor. Quarterly Review of Biology, 80, 395–430.

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Manuscript submitted for publication.

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Phonetica, 65, 1–18.

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Owren, M.J. & Riede, T. (2010). Voiced laughter elicits more positive

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pleasure might be strongly culturally variable in their production, i.e. might not constitute ‘basic’ emotions. There was a suggestion that ‘relief’ might have elements of universality, and positive evidence that ‘amusement’ was bi-directionally recognised across very diverse cultures, consistent with it forming a basic emotion.

However, there was a question of what precise emotion laughter might represent.

We were still largely equating laughter with amusement: however, it is much more likely that laughter reflects a basic positive social emotion, one that signals that ‘our intent is play, not assault’ (Provine, 2013). Robert Provine, who has been working on laughter for many years, has also suggested that we bear in mind that laughter is a social behaviour about which we do not have a lot of insight. If you ask people what makes them laugh, they will make references to jokes and humour. However, if you look at what happens when people actually laugh, it’s mostly when we are talking with our friends (Provine, 1996; Vettin & Todt, 2004). We are 30 times more likely to laugh if we are with other people than if we are on our own, and it’s not the case that conversing with our friends results in a stream of jokes – during conversation most of the laughter is associated with statements, and indeed people laugh most often when they are themselves speaking, rather than when they are listening (Provine, 1996). Laughter may thus be associated more with signalling affiliation, agreement and affection than it is with amusement per se – it may be most accurate to consider laughter as an expression of a strongly positive social emotion, which we use to form and reinforce social relationships, and which has only relatively recent been expressly linked to ‘humour’.

Along these lines, laughter has been shown to be produced by people in a context-specific way. For instance, in conversation, laughter is used to mark agreement and affiliation in addition to amusement (Vettin & Todt, 2004).

Antiphonal laughter – laughter produced

emotion in listeners when produced with the mouth open than closed.

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Panksepp, J. (2005). Beyond a joke: From animal laughter to human joy?

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Provine, R.R. (1992). Contagious laughter – Laughter is a sufficient stimulus for laughs and smiles.

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in response to another’s laughter – is produced by women more in response to male laughs, and by men as an index of their familiarity with the other person (male or female) (Smoski & Bachorowski, 2003). The coordination and timing of laughter during conversation between deaf signers is similar to that seen during spoken conversation, which indicates that the timing of laughter is associated with higher-order aspects of the interaction, rather than practical aspects of how spoken language is timed (Provine & Emmorey, 2006).

This social role of laughter has been shown to be neatly modulated by the channels available for social interactions.

A striking paper from Robin Dunbar’s lab (Vlahovic et al., 2012) contrasted the amount of laughter that was reported to occur during, and people’s ratings of positive affect after, different kinds of interactions. Using self-reports and ratings, they found that people laughed most (and were happiest) when they were in face-toface contact with a conversational partner,

whether this was in person or online video conferencing; this effect was reduced for phone conversations, and lowest of all for text-based interactions, such as text messaging and e-mails. This is evidence that the more sources of social information that there are – face and body as well as voice – the more laughter is produced, which may itself be a direct index of how much people enjoy an interaction.

Laughing fit to burst The physical effort involved in laughter means that energy expenditure increases during ‘genuine’ laughter, by around 10–20 per cent, and raises heart rate above baseline levels (Buchowski et al., 2007), and this increased physical exercise is associated with many of the pleasant feelings associated with laughter, including the increased uptake of endorphins: this can be demonstrated as an elevated pain threshold after laughter (Dunbar et al., 2012). Laughter has some specific acoustic qualities that arise from

Anatomy of a laugh: Transcript of Brian Johnston (with Jonathan Agnew) laughing while trying to broadcast a cricket summary in 1990. The phrase is ‘35 minutes, hit a four over the wicketkeeper’s head, oh Aggers, do stop it’. The upper plot shows the speech waveform, and the lower plot the estimated pitch profile. Note how high the pitch rises, from ‘35 minutes’ to ‘head’, and how ‘head’ dissolves into a wheeze due to a spasm of the intercostal muscles. The full laughter episode is annotated here: tinyurl.com/at8f4z7

1–4.

Provine, R.R. (1996). Laughter. American Scientist, 84, 38–45.

Provine, R.R. (2013). Laughing, grooming, and pub science. Trends in Cognitive Science, 17, 9–10.

Provine, R.R. & Emmorey, K. (2006).

Laughter among deaf signers.

Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 11, 403–409.

Sauter, D.A. (2006). An investigation into

vocal expressions of emotions. PhD Thesis, University College London. tinyurl.com/b9pjbhv Sauter, D.A., Calder, A.J., Eisner, F. & Scott, S.K. (2010). Perceptual cues in non-verbal vocal expressions of emotion. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(11), 2251-72.

Sauter, D.A., Eisner, F., Ekman, P. & Scott, S.K. (2010). The universality of

human emotional vocalisations.

PNAS, 107(6), 2408–2412.

Sauter, D.A. & Scott, S.K. (2007). More than one kind of happiness: Can we recognize vocal expressions of different positive states? Motivation and Emotion, 31, 192–199.

Scheiner, E., Hammerschmidt, K., Jurgens, U. & Zwirner, P. (2004). The influence of hearing impairment on preverbal emotional vocalizations of

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the way it is produced. In her PhD, Disa Sauter (2006) ran some experiments looking at how modifying vocal expressions of emotion (e.g. with noise vocoding: see tinyurl.com/cemf67f) affected the recognition of the emotions.

A striking finding was that as long as the amplitude envelope of the sound was preserved, people could recognise laughter (Sauter, 2006). This was not true of other non-verbal expressions of emotion, which typically needed some pitch or spectral properties (Sauter, Calder et al., 2010). This is probably because laughter is better considered to be a different way of breathing than it is of speaking (Abercrombie, 1967, cited in Kohler, 2008), and the characteristic repetitive contractions of the intercostal muscles and diaphragm lead to a very characteristic rhythmic profile of the sound, whether is it voiced or not.

This spasming of the intercostal muscles is the source of the weakness associated with helpless, involuntary laughter – as the intercostal muscles spasm, they become unavailable for the kinds of postural support that they normally confer. This is also one cause of the unavoidable effects that laughter has on speech. Human speech entails a very specific way of breathing out, such that a controlled flow of air passes through the larynx, and the vocal folds are vibrated to give the voice pitch and quality. This involves incredibly fine control of the intercostal muscles in controlling subglottal pressure: at first they need to prevent all the air rushing out, and as the air is released from the lungs, the intercostal muscles start to need to squeeze the air out to maintain the subglottal pressure. This is possible because of our upright gait – we have freed up our ribcage from a lot of its role in posture, and this enables us to use it to produce long controlled breaths when speaking (MacLarnon & Hewitt, 1999). Try talking to someone while doing press-ups and you will instantly notice how hard speech becomes when you need your ribcage to support your weight directly.

infants. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 56, 27–40.

Scott, S.K., Sauter, D. & McGettigan, C. (2009). Brain mechanisms for processing perceived emotional vocalizations in humans. In S. Brudzynski (Ed.) Handbook of mammalian vocalizations (pp.187–198). Oxford: Academic Press.

Scott, S.K., Young, A.W., Calder, A.J. et al.

The high subglottal pressures generated when people laugh result in extremely highfrequency sounds being produced, far higher than those seen during normal speech production (Amoss et al., 2011), and these pitches increase as with increases in physiological arousal in the person laughing. It also leads to wheezes, snorts, grunts and glottal whistles. Listeners are very sensitive to these acoustic cues; for example, listeners find laughs produced with an ‘open’ mouth to be more positive than those produced with a closed mouth (Owren & Riede, 2010). There is a common assessment that ‘voiced’ or sung laughter is associated with higher positive valence than unvoiced laughter, snorts, etc., especially when participants are rating female laughter (Bachorowski & Owren, 2001).

This has been interpreted as a deliberate use of laughter to control the affective response of a listener (Owren & Bachorowski, 2003).

They all laughed The bonding effects of laughter can be briskly diminished if one is excluded from laughter. I was on Ipswich railway station last year when some teenagers tapped me on the shoulder, then ran away. Their helpless mirth when I looked to see who had tapped my shoulder filled me with intense irritation and anger, because although their laughter was warm and genuine, it was directed at me, and there was no question – I was not included in that laughter group. Although

(1997). Impaired auditory recognition of fear and anger following bilateral amygdala lesions. Nature, 385, 254–257.

