J. Behav. Ther. & Exp. Psychiat.

43 (2012) 625e631

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Journal of Behavior Therapy and

Experimental Psychiatry
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jbtep

Perception of other people’s mental states affects humor in social anxiety

Andrea C. Samsona, *, Helmut Karl Lacknerb, c, Elisabeth M. Weissd, Ilona Papousekd
a
Department of Psychology, Stanford University, 450 Serra Mall, Bldg 420, Stanford, CA 94035, USA
b
Institute of Physiology, Medical University of Graz, Austria
c
Institute of Medical Engineering, University of Technology, Graz, Austria
d
Department of Psychology, Biological Psychology Unit, Karl-Franzens University of Graz, Austria

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Background and objectives: The present study examined the relationship between social anxiety and the
Received 12 April 2011 appreciation of specific types of humor. It was expected that social anxiety would hinder the enjoyment
Received in revised form of jokes particularly if the resolution of incongruity involves processing social cues and assessing the
8 August 2011
(false) mental states of others. Fifty-six participants rated three types of cartoons and a control condition
Accepted 30 August 2011
for comprehensibility and funniness.
Results: High degrees of social anxiety were associated with less enjoyment of cartoons that involved the
Keywords:
interpretation of others’ mental states (Theory of Mind), but not of semantic cartoons or visual puns.
Social anxiety
Theory of Mind
Furthermore, high social anxiety was related to longer response latencies of the funniness ratings,
Positive emotion especially in the case of Theory of Mind cartoons.
Humor Limitations: A possible limitation is that the present study was conducted in individuals with social
anxiety in the non-clinical range.
Conclusions: The findings suggest that highly socially anxious people do not have a general humor
processing deficit, but may feel threatened by tasks involving the mental states of others. The negative
affect evoked by TOM humor may hinder the experience of funniness in highly socially anxious indi-
viduals, and it may also make it more difficult for them to rate their own amusement.
Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Social anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in the general
population with a 7e13.3% lifetime prevalence (Kessler et al., 1994).
These disorders are characterized by the experience of extensive
fear in social interactions and overly negative evaluation of social
situations (Schneier, 2006; Stein & Stein, 2008). Although a number
of psychological correlates of social anxiety have been described,
relatively little is known about the more elementary processes of
social and emotional cognition that may predispose one toward
developing social anxiety, and experiencing significant distress and
functional impairment in work and social domains (Lochner et al.,
2003; Schneier et al., 1994).
Previous research has proposed that high levels of social anxiety
may partly be attributed to social cognition deficits, which are
manifested as a tendency toward inaccurate and distorted
appraisals of the beliefs and intentions of others during interper-
sonal interactions (Hirsch & Clark, 2004; Stopa & Clark, 2000).
Given that individuals with social anxiety tend to form inaccurate
impressions about others, “Theory of Mind” (TOM) tasks may serve
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: andrea.samson@stanford.edu (A.C. Samson).
as a potent probe of mentalizing abilities, because they require
individuals to make inferences about beliefs, intentions, and
behaviors of others.
Functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) studies have begun to
characterize the neural correlates of “mentalizing” using TOM
tasks, indicating that a network of cortical areas that includes the
medial prefrontal cortex, the temporal-parietal junction, and the
precuneus plays a key role in mentalizing and forming impressions
of other people (Amodio & Frith, 2006; Frith & Frith, 2006;
Gallagher & Frith, 2003; Rilling, Sanfey, Aronson, Nystrom, &
Cohen, 2004; Van Overwalle, 2008). Sripada et al. (2009) showed
that patients with clinically significant social anxiety exhibited less
activation of parts of this network during mentalizing compared
with the results of matched healthy controls.
Whereas Theory of Mind usually refers to inferences about the
mental states of another person, some researchers include the
understanding of one’s own mental states as a part of the concept.
Brain-based studies show that certain brain regions respond both
when individuals are asked to infer the mental state of another
individual and when they are asked to reflect upon their own
mental state. These findings suggest that there may be a common
biological basis related to a more elementary process of

