生命周期不同阶段的幽默理解与加工机制

以往学者们大多将幽默作为一种语言现象进行研究，几乎没人关注幽默的神经心理加工过程。现代脑成像技术给学者们提供了一种更为客观的方式，有助于揭开幽默大脑加工的神秘面纱。尽管幽默的认知神经心理机制的研究已经能够帮助人们建立起对人类幽默理解的系统认识，但目前还有很多可扩展的方向：首先，目前的绝大多数研究都以成年人为研究对象，研究的外部效度存在问题，仅有个别研究着眼于儿童和老年人的幽默理解认知机制，应该开展针对其他年龄段的研究，从人类生命周期的角度整合不同年龄段的幽默理解神经心理加工机制发展变化的特点。其次，应着重结合汉语的特点和我国社会发展的特点进行研究，形成中国特色的汉语幽默认知加工理论。

Humor Appreciation and Its Corresponding Processing Mechanism over a Lifespan

Humor is a common human activity that most people will experience in their daily life, which is a psychological reaction and a biological reaction as well. People in different phases will present different abilities to find things funny because humor involves a very complicated cognitive process. It is very meaningful to explore the mechanism of humor appreciation in different life phases from both psychological and biological perspectives. Past research focused more on the phenomenon than the process of humor appreciation. In recent years, scholars have employed more objective methods, like ERP and fMRI, to demonstrate humor-related theories and cognitive processes, which has gradually deepened our understandings of the neural psychological mechanism of humor cognition. We will elaborate on different humor styles and processing mechanism that people use in different life phases, combining different stages of humor production and different humor styles to highlight the characteristics of humor processing in each phase of life (including infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and late adulthood). The purpose of this review is not to be comprehensive, but to establish a clue to humor appreciation threading across a lifespan. Humor styles bud in infancy, the initial phase of life, and mainly evolve with improvement of humor appreciation ability. During childhood, some humor styles are less employed in humor appreciation since they are closely related to social intercourse and stress, which appear less in this phase of life. When entering adolescence, people will be able to apply all humor styles to humor production and appreciation and keep them in use until late adulthood, often putting particular emphasis on some humor styles in different phases. Therefore, the employment of humor styles will go from nonexistence to existence, from single style to mixed multiple styles and finally a certain humor style will be preferred by an individual. This is the general tendency of humor appreciation development. The psychobiological elements related to humor begin to emerge soon after birth, so the psychobiological mechanism of humor appreciation also comes into existence at the same time and develops. The neural circuits for laughter already are present at birth, and with the development of humor appreciation ability, gradually develop into the neural circuits of humor appreciation, which runs through a person’s lifespan. However, the psychobiological mechanism of humor will not remain unchanged, and at different ages, with different experiences and different brain mechanisms in different life phases of each individual, the ways of processing humor will also be distinctive. Humor appreciation ability will develop with the improvement of one’s cognitive ability, and the general tendency is to ascend across infancy, childhood, adolescence and younger adulthood, but it will then fall down a little bit during one’s late adulthood because of the decline of one’s cognitive ability. Different phases of life will present different characteristics in psychobiological mechanism although the neural circuit basis will be kept the same until the end of life. However, most of the current research targeted adults, and its external validity is questionable. Only a small amount of research focused on the humor appreciation mechanism of people in childhood and late adulthood. And there is still no research to integrate relevant findings and comb through the developmental features of humor appreciation over a human being’s lifespan. Therefore, reviewing relevant materials of neural mechanism and humor styles and probing into the internal relationships between them will lay solid foundations for future research.