Simonyan, K. & Horwitz, B. (2011).

Laryngeal motor cortex and control of speech in humans. Neuroscientist, 17(2), 197–208.

Smoski, M.J. & Bachorowski, J.A. (2003).

Antiphonal laughter between friends and strangers. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 327–340.

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

‘Corpsing’ in the studio The studio might be the place to record that single take of pop perfection, but those attempts are often hijacked by hilarity.

Here are some examples of laughter in song: New Order – Every Little Counts Arctic Monkeys – Love Machine (Live Lounge) Bob Dylan – Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream The Beatles – And Your Bird Can Sing (Anthology version) The Divine Comedy – A Drinking Song Joni Mitchell – Big Yellow Taxi Ryan Adams – To Be Young

I have no great desire to befriend young men at train stations, this exclusion was an unpleasant sensation. Previous research has expressly tried to identify what characterises a ‘taunting’ laugh from a ‘joyful’ laugh (Szameitat et al., 2009), but any laugh is capable of sounding highly evil if one is on the receiving end of it. Just as laughter can be used as a way of bonding with others, it can also be used as a clear way of excluding others from a laughing group.

The question of emotional authenticity is important though: the ways that we laugh when we are helpless with laughter are very different from the kind of social laughter that we produce when we are talking to our friends. The difference may be best characterised as voluntary versus involuntary laughter (Gervais & Wilson, 2005). People are very good at distinguishing between mirthful and social

Sprengelmeyer, R., Young, A.W., Calder, A.J. et al. (1996). Loss of disgust.

Brain, 119(5), 1647–1665.

Szameitat, D.P., Alter, K., Szameitat, A.J. et al. (2009). Acoustic profiles of distinct emotional expressions in laughter. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126, 354–366.

Vettin, J. & Todt, D. (2004). Laughter in conversation. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 28, 93–115.

Vlahovic, T.A., Roberts, S. & Dunbar, R. (2012). Effects of duration and laughter on subjective happiness within different modes of communication. Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, 17, 436–450.

Warren, J.E., Sauter, D.A., Eisner, F. et al.

(2006). Positive emotions preferentially engage an auditorymotor ‘mirror’ system. Journal of Neuroscience, 26(50), 13067–13075.

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laughter (Lavan et al., 2012), which likely reflect their different social meanings.

We have also found several acoustic and phonetic differences between voluntary social laughter and involuntary mirthful laughter. Some of these link directly to the greater forces generated during involuntary laughter, which lead to high-frequency wheezes and glottal whistles that are extremely hard to produce voluntarily. We have also found that social laughter can be nasalised, while involuntary laughter is never nasalised (in our data sets). This suggests that social laughs are not necessarily simply weaker forms of ‘real’ laughs, but have their own clear markers, reflecting their social importance. This may also mean that social laughter may be more culturally variable than involuntary laughter, but that remains an empirical question.

between ratings of the valence of the stimuli and activation in lateral premotor fields. The ‘mirror’ responses are thus not equivalent across all emotional expressions, and showed instead greater activation for the stimuli rated as more positive – triumph and amusement (laughter). We were interested in these

contagious (Provine, 1992), and we may be seeing a neural correlate of this behavioural contagion reflected in this motor activation. Another fMRI study, of yawning, showed that the more behaviourally contagious participants found a yawn (short of actually yawing), the more activation was found in orofacial ‘mirror’ regions (Arnott et al., 2009). However, the effect in our 2006 study was strong for laughter, but even stronger for triumphant sounds such as cheering: this is rated as an extremely positive and arousing emotion, but it is not behaviourally as contagious as laughter (or yawning). This may mean that for the laughter and triumph sounds, we are seeing a priming of more general smiling responses, rather than a more specific priming of particular emotional vocalisations. This would still be consistent with a role of mirror responses for positive social emotions, which, Ekman has pointed out, tend to share a smile (1992).

Laughter on the brain

You and me baby ain’t The strong social nothing but mammals importance of laughter can also be seen in the brain The theory of basic emotions responses to the sounds of (Ekman, 1992) suggests that laughter. We have analogues of the basic emotions, investigated the role of which have older evolutionary orofacial ‘mirror’ systems – histories than more culturally brain areas that are determined emotions, would be activated both by hearing found in and expressed by other emotional vocalisations and mammals (see also Darwin, by silently moving the face 1872). From Aristotle to Nietzsche, (Gazzola et al., 2006) – laughter has been suggested to be There are several acoustic and phonetic differences between when people listen passively something found only in humans, but voluntary social laughter and involuntary mirthful laughter to emotional vocalisations there is now abundant evidence that effects as it suggested that whatever (laughter, cheering, disgusted sounds, laughter is found across a variety of the role of motor cortex during the fearful sounds) (Warren et al., 2006). different mammals, from gorillas to rats perception of vocal emotional Mirror systems are recruited both by (Panksepp, 2005). Work with expressions, it was unlikely to reflect perception and production of the same chimpanzees has shown that their recognition processes (as all the stimuli kind of event, and are typically discussed laughter is modulated by social context – were well recognised) or simulation as being directly analogous to the mirror laughs produced when chimps are tickled processes, as there is no a priori reason neurons as they are described from the differ from those produced in response to why these should differ with valence. single-cell recording literature. There has the laughter of others (Davila-Ross et al, The ‘mirror’ response was also unlikely been a lot of discussion about what this 2011). Thus when humans laugh, we are to reflect emotional contagion, as disgust common activation of production systems engaging in a positive social emotional (a very negatively rated emotion) is by perception means, from ideas around behaviour that has its roots in our typically highly emotionally contagious. the obligatory use of motor evolution as mammals. Now, that’s funny.

Instead, the effects seemed to be rooted representations to recognise actions, in some more behavioural effects. The through to the suggestion that they may positive emotions we tested – triumph simply reflect basic associations through Sophie Scott and amusement (laughter) – are highly a lifetime of paired presentations (Catmur is Professor of Cognitive social emotions, and ‘mirroring’ in social et al., 2007). When we interrogated our Neuroscience at the interactions is typically associated with data further, we found that the orofacial Institute of Cognitive positive affect. These motor responses ‘mirror system’ was not equally activated Neuroscience, University may also reflect more direct ‘priming’ by all the emotional vocalisations, and College London of behaviour: laughter is immensely that there was a significant relationship sophie.scott@ucl.ac.uk

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Research. Digested.

The British Psychological Society’s free Research Digest Blog, email, Twitter and Facebook

www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog ‘Easy to access and free, and a mine of useful information for my work: what more could I want?

I only wish I’d found this years ago!’

Dr Jennifer Wild, Consultant Clinical Psychologist & Senior Lecturer, Institute of Psychiatry ‘The selection of papers suits my eclectic mind perfectly, and the quality and clarity of the synopses is uniformly excellent.’

Professor Guy Claxton, University of Bristol

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No laughing matter Mike Page, who is not a cognitive neuroscientist, does his bit for the planet in his own inimitable style

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n retrospect, as with many of the best were guaranteed to provoke passionate parties over the years, it appears that advocacy and, it cannot be denied, some I arrived in Cognitive Psychology just measure of tetchiness in their participants. as most everybody else was leaving. Even The irritation provoked by my own as I was unpacking my computational contributions to these, perhaps abstruse, modeller’s box of tricks, many of my theoretical debates appeared proportionate colleagues were busy packing their more to the academic seniority of the parties to commodious bags and heading for the whom they were addressed. Unlike sunnier uplands of the Neurozone (single Newton, with his altogether loftier currency, the Neuro, etc.). As if to echo perspective, when I left Cambridge, if I the fall from modishness of what we once had seen any distance it was by standing optimistically called ‘strong artificial on the toes, rather than the shoulders, of intelligence’, in my seven short years giants. Some of these disputes rumble on, there, Cambridge went from Silicon Fen over a decade later, but with undeniably to Neuro Fen. Which was ironic, because it gave me a headache.

That isn’t to say that it wasn’t fun. There were fierce arguments to be had: Parallel distributed processing had taken the cognitive psychology world by storm. As a natural contrarian, I had aligned myself with a resistance movement, the localists, and even wrote (without irony!) a paper with the word ‘manifesto’ in the title (see tinyurl.com/a5vrltx).

