Keywords
cognitive aging
humor
humor comprehension
How to Cite
Abstract
There are a limited number of studies investigating the aging-related changes in humor comprehension. Most studies use a similar procedure, asking participants to choose the option that completes a story with the funny punchline. Humor comprehension was found to be decreasing with aging and related to executive functions, theory of mind, and working memory. These studies generally focused on the type of joke in which the implicit secondary meaning resolves the conflict by creating a funny punchline. There are also other types of jokes and research has not focused on the links between humor appreciation, humor production, and humor comprehension. Most studies do not consider factors like education level, living in rural or urban areas, belonging to a professional group or culture, and cohort effects that can affect humor comprehension. Choosing the funny punchline for each successive item may measure attention, executive functions, and working memory span rather than humor comprehension. Therefore, findings showing the connection between cognitive function and humor comprehension may be task-dependent. In everyday life, jokes mostly occur within a context, but they are given as individual items in the laboratory. Older adults’ increased dependence on context in information processing also questions the generalizability of the findings. Keywords:
Aging, cognitive aging, humor, humor comprehension
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