It's official: all women have a GSOH. Women's brains appear to be quite different to men's in responses to humor, with women more likely to activate - with greater intensity - the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings in response to new experiences.
The researchers, from the Stanford University School of Medicine, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor the brains of male and female subjects while watching humorous cartoons. Previous studies have shown gender differences in the use and appreciation of humor and the meaning and function of laughter, but no previous research has examined sex-specific differences in the brain's response to humor.
The study, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system, but they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens, which is part of the brain's reward center.
Researcher Allan Reiss said he was puzzled by the nucleus accumbens finding. He and his colleagues theorized that because the women in this study used more analytical machinery when deciphering humorous material, it signaled that they weren't necessarily expecting the cartoons to be as rewarding as did the men. But when a woman's brain encountered the punch line, her reward center lit up. "The activation of this center not only signals the presence of something pleasant, but that the pleasure was unexpected," said Reiss. "Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon. So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it." He added that the funnier the cartoon, the more the reward center was activated in women, which was not the case in men, who seemed to "expect" the cartoons to be funny from the start.
"The results help explain previous findings suggesting women and men differ in how humor is used and appreciated," concluded Reiss, who believes that the results may have more serious implications for the treatment of depression. If further studies show that women's reward center and other regions of the brain are more sensitive to emotional stimuli - including negative stimuli - it could help explain why depression strikes twice as many women as men, potentially leading to new therapies.
Source: Stanford University Medical Center