The debate addressed in that paper is less fashionable than it once was. The term backprop is more likely to be taken, these days, to refer to an unusually versatile rugby ‘Bliss was it in that Dawn to be alive…’ or was it? player, and although hope briefly resurfaced at news of the Coalition Government’s recent ‘Localism’ Bill – you less vim. Essentially, it’s becoming take support from whatever quarter you increasingly difficult to find people to can – I was disappointed to find that it argue with. rather sidestepped what we had all taken The trouble is that at some point in to be the main issues. the last decade, many of my colleagues And so it went with other Swiftian had somewhat disarmed theoretical disputes: Was forgetting more like an acid challenge by stopping referring to bath or a line of telegraph poles? Were themselves as psychologists at all. They’d there phonemes, features, both, or become neuroscientists. (What real neither? Could consolidation prevent neuroscientists thought of this is not catastrophic interference? All debates that recorded, here at least.) Of course, the

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N-word was, and is, sometimes softened by the qualifier ‘cognitive’, presumably in an attempt, not notably successful, to reassure those of us who had stuck doggedly with the Ψ-word. I cannot deny that the handle ‘cognitive neuroscientist’ sounded to me rather like ‘quantum geographer’, a category error waiting to happen. And happen it did. Undeniable too, though, is that my identifying this as a new thing to argue about, has singularly failed to stop ‘cognitive neuroscience’ in its tracks. Far from it.

Perhaps its popularity has something to do with the fact that this soi-disant neuroscience is so very media-friendly?

I attribute this to its having adopted the modus operandi of the Hollywood blockbuster, eschewing plot and concentrating instead on the CGI. As with mainstream films, I cannot be alone in having attended many a cognitive neuroscience presentation over the years, only to leave perplexed: a surfeit of technicolour brain images (the PowerPoint equivalent of car chases and exploding Death Stars), but no discernible narrative thread. How dispiriting, then, to get home and find the whole thing bigged-up on the BBC website, with Andrew Marr chatting approvingly about it on Start the Week. (When it comes to Marrs, I’m with Johnny and, as should be obvious by now, David.)

Now I’m not naive. Media attention is bound to be an object of desire among scientists. When one works for years on a paper that will be read by 20 people, 18 of whom will disagree with its premise (the other two being two of the three coauthors – trust me, I speak from experience here), the journalist inevitably acquires something of an allure. In the case of the journalist, this is, of course, a symbiotic relationship. The journalist is accustomed to being as unwelcome as a wasp with a specialism in picnics. The only time when the phrase ‘there’s a journalist at the door’ is likely to be treated with enthusiasm is when the door in question is that of a laboratory.

To the scientist, the journalist represents the possibility of acknowledgement by a wider, and ultimately (it is assumed) grateful, public. To the journalist, in return, the scientist represents a pitch at gravitas. Throw pictures of brains (Pictures! Of Brains!) into this heady romance, and one can hardly be surprised by the results.

I regret to report that in the world of short-term memory for serial order (one I have inhabited for a while now), the media opportunities are fewer and further between. The internet has, at least, brought the benefits of rapid

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communication. When, in a move that here was a subject in which psychologists would have had the Reverend Spooner could usefully get involved. Cynical throwing himself from the walls of New opportunism, you might think, but College, James Naughtie inadvertently actually no more than acknowledging referred to Jeremy Hunt Culture Secretary two things: first, that the environmental using an epithet that many in the Angloproblem is a real and serious one; and, Saxon world had been using for years to second, that its mitigation is as much, refer to senior politicians (though not, it and maybe more, a psychological issue as has to be said, live on the Today it is a technological one. You, of course, programme), I was ready with a consoling may demur on both counts. As regards e-mail. To appoint Mr Hunt to a the first, you may be someone who thinks government position with that particular that we have no reason to be concerned consonant(-vowel) onset was, I wrote, about man-made climate change. If so, a reckless temptation of Providence; like you doubtless think yourself something making John Gummer Business Secretary, of an independent thinker, a bit counterDouglas Hurd Tory Chairman, or cultural, left-field even. By contrast, encouraging Steven Berkoff into I would reckon that you are, to use a journalism. Mr Naughtie could take somewhat technical psychological term, comfort, I continued, in the observation a bit thick. You might, alternatively, be that a modern view of such speech errors someone who agrees that we have real was less Freudian than he might have reason to be concerned but, as yet, has feared. done nothing about it. In which case, you Within 30 minutes, the e-mail was being read live on air, as Evan Davis sought to spare Mr Naughtie’s blushes.

“In my seven years The whole thing can be heard on there, Cambridge YouTube (http://bit.ly/UBRmS9): Fame went from Silicon Fen at last! The psychology of serial order to Neuro Fen. Which firmly established on the country’s was ironic, because it news agenda and featured on the gave me a headache” world’s most popular website to boot!

But you know the way these things go.

I Mike Page is a Reader in Psychology at the The Today programme moved on, University of Hertfordshire Mr Hunt moved to Health (for which m.2.page@herts.ac.uk I can think of no better reason than that this was, Spoonerism-wise, as safe as could be) and YouTube’s oxygen of publicity was cruelly cut short by the can relax. You are not thick. You are, firmly held pillow that is that medium’s however, a bit selfish and irresponsible. ‘comments’ section. One particular Having read quite a lot about commentator on the YouTube clip was psychological approaches to proproperly acerbic: ‘trust some smart arse environmental behaviour change (which to send in an e-mail, bet he was sitting mostly comprised reading about things all smug with a bowl of fucking Weetabix that didn’t really work), I settled on what and a copy of the Independent feeling so I called the HOT topics: Habits, proud of himself’. Hurtful and, I’m bound Opportunities and Thoughts. Actually, it’s to say, untrue. It was, in fact, a bowl of easier to discuss these, as here, in the fucking Alpen. order Opportunities, Thoughts and So how then to make one’s research Habits, but you don’t spend 20 years relevant to the world at large? How, in working on serial recall without realising short, to have the dreaded ‘impact’? It was that OTH Topics is a poor acronym. clear that short-term memory for serial The O for Opportunities was intended order would have to be supplemented by to capture the idea that people were very something more, erm, sexy. I briefly unlikely to make any pro-environmental considered the endlessly media-friendly change to their behaviour unless they Psychology of Magic, but that particularly were made aware of the opportunities niche had been occupied very effectively available for them to do so. (If this seems by one of my colleagues. Besides, I felt obvious and a truism, I take that as a unsuited to the world of the magician, compliment, truisms having, at the very having had some friends as a child. least, the advantage of being true.) Very So I settled on the Environment, with often, when visiting businesses or talking a capital E. One could not turn on the TV to friends, I found smart folk who or open a newspaper without being nevertheless had no idea that by, say, assailed by warnings of the environmental changing their lighting, they could make apocalypse to come. Global warming. substantial savings in their energy use Climate chaos. Avant la déluge. Surely and, hence, their costs. People were

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ostensibly willing to change their behaviour, if only they knew what best to do. On the grounds, therefore, that it seemed better to show people what they might do (rather than just talk about it), we decided, somewhat eccentrically, to build a demonstration home. A little diddy one.

If you’re interested, have a look at cubeproject.org.uk and tinyurl.com/ cubeproj for a ‘Big Picture’ from this publication. Suffice to say that we constructed and exhibited this compact, carbon-neutral microhome with some success at the Edinburgh Science Festival.

I say ‘we’. That we got it built on time at all, is really attributable to a couple of brilliant Slovakian carpenters called Matej and Robert, in whose debt I shall forever dwell It’s no exaggeration to say that the last time anyone found even one carpenter this good, Pontius Pilate had him crucified. (I mean no offence by this.

I’m really just implying, surely uncontroversially, that Jesus would have been an excellent carpenter. In our part of North West London, the only bigger compliment one might pay would be to describe someone as a modestly reliable plumber.) But I digress…

What about Thoughts? It is a common assumption in certain therapeutic approaches that negative and ‘automatic’ thoughts can, if unchallenged, prevent effective behaviour change. Could the same be true in relation to the environment? And if so, could taking a different perspective on these thoughts be an effective (if necessarily partial) remedy? If truth be told, I don’t know.

I reckon it’s worth a moment’s thought, though.

