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The Neural Correlates of Humor Creativity.

ABSTRACT: Unlike passive humor appreciation, the neural correlates of real-time humor creation have been unexplored. As a case study for creativity, humor generation uniquely affords a reliable assessment of a creative product's quality with a clear and relatively rapid beginning and end, rendering it amenable to neuroimaging that has the potential for reflecting individual differences in expertise. Professional and amateur "improv" comedians and controls viewed New Yorker cartoon drawings while being scanned. For each drawing, they were instructed to generate either a humorous or a mundane caption. Greater comedic experience was associated with decreased activation in the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), but increased activation in temporal association regions (TMP). Less experienced comedians manifested greater activation of mPFC, reflecting their deliberate search through TMP association space. Professionals, by contrast, tend to reap the fruits of their spontaneous associations with reduced reliance on top-down guided search.

SUBMITTER: Amir O

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5122582 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The Neural Correlates of Humor Creativity.

Amir Ori O Biederman Irving I

Frontiers in human neuroscience 20161125

Unlike passive humor appreciation, the neural correlates of real-time humor creation have been unexplored. As a case study for creativity, humor generation uniquely affords a reliable assessment of a creative product's quality with a clear and relatively rapid beginning and end, rendering it amenable to neuroimaging that has the potential for reflecting individual differences in expertise. Professional and amateur "improv" comedians and controls viewed New Yorker cartoon drawings while being sca ...[more]

PMID: 27932965

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Project description:Research is still disputing if an individual's use of humor in everyday life is also indicative of his or her creative potential. To date, the focus has been mainly restricted to shared cognitive factors, while motivational aspects that may link the production of humor and of creative ideas have been largely neglected. Humor motivation implicates latent social goals the creator pursues through the use of humor. These goals can be benign or more malicious and manifest in an individual's typical display of comic styles. While often overlooked, creativity often serves social functions as well, especially in common everyday situations. Similar to humor, creativity is typically regarded as beneficial for individuals and society. Yet, creative ideas may also originate from less prosocial goals. This is reflected in the concept of malevolent creativity, where novel ideas are generated to deliberately harm others. The present study investigated individuals' typical display of humor, differentiated in eight distinct comic styles in relation to their productivity in a behavioral test for malevolent creativity and general creative potential (n = 106). Individuals with higher scores on comic styles that are affiliated with malicious interpersonal goals - such as hurting or upsetting others or demonstrating superiority over others - were more fluent in producing malevolent creative ideas in the malevolent creativity test. This finding shows that individual differences in humor motivation relate to the capacity of coming up with relevant creative ideas also outside the domain of humor. The pattern of relationships between humor motivation and general creative potential differed from that of malicious creativity and implied the comic style "wit" only, primarily adding to the notion of shared cognitive processes in the production of humor and creative ideas. The study offers a novel perspective for how the inclusion of motivational factors that are inherent to conceptualizations of humor may also benefit creativity research.

Dataset Information

The Neural Correlates of Humor Creativity.

Publications

The Neural Correlates of Humor Creativity.

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