Women enjoy humor more than men.

[Red]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/11/07....ap/index.html





WASHINGTON (AP) -- The difference between the sexes has long been a rich source of humor. Now it turns out, humor is one of the differences.

Women seem more likely than men to enjoy a good joke, mainly because they don't always expect it to be funny.

"The long trip to Mars or Venus is hardly necessary to see that men and women often perceive the world differently," a research team led by Dr. Allan L. Reiss of the Stanford University School of Medicine reports in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But they were surprised when their studies of how the male and female brains react to humor showed that women were more analytical in their response, and felt more pleasure when they decided something really was funny.

"Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon," said Reiss. "So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it."

Women were subjecting humor to more analysis with the aim of determining if it was indeed funny, Reiss said in a telephone interview.

Study may aid understanding of depression

Men are using the same network in the brain, but less so, he said, men are less discriminating.

"It doesn't take a lot of analytical machinery to think someone getting poked in the eye is funny," he commented when asked about humor like the Three Stooges.

While there is a lot of overlap between how men and women process humor, the differences can help account for the fact that men gravitate more to one-liners and slapstick while women tend to use humor more in narrative form and stories, Reiss said.

The funnier the cartoon the more the reward center in the women's brain responded, unlike men who seemed to expect the cartoons to be funny from the beginning, the researchers said.

The new insight could improve understanding of such conditions as depression, the researchers said.

"The bottom line is that I think it contributes to the foundation of understanding individual differences in humans," Reiss said. Humor is used by humans to cope with stress and to establish relationships, and it can even help strengthen the immune system.

Reiss' team studied the response of 10 women and 10 men to 70 black-and-while cartoons, asking them to rate the jokes for how funny they were. While the volunteers were looking at the cartoons their brains were being studied with an MRI to determine what parts of the brains were responding.

In large part, men and women had similar responses to humor, using parts of the brain responsible for the structure and context of language and for understanding juxtaposition.

In women, however, some areas were more active than in men. These included the left prefrontal cortex, which the researchers said suggests a greater emphasis on language and executive processing, and the nucleus accumbens, or NAcc, which is part of the reward center.

Reiss said he was surprised at the NAcc finding. The researchers theorized that because women were being more analytical they weren't necessarily expecting the cartoons to be as funny as did the men.

Then, when they saw the punch line, the reward center lit up, indicating something pleasant and unexpected.

Arnie Cann, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, commented: "Given the findings in the current study, that women appear to use more executive functions, it could be that they are more engaged in scrutinizing the humor to decide if it fits their views on what is acceptable humor. Once they decide the humor is OK, they could be experiencing a relief-like response."

That would fit in with the finding that women experience more reward from the joke, said Cann, who was not part of Reiss' research team.

Reiss' research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.


It would seem in humor, as in porn, women are much more cerebral.

[Zeina-Heart]

and you guys think we have no sense of humor.. see its been proven now we do..

[sarettah]

Women are from Venus:Men jerk off a lot

[Timon]

Originally Posted by Zeina-Heart

and you guys think we have no sense of humor.. see its been proven now we do..

Now all we need to do is prove you are a guy posing as a chick to get male webmasters to join your revenue proggie!

[justb]

that's why we live longer......we laugh more ; )

[Timon]

Originally Posted by justb

that's why we live longer......we laugh more ; )

No we die younger because you give us ulcers and high bloodpressure.

[Dravyk]

So this explains the whole Three Stooges thing at last.

Might also explain why ugly comedians usually end up with hot wives.

[Trev]

Originally Posted by Timon

No we die younger because you give us ulcers and high bloodpressure.

Exactly

[MorganGrayson]

I once had a psychiatrist tell me "if you didn't have such a great sense of humor, you'd be dead." He was right.

I *know* I don't expect comedies made after a the 80's to be funny. I've sat through way too many movies without so much as cracking a smile to expect to laugh. When I do find a comedy that makes me laugh, it makes me laugh a *lot.* I don't expect those jokes that nice, well-meaning people bomb their friends with in email to be funny, either. I don't expect cartoons to be funny, either. I'm very much aware of what they discovered in the study: I'm female and I have very low expectation of a reward for these things. However, I also love one-liners and slapstick, so I don't know what to do with that.

[grimm]

women dont like humor more than men, they just are not funny to have a great sense of humor you have to be self depricating enough to show a part of yourself most women are incapable of.

so its not that they enjoy humor more, we just dont get much back

[Dravyk]

Originally Posted by grimm

women dont like humor more than men, they just are not funny to have a great sense of humor you have to be self depricating enough to show a part of yourself most women are incapable of.

so its not that they enjoy humor more, we just dont get much back

Half truth-sayer, half wise-ass that you are, Grimm ...

I have to agree with you that the majority of women are not capable of self-deprciating humor.

Hell, a lot of men aren't either. But a lot more men than women are.

[grimm]

or it could be said that when a man and a woman meet, they are dichotic. the woman is looking to prove she is a notch above other women, while the man is trying to prove hes a notch below )read: not a vain jerk)..so humor comes more naturally on the way down that on the way up

[Dravyk]

Might also be (or not) that men get dressed in 10 minutes, and many (not all) women will take over an hour.

So take the two of those, and have them get splashed by a car, or fall down onto the wedding cake at the reception or whatever ... Better chance the man will laugh at the experience.

[Dravyk]

Hmm, you know ... women who get dressed fast and who use the women's restroom fast (hell, right there, they are keepers!) ... often have a better sense of humor about themselves too.

Seriously, there's a definite correlation there.

[Nickatilynx]

I'm fortunate , my wife and I laugh a great deal. Rarely at the same time however.

;-)))