Let’s take lighting as an example. ‘I’m not buying those light bulbs. They take too long to warm up.’ The complaint is familiar enough, beloved of middle-aged men with specific reference to trips to the loo in, let us say, the wee small hours. It certainly sounds like the sort of negative thought that might forestall proenvironmental action. So let’s try to see things from a different perspective. To whit, for hundreds of thousands of years, the Sun was humankind’s principal source of light. Every dawn it took (and, indeed, takes) about an hour to get its act together. Did people complain? Not a bit of it. Some romantic souls even wrote poems in praise of the whole performance. When Wordsworth wrote, of 1789, ‘Bliss was it in that Dawn to be alive…’, he did not qualify the sentiment with ‘…but it did take rather a long time to get light and, in the meantime, I’d pissed all over my slippers’ (although, as a metaphor for the French Revolution this

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would, ironically, have been rather As with lighting, so it goes with other prescient). Looked at thus, 30 seconds low-carbon technologies. There’s any is surely not too long to wait for number of negative thoughts that one enlightenment. And besides, you could might have, any one of which (even if always sit down. ‘But surely those lowflatly mistaken) might prove sufficient to energy bulbs contain mercury’ comes stop one from doing anything helpful. the retort, often through gritted teeth ‘Wind farms? I drove past one once and laced with amalgam fillings. To which the turbines weren’t even moving!’ is not I respond, (1) dispose of your new bulb an argument, at least not one for the properly and it won’t be a problem, and numerate. Being against wind turbines (2) that much more mercury gets into the because the wind sometimes doesn’t blow environment from burning coal to satisfy is rather like being against windows your thirsty old bulbs. because sometimes Indeed, it is a little known it’s dark. This is scientific fact that humans just one of many “Being against wind turbines have ingested so much such cases in because the wind sometimes mercury by this route which the numbers doesn’t blow is rather like alone that, as the world really do matter. being against windows warms, we will all get just You think you’re because sometimes it’s dark” a little bit taller. If you doing your bit by were truly worried about religiously instant light and zerounplugging your mercury I’d encourage you to buy LED unused phone charger, yet still taking bulbs. ‘£20 for the equivalent of a 100W spending, say, 10 hours in an aeroplane bulb! Too expensive!’, you’d growl. And every year? Well, I suggest you do the yet, even if your incandescent bulbs were maths. It’s the carbon-cutting equivalent brought round to your house for free, the of going on a diet by forgoing one sugar LED would redeem its purchase price in in your tea, then using the same tea to around 2000 hours of use and will last wash down a couple of dozen Mars bars. another 30,000 hours beyond. Not Which brings us to H. You don’t need expensive. Bloody cheap! So what are you to be Sister Wendy to attest to the waiting for? constraining effects of habits. If we’re

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honest and, indeed, if our fellow psychologists are to be believed, the prime factor determining what we do today is what we did yesterday, or maybe what we did the same time last week.

Habits constrain us, because they shortcircuit our reasoned and well-considered goals (even assuming that they are, by now, reasoned and well-considered). We might take a tentative step in this or that direction but, like a marble rolling around a bath, we find ourselves drawn back to a familiar stasis. For this reason, my colleagues assert that habits cannot be broken tentatively, one at a time; nor is it enough to think about doing things differently, rather you must actually do different things. You know what? I think they may be right.

If we are interested in getting a grip on our environmental problems (You’re not? Then shame on you!), we must think differently and act differently.

If that sounds too much, then leave out the thinking bit and just act differently anyway. In this regard, I’d like to think that psychologists have as important a role to play as the engineers, the technologists, the politicians, the ethicists. And what of the cognitive neuroscientists? Hmmm. Let me get back to you on that.

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Annual Conference 2014 Confirmed Keynotes Professor Sir Simon Wessely Professor of Psychological Medicine at King’s College London and Civilian Consultant Advisor in Psychiatry to the British Army Ben Shephard Historian, Author and Television Producer Marinus H. van IJzendoorn Centre for Child & Family Studies, Leiden University Susan van Scoyoc Private Practice and Counselling and Health Psychologist

7-9 May 2014 International Conference Centre, Birmingham

CAREERS

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‘It’s not just about telling jokes to feel better’ Ian Florance talks to Stephanie Davies, Creative Director and ‘cognitive laughter and humour consultant’ for Laughology

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jobs online

t’s half term in the Royal Festival Hall bar on the South Bank in London.

Hundreds of children dance to a trad jazz version of ‘Old Macdonald Had a Farm’ while their parents look on proudly.

Stephanie Davies and I finally spot each other among the crowd and we settle down to talk. It seems an appropriate setting in which to meet someone who studied community arts, still does standup comedy and formed the company Laughology in 2006 to offer psychologically based services in which laughter is a key element. It would be easy to assume her approach is simply

www.psychapp.co.uk is now open to all.

Advertisers can now reach beyond the prime audience of Society members that they reach in print, to include the many other suitably qualified individuals online.

Society members have the added benefit of being able to sign up for suitable e-mail and RSS alerts, and we are looking to add more

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about cracking jokes to make people feel better about bad stuff, but I quickly learn that there’s a lot more to it than that.

‘It started with Norman Wisdom’ ‘I grew up in Southport but we moved to the Isle of Man when I was eight. I never saw myself as an academic – I was more of a doer and was really interested in the performing arts. I was picked to be in an anti-bullying film. Norman Wisdom appeared in it as a lollipop man and he is the original inspiration for what I’m doing – a real gentleman, always professional and genuinely funny. We got on well, had lots of talks and something he says in the film – “You’ll always be able to get by if you make people laugh” – has stayed with me.’

Stephanie did her degree at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, based in Paul McCartney’s old school.

‘I was not just interested in performance but in helping people, which was why I chose a degree in community arts. We looked at how art impacts on physical and mental health and on social issues.

It helped me value art not only for itself, but also as a technique to help people improve their lives.’

Stephanie’s dissertation was on ‘Women in Comedy: from Victims to Vixens’ and analysed the impact of comics from Vesta Tilley to the present day.

‘The final submission had to be partwritten, part-performance, so I arranged a five-minute stand-up performance for

tutors and peers. My tutor insisted I had to do a live show in front of a real audience. I did an open mic night in Liverpool and was hooked.’

Stephanie left college in 2001 and continued to do stand-up but, as she puts it, ‘I needed to make some money so I worked with the Liverpool Comedy Festival. One of the things I did was write a comedy course for schools. The first proper health-related project I did was at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, helping nurses, doctors and specialists integrate humour into play. I then worked with families.’

On Patch Adams and Jack Dee At this point I could see why Stephanie had linked psychology and humour. She explained: ‘There’s a huge research base on the effect of mood and humour on physical and mental health. I’m not doing anything that hasn’t been done before. I’ve studied on the Patch Adams course in the States. Many readers will know Patch Adams from the rather sentimentalised Robin Williams film about him. In fact he’s a genuinely challenging activist who uses clowning and humour to address health and social issues internationally.

He’s another of my heroes.’

I wanted to know what had convinced Stephanie to try to find a master’s course to study the linkage between psychology and humour.

‘Three things really. Firstly, doing stand-up comedy teaches you so much about yourself and develops you. It sharpens your mind, makes you thickerskinned and helps you believe in yourself.

Comedians are master communicators, and many of them unpick their own life for material – doing stand-up comedy helps you look at your life. I think everyone should have a go at it. “Dying” on stage teaches you more than anything else. I experienced it when I was performing for 200 people at Liverpool University and froze. I exited to slow handclaps. In those situations you either curl up or get on with it, which is what

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my ever-optimistic Dad told me to do.

Counter-intuitively, for a comedian a bad day is a good day! It gives you material.

I wished I’d been taught some of those skills when I was younger, and that thought set me out on the journey I’m still on. Comedy also has psychological effects on the audience. Comedians normalise the things we usually find it difficult to talk about. They admit absurd behaviour and a common audience reaction is for friends and partners to point to each other and say “You do that”.’

‘The second issue was working with children who couldn’t move easily; who were on dialysis machines, for instance.

That situation emphasised that if you wanted to engage them in play and humour you did it through their minds.

‘The third thing was working on the same bill as other stand-ups, including some household names such as Jason Manford. What became clear, very quickly, was that their performances are a form of self-medication. In real life, people like Jack Dee are very different from the way they act on stage.

Comedians want to be loved, liked and validated, and comedy is a way of eliciting that reaction. I realised that people other than comedians – those suffering psychological illnesses, for instance – may benefit from unconditional positive regard.’

The punchline is ‘Dean Martin’ Some interviewees in the careers section have accused psychological training of becoming too restrictive. I can’t imagine Stephanie found it easy to find a format that reflected her interest in humour.

