Objective: To assess humor perception in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients by comparison to a matched sample of healthy controls (HC), and to investigate the effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) on humor in PD by comparing pre- and postoperative ratings.

Background: Affective and cognitive disorders are common in PD, caused by the disease itself or as a side effect of treatment. Brain structures affected by PD, including the putamen and caudate nucleus, are involved in reward response and have been found to play a role in humor processing. Humor, a multidimensional construct studied in the field of personality psychology, can be described by a five-factor-model including the five dimensions of social fun, mockery, inept humor, cognitive humor and benevolent humor. An altered response to humorous content has previously been demonstrated in PD patients.

Methods: Studying PD patients’ humor with the Five-Factor-Model of Humor self-rating scale (5FMH): a) comparison of patients’ 5FMH-ratings to the ratings of matched HC, b) correlation of patients’ 5FMH-ratings with cognition (Mattis Dementia Rating Scale (MDRS) and others, including a PD-specific test), personality (Big-Five-Inventory-10), mood and PD-related characteristics and c) Analysis of the effects of disease progression and subthalamic (STN) DBS on patients’ 5FMH ratings. The DBS group is rated 3 months before and 3 months after surgery, the non-DBS group is rated twice in an interval of 6 months.

Results: In a preliminary analysis 40 non-demented, non-depressed PD patients (25 male, age 62.7±10) were compared to 40 HC (24 male, age 62.7±10). Patients rated significantly lower than HC on all 5FMH scales. The decrease was most severe in cognitive humor (p=.002). Higher cognitive humor ratings correlated with better performance in several cognitive tests, including MDRS total score. Correlations between personality and 5FMH-ratings were shown. At abstract submission, follow-up testing has not yet started. Here we report on the effects of disease progression and STN-DBS.

Conclusions: Humor is impaired in PD patients, especially the dimension of cognitive humor. Self-rating of cognitive humor correlates with cognition, suggesting that a preference for cognitively challenging humor depends on cognitive function. 5FMH-ratings correlate higher with personality than mood, likely due to measuring humor as a trait, not as a state.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/assessment-of-humor-in-parkinsons-disease-and-the-effect-of-deep-brain-stimulation/