0005-7916/$ e see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jbtep.2011.08.007
626 A.C. Samson et al. / J. Behav. Ther. & Exp. Psychiat. 43 (2012) 625e631
mentalizing about internal states; that is, about those of another
person as well as about those of oneself (Gentili et al., 2009;
Oberman & Ramachandran, 2007; Ochsner et al., 2004; Saxe,
Moran, Scholz, & Gabrieli, 2006). This is supported by evidence
that social anxiety is linked to deficits in a brain circuit that is
related both to social cognition and the evaluation of one’s own
emotional state (Gentili et al., 2009).
Evidence also suggests that social anxiety is associated with an
attentional bias to threat by preferentially allocating attention toward
threatening social information and signs of disapproval from others
(Alden & Taylor, 2004; Amin, Foa, & Coles, 1998; Bögels & Mansell,
2004; Pineles & Mineka, 2005; Taylor, Bomyea, & Amir, 2010). Indi-
viduals high in social anxiety exhibit a bias toward negative infor-
mation processing that is similar to biases in all other anxiety
disorders (e.g., Mathews & MacLeod, 2005). However, social anxiety
may be specifically characterized by aberrant processing of positive
social information. Social anxiety has been related to diminished
attentional allocation for positive social cues (Perowne & Mansell,
2002; Silvia, Allen, Beauchamp, Maschauer, & Workman, 2006;
Taylor et al., 2010) and negatively biased processing of positive
social information (Alden, Taylor, Mellings, & Laposa, 2008; Laposa,
Cassin, & Rector, 2010; Yoon & Zinbarg, 2007). It has also been
proposed that social anxiety may be associated with a more general
positive affect deficit, related to a tendency to suppress emotions
(Kashdan & Collins, 2010; Watson & Naragon-Gainey, 2010).
Humor is an important component of social interaction, generating
laughter, amusement, exhilaration, mirth and other positive emotions
(Martin, 2007; Ruch, 2007). Interestingly, humor processing has not
yet been used to study more elementary cognitive or emotional
characteristics in social anxiety. Previous research on general anxiety
and humor shows that anxiety is negatively correlated to the self-
reported use of more adaptive humor styles (affiliative and self-
enhancing humor), but positively related to self-defeating humor,
a maladaptive humor style (e.g., Martin, Puhlik-Doris, Larsen, Gray, &
Weir, 2003). Although some studies show that humor reduces anxiety
(e.g., Martin et al., 2003), only people with low or normal anxiety levels
seem to benefit from the use of humor. In highly anxious individuals,
humor may even have a detrimental effect. For instance, highly
anxious students scored lower on a humorous test than on a non-
humorous test, suggesting that anxious people may react negatively
to humor (Townsend & Mahoney, 1981).
In the present study, an experimental paradigm in the context of
positive emotions was used to test inferences about individual
differences in social cognition and the perception of one’s own
emotions. Participants with varying degrees of social anxiety were
presented with humorous stimuli that varied in the social cognition
requirements to understand the joke, and rated the cartoons for
comprehensibility and positive emotions (i.e., funniness). By these
means we aimed at using humor to probe some of the cognitive
mechanisms of social anxiety.
The degree to which someone is able to experience amusement
evoked by a joke or funny event depends on multiple factors. On the
one hand, different people perceive humorous stimuli differently,
and this depends on a variety of personality characteristics.
Examples include 1) experience seeking (e.g., Forabosco & Ruch,
1994; Ruch & Hehl, 2007), 2) sense of humor (e.g., Martin et al.,
2003; see also Martin, 2007), 3) emotional responsiveness
(Herzog & Anderson, 2000), or 4) temperamental mood states such
as cheerfulness, seriousness and bad mood (Ruch, Köhler, & van
Thriel, 1996, 1997). Furthermore, cognitive skills such as cognitive
flexibility (Shammi & Stuss, 2003) or the ability to ascribe mental
states to other people (Theory of Mind; Samson & Hegenloh, 2010)