‘I looked for a university that would help me put together an MA. Chester did this through their Work and Business Integrated Studies programme which enabled me to study psychology and relate it to my work. My MA is in the psychology of humour and is a patchwork of different modules.

‘I had done my dip1 CBT at Edge Hill University and carried the points over for my MSc. Dr Sam Sharpe from St Catherine’s Hospital in Birkenhead supervised my case studies and practical work. She also supervised elements of the MSc health psychology module at Chester university – my case studies and dissertations were with drug and alcohol groups and an individual with chronic pain from trigeminal neuralgia. One of my final research methods and case study papers was with a group of women who had been identified on the Edinburgh Scale as having postnatal depression. I put

together a 10-week programme based around using humour in combination with CBT to help clients feel better and improve.’

Stephanie is still undertaking the project which will form the basis of her final submission for the MSc. ‘I’m working in a medium/high-secure mental health unit at the Humber Centre for Forensic Psychiatry in Hull. I put together a research programme and designed a course, using Laughology, which works alongside the service users’ recovery programmes. I was invited after a presentation I gave at a conference. The specialist staff were initially suspicious of my approach when I presented to them.

One commented “Laughter’s too risky”.

I understood what they meant and, apart from anything else, there’s a safety issue in an environment like that. You’re dealing with sometimes fragile people.

But laughter can help people in a huge number of ways. It provides “A-ha!” moments. It encourages people to realise they are intelligent enough to get that joke, and it enables people to connect with each other.’

Stephanie researched and implemented the course, then improved it using comments from service users and providers about the programme. It’s now a 10-session one-hour-a-week programme with a booklet given out each week. This seemed a good point to ask what sort of things the course covers.

‘There’s a session on why laughter can be good for us but also why it is bad.

How do we build relationships and when, for instance. Is sick humour appropriate or inappropriate? We have a session on what laughter does to your body, which really engages people.’

Stephanie talks about personal laughter triggers… and I get a sense of what the course is like as I find myself smiling, talking about the fact that some old university friends of mine only have to mention the name ‘Dean Martin’ to laugh uncontrollably, for reasons too complicated to explain. Stephanie nods.

‘People change their persona when they talk about what makes them laugh. And if they understand what makes them laugh they can self-medicate.’

Stephanie describes her FLIP framework which structures the course.

‘It’s based on what comedians do. F is for focus. Comedians focus their state of mind and flip the world, and we work with service users to help them to do this.

L stands for language. We try to sensitise people to the associations of words and how they can support emotional states.

I is for imagination and P is for patternbreaking. Hopefully you can see that it’s

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not just about telling jokes to make people feel better.’ As we talk about this, it strikes me that there are elements of other therapies and approaches, including cognitive behaviour therapy and positive psychology in this, but that Laughology gives then a unique flavour and extends their repertoire of techniques.

And finally… Mr Ken Dodd The parents and children are going home and the trad jazz band and a number of brightly dressed clowns have just filed past our table. I ask Stephanie about Laughology’s future as well as hers. ‘We’re working with a wide variety of clients and institutions. In businesses for instance, we do a lot of work in culture change, behaviour strategy, leadership skills, engagement and even how to speak to people. I do some motivational speaking for big companies as well. Everything we do is about the relationship of happiness and humour to an area – business success, physical and mental health or learning.

The recession has, I think, made people think differently and we’ve been really busy for some while.’ Stephanie trains associates in the Laughology technique.

‘There’s one other comedian in the team.

Some have psychology training but if not we arrange an A-level to start with.’

And what would Stephanie like to do? ‘Virtually every moment of my time is spent on Laughology – developing the approach, winning work, delivering it.

At some stage in the future I’d like to step back and take a more strategic role, but there are other things I want to do.

I would like to license packages to schools to introduce Laughology more widely. My first book Laughology: The Science of Laughter to Improve Your Life comes out in May from Crown House and I have a few more books in planning. I’ve been on TV programmes such as Trisha, The Bank of Mum and Dad, BBC’s Heaven & Earth and ITV’s Stand-up Jenny. I’m also on BBC radio a lot. I’d love to do a PhD – in fact I’ve been talking to Chester about that.’ This bears out Stephanie’s early comment that she liked a challenge!

It’s very cold outside, and as we walk to the station through Friday evening crowds I ask Stephanie if she still has time for stand-up. ‘Mostly for charity but I try to keep my hand in now and then.’

And I suggest that one of the explanations for her interest in humour is her Liverpool upbringing. ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ she says. ‘I love those big Northern cities which can be tough, have their own culture but all have a very specific sense of humour. And Liverpool’s known for it.

Just look at Ken Dodd.’

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Is work a laughing matter?

Elizabeth Sullivan considers gallows humour

Did you hear about the emergency ward nurse who died and went straight to hell?

— It took her two weeks to realise that she wasn't at work anymore.

(Gaskill, 2005)

DUNCAN PHILLIPS/REPORTDIGITAL.CO.UK

f you ask people in difficult and challenging occupations whether they use gallows or sick humour in the workplace they generally say that they do. If you ask them why, what purpose it serves, they tend to agree on three things: that it helps relieve stress and tension that could inhibit effective work; it helps to distance them from traumatic aspects of the work allowing them to remain sane in ‘insane’ circumstances; and it helps to foster social cohesion among members of a work team. In my own research (Sullivan, 2000), social workers in children’s services spoke of the purgative power of gallows humour:

I

Whatever the benefits, there are also ethical dimensions to the use of gallows humour (Sullivan, 2000; Watson, 2011) In research with social workers – a profession that prioritises person-centred practice and is vigilant in combating discrimination – among the views that gallows humour was a healthy mechanism for dealing with emotionally challenging work, there were also misgivings about the possibility that it could foster or hide unacceptable prejudices and attitudes towards the client. In other

…it allowed us to vent all our feelings about these children so we could face them totally cleansed, and the more we spoke negatively about a particular child the more we could see them positively.

This highlights an intuitive appeal for the notion of catharsis, a familiar concept in psychotherapy and counselling (e.g. Heron, 1990). Much of the research does identify catharsis as an outcome of gallows humour.

However, apart from self-report studies, it seems researchers have as yet to find a demonstrable link between humour and well-being (McCreaddie & Wiggins, 2008).

Many studies have been undertaken, in which the self-reports of workers as diverse as emergency service professionals (Rowe & Regehr, 2010), social workers (Moran & Hughes, 2006), doctors (Wear et al., 2009), nurses (Hammond, 1993), forensic psychiatric workers (Kuhlman, 1998) and crime scene investigators (Roth & Vivona, 2010) attest to the benefits of gallows humour. Yet it remains unclear whether the benefits they describe are based in measurable physiological changes in wellbeing, including lowered stress hormones such as cortisol, or are purely perceived and experienced psychologically and emotionally.

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unacceptable utterances are rendered difficult to object to because they are related in a way that makes us laugh (Dovidio et al., 1991).

In addition, gallows humour shared with colleagues may be seen to serve two identity needs: self-esteem and selfprotection. Firstly, it may highlight and re-affirm the collegiate relationship from which feelings of acceptance and selfesteem derive. Greenwald and Banaji (1995) demonstrated that high self-esteem accompanies association with positively valued others and/or dissociation from negatively valued others. Thus, humour shared with positively valued colleagues serves as a coping strategy by bolstering self-esteem, but may do so by negatively valuing the client (or patient, or disaster victim or dead body depending on the work setting).

Secondly, gallows humour translates unacceptable thoughts and feelings into a socially acceptable form of expression, thus allowing them to be experienced in an accepting context. This process may act to disguise the existence of prejudice and other socially unacceptable attitudes such as sexism and racism. It is easy to see that a work environment which fosters such attitudes through the lens of humour, and in the guise of a coping strategy, could have a deleterious effect on worker’s relationships with clients, members of the public, and on each other, as well as on working practice. For example, if a client is reduced to a derogatory stereotype in order that a sick joke can be told about them, an unthinking worker’s practice might reflect that derogatory stereotype in a way which disadvantages the client.

So is gallows humour a good thing or not? The results of the self-report studies strongly support the perceived benefits for workers – catharsis, relief, distancing from intolerable situations, fostering social cohesion and bolstering professional identity. But some writers suggest a more cautious approach that takes into account the potential pitfalls – fostering disrespect and discrimination aimed at the ‘client’, and disguising unacceptable attitudes.

