From infants to old people…

Old people (such as Alaska’s senator, Ted Stevens, pictured above) have a reputation for sometimes being grumpy and humorless. Well, now there’s some scientific research to back that up.

A new study out of Washington University in St. Louis looks at how general cognitive decline leads to a loss in humor comprehension:

Humor comprehension in older adults functions in a different fashion than humor comprehension in younger adults. The researchers studied older adults from a university subject pool as well as undergraduate students. The subjects participated in tests that indicated their ability to complete jokes accurately as well as tests that indicated their cognitive capabilities in areas of abstract reasoning, short-term memory, and cognitive flexibility. Overall, older adults demonstrated lower performance on both tests of cognitive ability as well as tests of humor comprehension than did younger adults.

The experiment was conducted, in part, by having test subjects complete a “joke stem” “correctly”: “A joke stem was presented with four different endings including the correct humorous ending; a humorous nonsequitur—an ending that does not make sense with the joke stem but is funny in and of itself; an unhumorous straightforward answer; and an unhumorous, unrelated nonsequitur. The correct ‘funny’ answer required that the participant integrate the three different cognitive measures tested in the study—abstract reasoning, short -term memory, and cognitive flexibility.”

I’d love to see the jokes they used. (Did they haul out the old “Soup or Sex” chestnut?)

While it’s easy to make fun of, though, this strikes me as important research. People don’t lose their sense of humor because they get old and/or crotchety. They literally lose their sense of humor, like one loses one’s hearing or one’s eyesight, though in this case due to a general decline in cognitive function. I’m not sure this means we’re close to a cure for “grumpy old man syndrome”; but we’re headed in something like the right direction.

For Senator Stevens, however, I fear we’re too late.

(via Omni Brain)