seem to influence humor processing.
On the other hand, stimuli characteristics also seem to play an
important role: content-related characteristics such as joke cruelty,
hostility or aggression, and the joke target were addressed in
several studies (Ferguson & Ford, 2008; Herzog, Harris, Kropscott, &
Fuller, 2006; Samson & Meyer, 2010; Zillmann & Cantor, 1976). The
formal or structural aspects of jokes and cartoons, such as the
resolvability of the incongruity (incongruity-resolution and
nonsense humor, e.g., Ruch, 2007) and the cognitive rule upon
which the punch line is based (Attardo, Hemplemann, & DiMaio,
2002; Attardo & Raskin, 1991), seem to be relevant as well. It is
assumed that in order to understand a punch line, one has to bring
two initially incongruent scripts into congruence. This is possible
by recognizing the cognitive rule (also called logical mechanism)
that describes how to resolve the incongruity.
Recently, several studies addressed the impact of different
cognitive rules on the humor response: it was shown that the neural
activation patterns during processing of cartoons differed according
to the cognitive rules specifying how the incongruity was to be
resolved: visual puns (PUN) are based on visual ambiguity (one
visual element represents two meanings simultaneously), semantic
cartoons (SEM) include several cognitive rules (exaggeration,
analogy, etc.), whereas Theory of Mind (TOM) cartoons are based on
the false beliefs of one of the characters portrayed in the cartoon
(Samson, Zysset, & Huber, 2008). One can argue that social cognition
is increasingly required on a continuum from visual puns (not at all),
to semantic cartoons (sometimes, mental states of others play a role
but are not in the main focus of the joke), to TOM cartoons. In TOM
cartoons, it is crucial to take into account the (false) mental states of
the characters in the cartoon in order to understand the punch line.
Usually, normal healthy participants rate visual puns to be the least
funny, whereas TOM cartoons are perceived to be the funniest jokes.
This pattern in the funniness response cannot be found in individ-
uals with Asperger’s syndrome who are known to have social
cognition difficulties (Samson & Hegenloh, 2010).
Consequently, participants in the present study were exposed to
PUN, SEM, and TOM cartoons, as well as to cartoon-like pictures
(control condition; see methods section and Fig. 1). The compre-
hensibility rating refers to the cognitive process of detecting and
resolving the incongruity in the cartoons (i.e., detecting the punch
line). The funniness rating is related to the perception and appre-
ciation of humor and enjoyment. As it implicates the participants’
reflection on their own emotional state, the response latencies to
the funniness rating may reflect how difficult it is to perceive and
judge one’s own mental state.
The aim of the present study was to examine whether the impact
of social anxiety on humor appreciation may depend on the degree
of social cognition involved in assessing humorous stimuli. We
assumed that the degree of social anxiety may selectively predict the
appreciation of TOM humor, where it is essential to take into account
other peoples thoughts and beliefs. These might be potentially
threatening and negatively interpreted by socially anxious individ-
uals. By contrast, we expected that humorous stimuli that do not
require assessing the mental states of others, such as visual puns,
may be equally enjoyed by individuals with low and high social
anxiety. Referring to their possible deficit in the evaluation of their
own emotions (Gentili et al., 2009), it was assumed that individuals
high in social anxiety may take more time to perceive their own
emotional states such as amusement and exhilaration. Finally, if
social anxiety is related to more general positive emotional
dysfunction, appreciation of all types of humor might be reduced.
1. Method
1.1. Participants
Fifty-six participants (28 men, 28 women) aged 18e53 years
(M ¼ 24.3, SD ¼ 6.3) completed the experiment. They were
 A.C. Samson et al. / J. Behav. Ther. & Exp. Psychiat. 43 (2012) 625e631 627