Reflection and supervision offer a way of

words, we must consider the possibility that workers could be in danger of compromising their person-centred practice by easing their stress with uncomplimentary stereotypes wrapped up in humorous exchanges. Watson (2011) describes how gallows humour may be very situation- and participant-specific. In other words, when shared by a small group of workers ‘behind the scenes’ as it were, it is beneficial, but if told out of context with people who ‘weren’t there’, it may become offensive.

In the social psychology literature humour is conceptualised as a social activity which, because it relies on shared systems of understanding, has the effect of cementing relationships between members of a group (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986). At its best, humour expresses the innocent enjoyment of shared meanings and social cohesion. At its worst, it is a powerful communicator of prejudice, since

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unpicking what gallows humour might be hiding so that the instantaneous benefits might still be enjoyed, but the sneaky side effects don’t go unnoticed.

Principal Clinical Psychologist

I Dr Elizabeth Sullivan is a former Senior Lecturer in social work, now retired e.l.sullivan@ntlworld.com References Dovidio, J.F. & Gaertner, S.L. (1986). Prejudice, discrimination and racism: Historical trends and contemporary approaches. In J.F. Dovidio & SL. Gaertner (Eds.) Prejudice, discrimination and racism (pp.1-34). San Diego: Academic Press.

Dovidio, J.F., Tobriner, M., Roux, S. & Gaertner, S.L. (1991). Say “we”: Priming inter-personal expectations. Unpublished manuscript.

Department of Psychology, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY. Gaskill, D. (2005). Gallows humor: Funny as hell.

Presented to Nammor Symposium, California State University, Sacramento. Retrieved 26 Feb 2013 from tinyurl.com/d585btk Greenwald, A.G. & Banaji, M.R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem and stereotypes.

Psychological Review, 102(1), 4-27.

Hammond, P. (1993). Sick with Laughter. Nursing Times, 89, 122.

Heron, J. (1990). Helping the client. London: Sage.

Kuhlman, T. (1998). Gallows humour for a scaffold setting: Managing aggressive patients in a maximum-security forensic unit. Hospital and Community Psychiatry, 39, 1085–1090.

McCreaddie, M. & Wiggins, S. (2008). The purpose and function of humour in health, health care and nursing: A narrative review. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 61(6), 584–595.

Moran, C. & Hughes, P. (2006). Coping with stress: Social work students and humour. Social Work Education, 25(5), 501–517.

Roth, G. & Vivona, B. (2010). Mirth and murder: Crime scene Investigation as a work context for examining humor applications. Human Resource Development Review, 9(4), 314–332.

Rowe, A. & Regehr, C. (2010). Whatever gets you through today: An examination of cynical humor among emergency service professionals. Journal of Loss and Trauma: International Perspectives on Stress & Coping, 15(5), 448–464.

Sullivan, E.L. (2000). Gallows humour in social work: An issue for supervision and reflexivity. Practice, 12(2), 45–54.

Watson, K. (2011). Gallows humour in medicine. The Hastings Centre Report, 41(5), 37–45. www.medscape.com/viewarticle/749289 Wear, D., Aultman, J.M., Zarconi, J. & Varley, J.D. (2009). Derogatory and cynical humour directed towards patients: Views of residents and attending doctors. Medical Education, 43, 34–41.

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‘Turn off your internal editor that makes you say the right thing; find your inner idiot and remember how to play again,’ explains Logan, our course tutor, a professional stand-up himself. ‘Don’t try to be too clever. Don’t try too hard to be funny… and knowing all about the theory of humour is unlikely to really Rob Bailey with the latest in our series for budding writers help you all that much. Just muck (see www.bps.org.uk/newvoices for more information) around. That’s what people want to see on stage. That’s why they pay good money… to see you arse around.’ So that’s what we’ve been doing.

An instruction typical of the ones ’m about to do something that would Logan would use to help us loosen up commanding, mysterious figure onstage, terrify most people. I’m leaning with included, ‘Wander around talking to but on my debut show at the Oxford my back to the bar, guitar in hand, others in the room, but make sure that Fringe Festival, the audience laughed at waiting as a compere warms up an you’re the lowest status person here.’ Not my first joke, then continued to laugh audience in a central London comedy to be outdone, I found myself conversing throughout all the routines that were club. The punters have paid, bought with others whilst lying prostrate on the meant to be serious. To say I was themselves a drink, and now want to floor. surprised was an understatement, but laugh. Once he’s finished, I’ll be up next, I’d say that understanding the thankfully, they weren’t laughing at me. hoping to entertain the room with my psychology of humour has helped a little.

Well sometimes they were, but mostly first ever stand-up comedy routine.

It was only last year that I stumbled they were with me.

Imagine yourself in exactly the across the book Inside Jokes: Using same position. Does it make your Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind hands go just a little clammy? In from 2011, by Hurley, Dennett and an online research survey we Adams. As I read the introduction, conducted via my workplace I couldn’t have grinned much wider recently, it wasn’t money, work or if I’d put a coat hanger in my other horrors that came out as the mouth, because I finally felt that number one stressor, but public I was reading a true, unifying theory speaking. Only a few years ago of humour.

I might have felt exactly the same.

Past efforts to explain humour So how did I get here? had never really cut it for me. For I’m a narcissist. Simples. example, those theorists that simply No, actually, the real answer is thought that humour was a way of that I signed up for an eight-week expressing anger, or of social comedy course with 18 other control, or of proving intellect, or people, and here I am at the end of plays a part in sexual attraction (of week eight, at my graduation women to men) seemed to have showcase. Every Sunday, we’ve only explained some, incomplete, seen little sunlight as our six-hour aspects of motivation, not the meetings are held in the basement mechanics of humour. of a pub, which smells like a So at this point, here’s where teenage boy’s boxer shorts (on their you might expect to find the third continuous day of service). At obligatory ‘…and Freud said…’ the beginning of each session, we section. But honestly who cares push back all of the tables and about his inaccurate, half-baked, chairs before attempting to find confused misconceptions about the our comic geniuses. The group human psyche? I think most of us includes a lawyer, a couple of have now figured out that the mind I finally felt that I was reading a true, unifying theory people working in finance, a tourand body don’t act like a Victorian bus driver, a couple of actors, a 69- of humour boiler system. Do I really feel the need year-old comic, and me, a to trot out the tired nonsense typical of psychologist. a BBC online magazine article written Jimbo – the older chap – by an aspiring media studies student explains that he’s looking for love so has who wouldn’t spot a genuine theory if the So it was the audience who told joined mature dating websites; he says it’s Large Hadron Collider shot it up their me that I’m funny, but I haven’t always called carbon dating. bottom? I don’t think so. understood why, or how to craft and Of all the group, I think I’ve probably Any Freudians out there… feel free control the comic moments. Hence why gigged the most. For the last three years, to write me a letter, to defend your outI signed up for the course: to learn. And I’ve performed a comedy mind-reading dated, erroneous wiffle-waffle, but please although I’m proud to say that I’ve had show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. don’t strain your eyes as you scratch away five humour books published, there was It wasn’t originally meant to be a comedy with your quill in the candlelight. When hardly a single joke in any of them, so show – I thought I would cut a you look up blearily from your missive, I still feel like a beginner.

Comedy and psychology – a personal perspective

I

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you’ll find that the rest of us have moved on. We’ve got genuine theory and evidence-based practices, so stick that in your cigars and suck on them.

Oh, and don’t take what follows to be ironic confirmatory evidence for your silly beliefs. I’m ahead of you.

Just for you, here’s one of the Freud jokes from my show…

most naïve audience member would think that doves really have appeared from nowhere, or that a spectator’s watch was genuinely smashed into pieces and then magically restored. There seems to be pleasure in knowing that you’ve been fooled and that you may or may not figure out how. Perhaps willingly being tricked shares some commonality with ‘Discussing Freud reminds me of the experiencing contradictions: we time that I mixed up my haemorrhoid simultaneously enjoy a fantasy which cream with my superglue and got looks real and yet also know it to be anally fixated.’ untrue.

