Alcohol Can Cause You To Lose Your Sense Of Humour
Apparently problem drinkers have trouble understanding jokes and they don't always find them funny, Will and Guy have recently discovered in their online research.
Details of research, published in a recent issue of "Addiction", describes a study of 29 alcoholic patients in a clinic in Bochum, Germany, who took a range of tests to measure their mood, intellectual ability, memory and psychomotor skills, and capacity to appreciate jokes. A further task tested their ability to predict and understand other people's behaviour on the basis of their mental states ["mentalizing ability"]. The results were matched against those of 29 healthy controls.
For the humour processing test, subjects were given alternative punch lines for jokes, some more coherent and logical than others, and asked to choose the most appropriate.
The performance of the two groups differed markedly, with less than 68% of the alcoholic patients choosing the correct punch lines, against 92% of the healthy controls.
Alcoholics also fared less well in the working memory tests and the mentalizing ability tests, prompting speculation that deficits in these areas can impact upon a problem drinker's capacity to understand jokes and find them funny. Some people would take the view that research was not required to establish these facts - we may tend to agree
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