Women get more of a buzz out of cartoons, a brain-imaging study has found, with their brains feeling more rewarded by a funny joke than those of men.Women and men are often perceived as having differences in their senses of humour but, until now, there had been no neurological evidence for such suspicions. The new brain scanning study showed that although men and women tended to agree on which of the single-panel cartoons they were shown were funny, they processed the humour differently in their brains.In particular, women appear to have a lower expectation that the cartoon will be funny than men. “Women appear to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon. So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it,” says Allan Reiss, one of the study’s authors, at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, US.The group of 10 women and 10 men were shown a series of black and white cartoons. They rated the cartoons for funniness while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) identified the active areas of their brains. The level of activity in those areas was measured using a technique that analyses the level of oxygenation in the blood.