But the psychology of magic is a Really, before I drop it, I ought to explain whole separate topic – there are a huge that one of Freud’s assumptions was that number of psychological reasons why humour is letting off repressed anger… magic might appeal, including escapist well… you know what! That makes me fantasy: people imagine what they would want to travel back in time and teach him be able to do if they too shared the a lesson… I’d dance round his study, powers demonstrated by the magician. dressed as my mother, before slapping Which does beg the question… why if him around the ears with a giant cigar, I had the power to morph and transpose whilst shouting ‘Thanatos’ at him. Grrr. physical matter at will, would I turn So back to Inside Jokes… The crux of handkerchiefs into billiard balls? their thesis is that any self-directed So, returning to comedy, was Logan intelligent system will need to correct its right when he said that even knowing the own bugs. So think of it in terms of the theory of humour wouldn’t help us all human mind running software to that much as a stand up? I think he was. understand the world around it. As it So much of what made our group laugh makes sense of things, there’s a risk that over our eight weeks of life-affirming the occasional error will be made (a bug), mucking around would be very hard to which will have to predict or script. During be debugged before one improv exercise, four long. Now if that of us were told to perform “I feel more likely to say process was tedious an improvised opera. Whilst what’s on my mind and to or onerous, we’d be Susan and Caroline sang be more playful again” less inclined to do it. earnestly on either side of However, just like the stage, I’d spontaneously the joyous squelchy brought Henry to the floor, moments that consenting adults enjoy where we wrestled each other like out-ofbetween themselves, evolution has control brawlers in a pub fight. The rest conspired to make the decoding fun. of the group, sat in the audience, were Imagine if the former wasn’t fun – I guess in uncontrollable fits of laugher. As this most of us might just find it a little ikky moment was lost to the ether, and as and the human race would cease to exist. a performer, I couldn’t be an observer, To make this all more concrete, here’s I’ll never appreciate just why it seemed an example, from the book: so funny. But the point is, I would never Two fish are in a tank. have written this into a script. It was One says to the other, “Do you know a joyous, found moment. how to drive this thing?”

The other thing that I would never have predicted is just how happy I’ve felt The joke works on the principle that we during these few weeks. I might have have started to imagine one thing, and, expected some form of winter blues by just in time, the punch-line tells us that now, but I’ve had none of it. It’s difficult our first assumption was wrong. For to explain just how much fun it’s been to correctly figuring out the contradiction be amongst a group of people who will we are rewarded with a pleasurable tolerate you saying or doing whatever feeling. The joke is an efficient way of comes into your head. We’ve all said and stimulating this natural reaction. Comics done things that would normally appear have become experts in tickling this revolting or shocking, then looked up mental funny-bone in order to make us hesitantly to the group to find not derision laugh. or rejection, but howls of laughter. I would Since reading this theory, I’ve begun repeat some of what we said, but for the to wonder, too, whether or not the same fact that I spent years training to become psychological mechanism might underlie a Chartered then Registered Psychologist enjoyment of magic. After all, only the and don’t want some humourless reader

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

taking umbrage and attempting to strip me of that. You know who you are, and frankly, I think your sort are so grumpy that even the bacteria in your yoghurt are unfriendly.

The courage to speak more freely has come back into my everyday life too. I’ve always been a little irreverent, but over the years I’d learnt to behave well. In doing so, I’d become more… boring.

Now, I feel more likely to say what’s on my mind and to be more playful again, even in a work setting. Perhaps because, through maturity, I’m more aware of where the line is, I’ve got the choice to tippy-toe around it, and again, instead of disapproval, I’ve tended to hear laughter.

So what have I learnt recently? Here’s a brief list…

I Even if people disagree with you, specific clear statements of your own opinions tend to be valued, on or off stage.

I Remember to treat nerves like excitement; they feel so very similar, but one will make you very sick, the other is a thrill that can help you achieve peak performance.

I Something about the whole experience of the stand-up course was lifeaffirming and liberating.

I It is possible to have a unifying theory of humour.

I Humour is more than a funny script; the mannerisms of a comic carry the laughter just as much as the wordplay.

I almost wish I wasn’t having to type this but instead I could be with you reading this to you in person, thereby introducing all the rhythm and inflections I hold in my mind. But there’s a risk associated with that – humour is seductive, and before long, at the very least you’d want to cuddle me, and we can both think of several reasons why that would be wrong.

But, finally, how did my comedy routine go?

Well, the audience laughed at all of my jokes. Ones I hadn’t expected to get big laughs got the biggest laughs. If I want even bigger laughs, I’ll have to tighten up the script, get back out on stage and practise. I feel that I’ve only just begun.

Rob Bailey is Principal Consultant, R&D, at OPP Ltd Rob.Bailey@opp.com @psychicpsych

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training of the original uncut worm.

Moreover, after several regenerations, worms that contained none of the structure of the originally trained animal also retained some memory of the initial conditioning.

On 21 September Newsweek published a summary of this work, triggering a series of events that no one – Larry Stern on an ‘extraordinary and subversive’ journal certainly not McConnell – ever expected.

Two years earlier, the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik sparked fears that the United States lagged behind the Soviets in science and technology. cience, we all know, is serious stuff.

One result, designed to ignite the youth appeared in the New Yorker. Gary Larson’s If it is to retain its cultural and of America’s interest in science, was a depictions of psychology in his Far Side cognitive authority, it must be seen renewed emphasis on local science fairs. are insightful – and hilarious. Just as an objective, dispassionate and valueShortly after the Newsweek coverage, consider his cartoon titled, ‘The Four free enterprise. But science, at its core, is McConnell was inundated with letters Personality Types,’ featuring four a human enterprise populated by all types individuals confronting a half-filled glass from high school students from around of people. Some, to be sure, are rather the country asking where they could of water. After the typical optimist, austere – practically agelastic. Newton, it’s obtain worms for their projects and how pessimist, and indecisive personality types been said, only laughed once: when asked say their piece, the fourth, hands on hips they should go about caring for and if there would be any use in reading training them. Some students, according bellows, ‘Hey, I ordered a cheeseburger!’

Euclid. But science and scientists can also to McConnell, demanded that he send a You don’t need to be a native New Yorker be awfully funny – without jeopardising few hundred trained worms at once since to relate – and smile. the objectivity of what comes to count their projects were due within days.

But one need not look outside the (however provisionally) as certified After answering the first few letters halls of academia to find such humour. knowledge.

McConnell realised that something more Indeed, for my money, nothing beats the Mindful of American author E.B. efficient was needed. So he and his humour contained in the Worm Runner’s White’s admonition that ‘Humor can be students wrote what amounted to a Digest, published between 1959 and 1979. dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies training manual describing their work If your library subscribed, you might find in the process and the innards are and how to repeat their experiments. it and its twin, the Journal of Biological discouraging to any but the pure scientific Psychology, nestled between the serious McConnell firmly believed that mind,’ I shall not attempt to provide a ‘anyone who takes himself, or his work, Journal of Applied Psychology and Journal definition, much less an analysis of the too seriously is in a perilous state of of Comparative and Physiological nature of humour, its role in one’s psychic Psychology. mental health’. So as well-being, relationships with others, and a joke, he affixed the The brainchild of various institutional settings that name Worm Runner’s James V. McConnell, then “anyone who takes comprise society. I note, only in passing, Digest to the top of the an assistant professor of that some of the giants have tried their manual. Adorning the psychology at the himself, or his work, too hand, and perusing their work literally left University of Michigan, front page was a crest seriously is in a perilous me limp. Unable to appreciate the merits that one of his students the Worm Runner’s Digest state of mental health” of Hobbes’ superiority theory made me designed, complete burst on the scene as a feel inadequate. Kant’s reliance on reason with a two-headed worm new 1960s counterculture to account for humour seemed totally with pharynx fully exposed, was beginning to take incongruous to me. After slogging a pair of diagonal stripes in the maize and form. Devoted in part to puncturing the through Kierkegaard’s treatise I felt so blue colours of Michigan across the pretentiousness and pomposity of that disoriented and confused that I began to escutcheon of said planarian, a coronet sacred cow known as ‘science,’ it was, question the meaning of it all. Though made up of a Hebbian cell assembly, a Ψ as McConnell noted, one of the first hopeful, I found that delving into the for psychology, a homage to the stimulusscientific journals that knowingly recesses of Freud’s theory provided no response of behaviourism, and a motto, published satire. relief at all. And reading Schopenhauer’s ignotum per ignotius which, loosely What, then, prompted the creation discussion sapped whatever will I translated, means ‘When I get through of this peculiar journal? previously possessed to continue. explaining this to you, you will know It began with a paper McConnell Fortunately – just in the nick of time as even less than before I started.’ To top presented on the morning of 8 September the deadline for this article approached – things off, McConnell labeled it Volume I, 1959 at the 67th Annual Convention of I stumbled upon Mel Brook’s learned No. 1. the American Psychological Association. distinction, ‘Tragedy is when I cut my To McConnell’s astonishment, word In this paper, ‘Apparent retention of a finger. Comedy is when you walk into an of this new ‘journal’ got out and he started conditioned response following total open sewer and die.’ Feeling rejuvenated, receiving submissions. So he decided to regeneration in the planarian,’ McConnell I was able to press on. ‘pep things up a bit’ by scattering poems, reported data collected by one of his Cartoonists have been poking fun at jokes, satires, cartoons, spoofs and short honours students, Reeva Jacobson, which science – and especially at psychologists – indicated that separate pieces of trained stories more or less randomly among the for decades. From 1925 to 2004, for more serious articles. worms, after being allowed to regenerate example, 2486 cartoons about psychology their missing parts, retained the initial McConnell wrote some of these

The Worm Runner’s Digest

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spoofs himself, including one on learning theory that should be mandatory reading.