Fig. 1. Examples of the stimuli used in the study. (A) Example of a visual pun (PUN): it plays on the visual similarity of a flower on a stem to a brain and its spinal cord. (B) Example
of a semantic cartoon (SEM): the joke is based on semantic relations and not on visual resemblance, as in PUNs: A person finds himself in an airplane with crash test dummies. In
order to understand the joke one does not have to refer to false mental states. (C) Example of a Theory of Mind (TOM) cartoon: In order to get the joke, it is necessary to infer about
other people’s mental states, i.e., to understand that the patient is not aware of the therapists’ activities but thinks the therapist is attentively listening to his problems. Cartoons:
Copyright by Oswald Huber. Permission to use was granted. Cartoon A) is reprinted from “Cartoons: Drawn Jokes?,” by C. F. Hempelmann and A. C. Samson, 2008, In: V. Raskin (Ed.).
The Primer of Humor Research (pp. 609e640). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. p. 616. Copyright 2008 by Oswald Huber. Reprinted with permission.

recruited by flyers posted on the university campus. No participant 1.3.2. Depression

reported using psychoactive medication and none had participated To be able to control for the potential impact of depressed mood
in an experiment using cartoons before. The study was performed on the results, the German version of the CES-D was applied, which
in accordance with ethical standards and was approved by the local is particularly suitable to measure depressive experiences in the
ethics committee. Participants gave their informed consent to general population (Hautzinger & Bailer, 1993; Radloff, 1977; Wood,
participate in the study. Taylor, & Joseph, 2010). It is comprised of 20 items referring to
mood and attributions over the past week. Scores have a potential
range from 0 to 60. The mean score in the present sample was
1.2. Stimulus material
M ¼ 12.4 (SD ¼ 8.4; a ¼ .7).
The stimulus material consisted of three groups of cartoons and
1.3.3. Retrospective rating scales
one group of non-humorous pictures serving as a control condition.
As an indicator of their motivation, the participants were asked to
All pictures were used in previous studies (Samson & Hegenloh,
indicate how much effort they had made to accomplish the task after
2010; Samson et al., 2008; Samson, in press). Theory of Mind
each block (17-point rating scale, from 1 “not at all” to 17 “extremely”;
(TOM) cartoons are characterized as those in which it is essential to
M ¼ 8.0, SD ¼ 5.2). They were also asked to indicate how difficult they
take into account the (false) mental states of the characters in the
had experienced the task in the previous block (17-point rating scale,
cartoon to understand the punch line. Visuals puns (PUN) are
from 1 “not at all” to 17 “extremely”; M ¼ 5.9, SD ¼ 3.9).
cartoons where the punch line is based on the visual similarity or
identity of two different objects that might partially overlap in their
1.4. Procedure
meaning or function (see Hempelmann & Samson, 2008). Semantic
cartoons (SEM) are not based on visual similarities of two objects,
Participants were tested one by one in a sound-attenuated
but the punch line is based on the incongruity and (if resolved) the
examination room. After the questionnaires were administered,
semantic relations between two scripts or meanings. The incon-
the participants received instructions for the task and were given
gruity has to be resolved by recognizing the underlying cognitive
sample cartoons and the required responses. The experiment was
rule of the cartoon (e.g., analogy) e to understand on which
run using a Matlab (MathWorks Inc.) script designed for this study.
mechanism the joke is based. Cartoon-like pictures that contain an
Each cartoon was presented for 6 s, along with two buttons at the
incongruity which cannot be resolved meaningfully were used as
bottom of the screen (“not understood”, “understood”). Participants
a control condition (irresolvable incongruities, INC); that is, INC
were required to indicate via mouse click, whether or not they had
pictures do not contain a punch line.
understood the punch line of the cartoon. After presentation of
During the experiment a total of 96 cartoons were presented,
each cartoon, a scale appeared for 4 s on which the participants
divided into three blocks. Within each block, the cartoons (8 TOM,
rated via mouse click the funniness of each cartoon, from 1 (not
SEM, PUN, and INC each) were presented in pseudorandom order.
funny) to 6 (very funny). The computer program also calculated the
In total, 24 TOM, 24 SEM, 24 PUN, and 24 INC cartoons were used.
response latencies to the comprehensibility and funniness ratings.
The order of blocks was counterbalanced.
After each block (32 trials), the participants were given 10 min to
relax and fill in the rating scales, which were also presented on the
1.3. Questionnaire data screen. The experimenter remained outside the examination room
during the whole experiment; the participants were monitored
1.3.1. Social anxiety through a one-way mirror and an intercom.1
For the assessment of individual differences in social anxiety,
the German adaptation of the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN, 1.5. Data analysis
Connor et al., 2000; German version by Stangier & Steffens, 2002)
was used, which has been extensively validated in clinical and non- Data from “not understood” TOM, SEM, and PUN cartoons and
clinical samples (Sosic, Gieler, & Stangier, 2008). It consists of 17 “understood” INC pictures, and trials in which participants failed to
items referring to social anxiety symptoms experienced during the
last week (5 point Likert scales, from 0 “not at all” to 4 “extremely”).
In the present sample, the total score ranges from 0 to 62, M ¼ 16.0, 1
Additional data were obtained for purposes not related to the present research
SD ¼ 11.1, a ¼ .93. question.
628 A.C. Samson et al. / J. Behav. Ther. & Exp. Psychiat. 43 (2012) 625e631

Table 1 evidence that women may be more emotionally responsive in

Mean funniness ratings (from 1 to 6) and response latencies (in seconds) to the general and more susceptible to humor in particular (Kring &
funniness ratings.
Gordon, 1998; Ruch & Carrell, 1998), and tend to have higher
TOM SEM PUN INC social anxiety scores (Sosic et al., 2008), sex was entered as
Perceived 3.89 (.67) 3.71 (.63) 3.47 (.77) 1.28 (.36) a control variable. To evaluate the possibility that effects of social
funniness (1e6) anxiety may be due to a more depressed mood in more socially
Response 1.21 (.26) 1.21 (.25) 1.15 (.27) 1.32 (.37)
anxious participants, depression was entered as a further control
latencies (sec)
variable. Finally, effort (motivation), showing relatively high vari-
Note: TOM ¼ Theory of Mind cartoons; SEM ¼ semantic cartoons; PUN ¼ visual
ability among participants, was entered to control for its potential
puns; INC ¼ pictures with irresolvable incongruities (control condition). Standard
deviations are given in parentheses.
impact on the behavioral data. All predictors were entered
simultaneously.

