Relationship between self-defeating humor and the Gray matter volume in the orbital frontal cortex: the moderating effec
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Relationship between self-defeating humor and the Gray matter volume in the orbital frontal cortex: the moderating effect of divergent thinking Weiwei Zhang 1 & Kaixiang Zhuang 2,3 & Qunlin Chen 2,3 & Baoguo Shi 1
&
Jiang Qiu 2,3 & Nan Wang 1
Accepted: 25 October 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The self-defeating humor style is characterized by the excessive use of self-mockery, fawning over others and ineffective denial of negative emotions. The differences in brain structures responsible for self-defeating humor and the role of divergent thinking (DT) in this relationship have not been directly investigated in a large sample. Using voxel-based morphometry (VBM), we identified the association between regional gray matter volume (GMV) and self-defeating humor (assessed by the Humor Style Questionnaire) in 284 participants. Then, the role of DT (assessed by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, TTCT) in the relationship between humor and the related brain regions was examined in the participants (N = 280). The results showed that self-defeating humor was significantly positively associated with the regional GMV in the left orbital frontal cortex (OFC) and that DT had a moderating effect on this relationship. Among the individuals with higher DT, a strong positive correlation was observed between self-defeating humor and the OFC, but among individuals with lower DT, this correlation was weaker. These results reveal that the interaction between brain structures and DT plays an important role in humor, thus providing new evidence enhancing our understanding of the mechanism of humor. Keywords Self-defeating humor . Divergent thinking . VBM . Orbital frontal cortex
Introduction Humor is a fundamental ingredient of social communication (Wyer and Collins 1992). Humor has important adaptive value, such as psychological, social and physical functions, in many aspects of human life, can help people better establish interpersonal relationships and promotes individual physical and mental health (Borcherdt 2002). Generally, humor has been defined as a stable personality trait or individual variable (Erickson and Feldstein 2007) that integrates attitude, temperament, ability, emotion and behavior. On this basis,
* Baoguo Shi [email protected] 1
Beijing Key Laboratory of Learning and Cognition and School of Psychology, Capital Normal University, Beijing 100048, China
2
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (SWU), Ministry of Education, Chongqing 400715, China
3
School of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing 400715, China
researchers in relevant fields coined the term humor style. Humor style is the way in which individuals tend to express their sense of humor in social situations (Zhao et al. 2012). Based on the positive and negative dimensions of humor, Martin et al. (2003) divided humor into the following types: affiliative humor (the tendency to strengthen community cohesion using a tolerant and acceptable way of joking and ent
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