In it, a psychology professor is walking in the woods thinking about how to teach his intro students the finer points of learning theory when he suddenly finds himself in a giant Skinner box on an alien spaceship, complete with a nipple on the wall that delivers ‘a slightly cool and somewhat sweetish flow of liquid’ and, later, a lever that when pulled delivers protein balls of food. The ‘experiments’ the subject endures are classic, and if the denouement does not bring a smile, well, perhaps you are in a perilous state of mental health.

Dozens of reputable psychologists contributed humour to the digest as well. Harry Harlow had two pieces: ‘Fundamental principles for preparing psychology journal articles’ and a poem, ‘Yearning and Learning,’ a somewhat bawdy look at how monkeys learn to copulate.

B.F. Skinner contributed two parodies of behaviourism: ‘A Christmas caramel, or a plum from the hasty pudding,’ in which he plays the role of Professor Skinnybox, and ‘On the relation between mathematical and statistical competence and significant scientific productivity,’ which he published under the pseudonym of F. Galton Pennywhistle.

Spoofs of Freudian theory also appeared. ‘Some comments on an addition to the theory of psychosexual development’ by Sigmund Fraud introduced the ‘nasal stage,’ occurring between the anal and phallic stages, in which the libido is localised primarily in the mucous linings of the nose. Though the consequences of poor nasal training might not be as drastic as those accompanying poor toilet training, two pathologies might ensue: feelings of superiority that lead you to turn your nose up at others, and/or being a busybody and constantly sticking your nose in others’ business.

Other notable contributions that graced the Digest’s pages include faux reports on ‘The effects of physical torture on the learning and retention of nonsense syllables,’ ‘The Gesundheits Test,’ ‘Taste aversion in dead rats: Learning or motivational defect?’ and its follow-up ‘Taste aversion in dead rats: A note on proper control procedures.’ The Digest is also credited with announcing the ‘law of scientific output,’ where productivity equals the number of secretaries in a laboratory times their average typing speed divided by the number of scientists.

Thus, not only is one good secretary worth two good scientists but when the number of scientists is zero, productivity becomes infinite.

But bona fide experimental reports were included in the Digest as well. Some of these, most notably McConnell’s report in 1961 that naive planarians, upon cannibalising their conditioned brethren, showed evidence of ‘remembering’ the conditioned task, strained the credulity of psychologists. Indeed, the publication of serious articles side-by-side with spoofs apparently posed a problem for some scientists who complained that they weren’t able to distinguish between the serious reports and the parodies.

To deal with this problem, McConnell

As might be expected, responses to the Digest were mixed, reflecting some of the schisms found in the larger society at the time. While admirers hailed the Digest as a ‘scientific Playboy,’ revelling in its wit, McConnell’s more austere critics referred to it pejoratively as a ‘scientific comic book’, arguing that science is not the place for such sophomoric humour.

McConnell, in fact, believed that the Digest cost him research grants.

McConnell’s bottom line – that science could and should be fun – is perhaps as important today as it was when he began to champion the cause in 1959. If your library does not hold copies of the Digest, you can find the ‘greatest hits’ in two anthologies – The Worm Re-

banished all of the so-called funny stuff to the back of the journal, printing it upside down to make sure that no one would confuse it with the serious work. This began in October 1964. Three years later, the split became formal when McConnell renamed the front part of the journal containing the serious scientific work the Journal of Biological Psychology, retaining the name Worm Runner’s Digest for the back half of the journal.

At its peak, the Digest had roughly 2500 subscribers scattered throughout the world. Since humorous cartoons appear regularly in best-selling psychology textbooks today, it is easy to forget how extraordinary and subversive the Digest was when it first appeared.

turns and Science, Sex, and Sacred Cows – in used bookstores, or online. As Arthur Koestler opined, ‘One of the last Palinuran joys of civilized middle age is to sit in front of the log-fire, sip a glass of brandy, and read the Worm Runner’s Digest.’

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

I Larry Stern is a professor of sociology and Chair of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Collin College in Plano, Texas.

This is an expanded version of an article which originally appeared in Stern, L. (2013, January). Psychological hijinks. Monitor on Psychology, 44(1). Retrieved from www.apa.org/monitor, published by the American Psychological Association.

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automatically mean it’s correct.

One cultural recommendation Black Books. No real reason, I just really like it.

…with Dean Burnett

One alternative career path you may have chosen I pretty much do all my desired alternatives as it is.

Neuroscientist, comedian and Guardian blogger

One person who inspired you Worryingly, Susan Greenfield.

I first got into neuroscience after reading one of her books.

Given what she gets up to these days, I imagine this is what die-hard Star Wars fans felt like when watching The Phantom Menace.

One favourite comedian from a psychological perspective Matt Price.

Cornish comedian, good friend of mine.

How he can turn any group of people into an ideal audience is beyond comprehension.

One favourite joke Susan Greenfield!

One challenge of blogging on psychology Getting people to appreciate that psychology is a legitimate science, and can be more complex and messy than others at times.

One challenge you think psychology faces The intangible nature of much of what’s covered by the field may mean it always struggles to get deserved recognition.

One regret That newspaper picture (see above).

My blog ‘Brain Flapping’ at The Guardian (see www.guardian.co.uk/ science/brain-flapping). I’m genuinely proud of it, I feel it shows you can keep the humour without losing the science if you combine the two.

Articles on quitting smoking, the connected brain, political violence and youth, and much more...

I Send your comments about The Psychologist to the editor, Dr Jon Sutton, on jon.sutton@bps.org.uk, +44 116 252 9573 or to the Leicester office address I To advertise Display: ben.nelmes@redactive.co.uk, +44 (0)20 7880 6244 Jobs and www.psychapp.co.uk: giorgio.romano@redactive.co.uk, +44 (0)20 7880 7556

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One nugget of advice for aspiring psychologists Just because an article is published, that doesn’t

contribute

One journal article that you think all psychologists should read Any journal article that I’ve managed to get an author’s credit on. I need to stay credible somehow, and they’re both good papers.

coming soon

Dean Burnett drdeanburnett@gmail.com

One thing I have noticed about psychology After thinking long and hard about it, I just don’t think introspection is a useful approach

resource

One moment that changed the course of your career When I lacked media awareness, I was featured in a newspaper, pictured in a cowboy hat and scarf, splashing in puddles with an insane grin on my face.

‘Serious academic’ was no longer an option after that.

One hero from psychology past or present Patient H.M. Gone, but not forgotten (ironically).

One great thing that psychology has achieved Stopped a lot of people dying, in a number of ways.

One problem that psychology should deal with People are too easily misled by those with confidence. Sort it out!

One hope for the future of psychology Some sort of system to rein in pop-psychologists speaking guff for money.

One amusing psychology experiment I’m always bemused by the Bobo Doll experiment. Social Learning aside, I think Bandura just hated clowns.

One proud moment Getting my PhD despite my examiner’s best efforts.

One psychological superpower I’d like to have I’d enjoy being able to spell rude words on my neocortex while in an fMRI scanner.

One final thought You don’t have to be serious to be smart (I hope).

Think you can do better? Want to see your area of psychology represented more?

See the inside front cover for how you can contribute and reach 50,000 colleagues into the bargain, or just e-mail your suggestions to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk

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BPS T Textbooks extbooks in P Psychology sy ychology c No other series bears the BPS seal of appr approval oval Refreshingly written to consider more than Northern American research, this series is the ďŹ rst to give a truly international perspective. Every title fully complies with the BPS syllabus in the topic.

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