Bartolo Angela, Ballotta Daniela, Nocetti Luca, Baraldi Patrizia, Nichelli Paolo Frigio, Benuzzi Francesca
Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9193 - SCALab - Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, Lille, France.
Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), Paris, France.
Front Psychol. 2021 Nov 22;12:750597. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.750597. eCollection 2021.
Disparagement humor is a kind of humor that denigrates, belittles an individual or a social group. In the aim to unveil the offensive side of these kinds of jokes, we have run an event-related fMRI study asking 30 healthy volunteers to judge the level of fun of a series of verbal stimuli that ended with a sentence that was socially inappropriate but funny (disparagement joke -DJ), socially inappropriate but not funny (SI) or neutral (N). Behavioral results showed disparagement jokes are perceived as funny and at the same time offensive. However, the level of offense in DJ is lower than that registered in SI stimuli. Functional data showed that DJ activated the insula, the SMA, the precuneus, the ACC, the dorsal striatum (the caudate nucleus), and the thalamus. These activations suggest that in DJ a feeling of mirth (and/or a desire to laugh) derived from the joke (e.g., SMA and precuneus) and the perception of the jokes' social inappropriateness (e.g., ACC and insula) coexist. Furthermore, DJ and SI share a common network related to mentalizing and to the processing of negative feelings, namely the medial prefrontal cortex, the putamen and the right thalamus.
贬低性幽默是一种诋毁、轻视个人或社会群体的幽默。为了揭示这类笑话的冒犯性一面，我们进行了一项与事件相关的功能磁共振成像研究，让30名健康志愿者对一系列言语刺激的有趣程度进行评判，这些刺激的结尾句子在社会上不适当但有趣（贬低性笑话 - DJ）、社会上不适当但无趣（SI）或中性（N）。行为结果表明，贬低性笑话被认为既有趣又具有冒犯性。然而，DJ中的冒犯程度低于SI刺激中的程度。功能数据显示，DJ激活了脑岛、辅助运动区、楔前叶、前扣带回、背侧纹状体（尾状核）和丘脑。这些激活表明，在DJ中，源自笑话的愉悦感（和/或发笑欲望）（如辅助运动区和楔前叶）与对笑话社会不适当性的感知（如前扣带回和脑岛）同时存在。此外，DJ和SI共享一个与心理化和负面情绪处理相关的共同网络，即内侧前额叶皮质、壳核和右侧丘脑。
