When humor is a matter of heart: Effects on emotional state and interbeat interval.

Previous studies demonstrated that exposure to humor has beneficial effects on psychological well-being. In the present work, we investigated the behavioral and psychophysiological effects of different types of humor on psychological well-being and on the performance during the execution of a stressful cognitive task. To this aim, we examined the behavioral and psychophysiological effects of ToM humorous and Slapstick humorous comic strips before and after executing a stressful cognitive task.

Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of MPFC enhances humor processing.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the comprehension of a specific type of humorous situation requires the involvement of brain regions associated to mentalization or Theory of Mind processing and if the electrical stimulation of these areas would facilitate the comprehension of humor. To this aim, we analyzed the effects of tDCS stimulation on the MPFC and rTPJ during the presentation of humorous and non-humorous comic strips. In particular, the stimulus set included strips containing humorous scenes that required ToM abilities in order to be comprehended (), non-ToM humorous strips (), non-humorous strips which were semantically coherent but not funny (), and non-humorous strips which were semantically incoherent ().