An English study shows that people who are good at humor have personality traits similar to shizophrenics and bipolar people.
We knew the sad clown, here is the psychotic actor. While popular culture has long associated artistic practice with having – at least a grain of – madness, little scientific research has been done on humor and comedy. According to a new study, published on January 16 in the scientific journal British Journal of Psychiatry, the people who are good at humor have personality traits similar to schizophrenics and bipolar people.
As explained the BBC News site who relayed the information, researchers at the University of Oxford studied 523 actors (404 men and 119 women) from the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. These actors had to fill out a questionnaire aimed at detecting psychotic traits in people free from any psychiatric pathology. This test measures 4 aspects of personality: unusual experiences, i.e. belief in telepathy and paranormal events, cognitive disorganization, e.g. difficulty concentrating, being introverted and to have a reduced ability to experience physical and social pleasure, and finally impulsive tendencies and antisocial behaviors.
Both introvert and extrovert
And the results are quite impressive: Comedians outperform the general comparator group (consisting of 831 people not working in the creative universe) in all four personality traits of psychotics. Above all, the experience points to results that may seem contradictory: comedians have particularly high results in terms of personality traits, both introverted and extroverted. According to the BBC, researchers believe these unusual personality structures may explain the ability of comedians to entertain.
Interviewed by British radio, Professor Gordon Claridge of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford attempts an explanation of the mechanics of humor: “The creative elements necessary for the production of humor are remarkably similar to those characterizing the style of people suffering from psychosis, whether schizophrenia or bipolar disorder ”. For example “schizophrenia could help these people to make associations of unusual ideas […] while mania, which is found in people with bipolar disorder, might help comedians combine ideas in order to create original and humorous connections between them, ”explains the professor.
Psychotics don’t like humor
However, as the English site points out, the results have also been criticized by some psychiatrists, such as James McCabe of the King’s College Institute of Psychiatry for whom “psychosis is not just a personality problem but a disease. worse “. He also notes that people with psychosis or schizophrenia have “a very reduced capacity to appreciate humor”.
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