There is some research on Humor and stress alleviation, and health outcomes. I have not seen any study directly assessing brain activity or other physiological reactions to humor.

I think that James Gross did a piece on physiology and humor published not too long ago. Other than that, i think there is very little directly looking at physiology or brain activity during humor that i have come across.

Thanks for your responses. One of the problems we have in humor research is that not all humor leads to laughter; perhaps we need a more specific definition of humor or several subsets of humor to take such differences into account.

Yes I do agree with Dr sewell. we needs  specfic defination of humor. Brain has been electrically maped out about fifty years back. hippocampus,amogadella, those are prominent brain area where humar emotions,many human activity are expressed. as dr sewell saysall humor do not leads to laugh but some are more emotional expression of human  needs clear difination.Many  studies have already been done in this line with out specfic directions. With kind regards.pcg,CLi,Mumbai

Here are some references on the subject. Plus:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn.2006.18.11.1789#.VO92eCwYGd4

Regards

Francisco Yus

Some older studies are Cupchik &Leventhal, 1974 as well as Leventhal and Cupchik 1975 and 1976.  Also Brodzinsky et al. 1981 and Sekeres & Clark 1980.

I thought Ogden Nash defined humour not as something said and done but unto whom. Objective humour is an oxymoron.

Hi Edward,

Many researchers tried to measure the affective nature of humor setting smiling and laughter as objective indicators; however, coefficients rarely exceeded between .30 and .40.  When this research was re-evaluated using FACS, they found correlations to be .65 and above, indicating that the early research on humor did not separate different types of smiles.  You might want to look at Ekman’s work on FACS, or Ruch’s work on laughter.

Lee