The researchers hope the work will provide a base for understanding how positive emotions, such as a sense of humor, could affect a child\u2019s well-being<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cHumor is a very important component of emotional health, maintaining relationships, developing cognitive function and perhaps even medical health<\/strong>,\u201d said Allan Reiss, MD, who directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research at Stanford. Reiss is the senior author of a study describing the new findings, published Feb. 1 in the Journal of Neuroscience<\/em>.<\/p>\n As an important component of positive emotion, a strong sense of humor may help children to be more resilient<\/strong>, added Reiss, who is also a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, of radiology and of pediatrics at Stanford and at Lucile Packard Children\u2019s Hospital. \u201cIn particular, we think a balanced and consistent sense of humor may help children negotiate the difficult period of pre-adolescence and adolescence<\/strong>,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n To study kids\u2019 responses to humor, the research team analyzed brain scans collected while 15 children, aged 6 to 12, watched short video clips while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, scanner. The children were of at least average intelligence and did not have any psychiatric or developmental problems. The videos, which had been evaluated by other kids, fell into three categories: funny, positive and neutral. The \u201cfunny\u201d videos, mostly taken from the TV program \u201cAmerica\u2019s Funniest Home Videos,\u201d were both funny and rewarding to watch. The \u201cpositive\u201d videos were rewarding to watch but not funny. The \u201cneutral\u201d videos were neither rewarding nor funny. All of the videos could be understood without sophisticated language or reading skills.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was great fun to plan the study, though we couldn\u2019t just find movie clips that we, the investigators, found funny \u2014 our sense of humor is not the same as a 9-year-old\u2019s,\u201d said Reiss. \u201cSo we had a separate group of kids rate the clips before we undertook the study.”<\/p>\n The study\u2019s results showed that funny videos activated two regions of children\u2019s brains \u2014 regions that are also activated in adults who are viewing humorous material. While watching funny videos, children had high activity at the temporal-occipital-parietal junction, a brain area that processes perceived incongruities. Unlike in adults, this region was activated on both sides of the children\u2019s brains; in previous studies of adults responding to cartoon humor, activation was confined to the left side of the brain.<\/p>\n \u201cOur new finding suggests that the network that responds to humorous stimuli in adults is already present in kids but is not as well-developed,\u201d Reiss said.<\/p>\n Children, like adults, also responded to humor with activation in the brain\u2019s mesolimbic regions, which process rewards. Reward-processing areas were more strongly activated in younger children than older kids, which might mean the response of the reward circuitry becomes more sophisticated as children mature; it also could suggest that the funny videos used in this study were more age-appropriate (and more rewarding) for younger kids, the researchers said.<\/p>\n The positive videos activated the reward-processing areas but not the parts of the brain that process incongruity. This result supports prior research in adults that suggests incongruity \u2014 a surprise for the brain \u2014 is a key part of making something funny.<\/p>\n The researchers plan to expand on their findings by conducting studies to examine if brain circuits underlying humor in boys and girls develop differently, and to learn how a sense of humor is tied to a child\u2019s overall mental health and resilience.<\/p>\n For example, Reiss said, a better-developed sense of humor might help to protect a child against depression<\/strong>. But positive emotional states, such as the humor response, have scarcely been studied in kids, he added.<\/p>\n \u201cNegative emotional states such as depression or anxiety are compelling to study, but you can\u2019t completely understand why a child has emotional stability or instability until you look at both sides of the coin,\u201d he said. \u201cThis work is setting the stage for helping us look at how humor predicts resilience and well-being.\u201d<\/p>\n Reiss\u2019 team included the study\u2019s first author, Michelle Neely, who was an undergraduate researcher at Stanford when the study was conducted and is now a medical student at Cornell; and postdoctoral scholars Elizabeth Walter, PhD, and Jessica Black, PhD, who is now a member of the faculty of Boston College.<\/p>\n The research was funded by grants from the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children\u2019s Health; the Spectrum Child Health Research Institute, of which Reiss is a member; a Bette and Al Moorman Young Investigator Award; an NIH-sponsored institutional research training grant; and a grant from the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Stanford School of Medicine press release: For the first time, researchers have scanned the brains of children watching funny videos to examine which of their brain regions are… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,10,6,9],"tags":[70,42,45,285,73,214,39],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1052,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions\/1052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Laughing.jpg\" "\\"laughing\\"")
For the first time, researchers have scanned the brains of children watching funny videos to examine which of their brain regions are active as their sense of humor develops. The new findings from the Stanford University School of Medicine show that some parts of the brain network that respond to humor in adults already exist in 6- to 12-year-olds, though the neural circuits become more sophisticated as kids grow<\/strong>.<\/p>\n