answer the funniness rating were excluded from further analysis.
On average, M ¼ 19.5 (SD ¼ 3.9), M ¼ 20.2 (SD ¼ 3.2), M ¼ 19.3
(SD ¼ 3.6) trials were valid for TOM, SEM, and PUN, respectively. For
each type of cartoon, the funniness ratings and response latencies
to the funniness and the comprehensibility ratings were averaged
across all items of all blocks. As there was very little variance in the
answers to the comprehensibility questions, they were not further
analyzed.
In order to control whether the cartoons were perceived as
funny in contrast to the control condition (INC) and to check
whether TOM, SEM, and PUN cartoons differed from each other in
the responses or response latencies to the funniness ratings, a one-
way multivariate analysis of variance was performed, with type
(TOM, SEM, PUN, INC) as the independent variable, and perceived
funniness and latencies as the dependent variables. The multivar-
iate approach to repeated measures analyses was used, which
allows valid tests under nonsphericity conditions (Vasey & Thayer,
1987). Estimates of effect size are reported using partial eta-
squared (h2p ), which gives the proportion of variance a factor or
interaction explains of the overall (effect þ error) variance. Tukey’s
HSD was used for a posteriori comparisons.
For the evaluation of the main research question, residualized
scores were calculated, in order to control for general individual
differences in response tendencies and response speed. This was
done by conducting linear regressions using INC scores to predict
TOM, SEM, and PUN scores, respectively. The use of residualized
scores ensured that the analyzed residual variability was specific to
the participants’ evaluation of the experience of humor and
accompanying feelings of amusement and exhilaration, as opposed
to the evaluation of any pictures or recognition of any incongru-
ence. Nine standard multiple regression analyses were performed
with social anxiety as predictor and residualized scores of
perceived funniness, response latencies to the funniness rating, and
response latencies to the “understood” question for the different
types of cartoons (TOM, SEM, PUN) as outcome variables. As there is
2. Results
Responses to the funniness ratings differed between types of
cartoons (F6,50 ¼ 153.3, p < .001). Subsequently performed
univariate tests showed that this held both for perceived funniness
(F3,165 ¼ 515.6, p < .001, h2p ¼ .90) and the response latencies to the
funniness ratings (F3,165 ¼ 7.5, p < .001, h2p ¼ .12). Means and
standard deviations are shown in Table 1. In both variables, INC
markedly differed from TOM, SEM, and PUN (lower funniness
ratings, longer response latencies). Additionally, puns were rated
somewhat less funny than TOM and SEM cartoons (HSD ¼ .194,
.092).
The regression analyses with perceived funniness as the
dependent variable revealed that social anxiety predicted how
funny TOM cartoons were perceived (F4,55 ¼ 4.6, p < .005; b ¼ .33,
p < .05). Higher social anxiety scores were associated with lower
funniness ratings. In addition, women rated the TOM cartoons to be
more funny than men (b ¼ .40, p < .005). The predictors did not
significantly contribute to the variance of perceived funniness of
SEM (F4,55 ¼ 1.8, ns.). Only sex and effort were significant predictors
of perceived funniness of PUN cartoons (F4,55 ¼ 3.0, p < .05; sex
b ¼ .30, p < .05; effort b ¼ .27, p < .05). Higher funniness ratings
were observed in women and in participants having expended
more effort. Table 2 shows zero-order and semi-partial correlations
for all experimental variables. The semi-partial correlations indi-
cate the unique contribution of a predictor variable to explaining
the variance of the dependent variable (i.e., the relationship
between one particular predictor and the dependent variable with
the effects of all other predictors removed). The analyses of the
response latencies showed that participants with higher social
anxiety scores took more time to respond to the funniness ratings
of TOM cartoons (F4,55 ¼ 2.9, p < .05; b ¼ .43, p < .005) This
association also holds true in the case of SEM cartoons (b ¼ .33,
p < .05; see Table 2 for zero-order and semi-partial correlations),
although the overall result of the regression model failed to be

Table 2
Effects of social anxiety on responses and response latencies to the funniness ratings.

TOM SEM PUN

r sr r sr r sr
Perceived funniness
Social anxiety .20 .29* .11 .17 .15 .20
Sex .36* .38** .22 .22 .27* .29*
Depression .01 .02 .01 .00 .06 .05
Effort .24 .24 .23 .23 .27* .26*
Response latencies
Social anxiety .35** .38** .30* .29* .17 .16
Sex .14 .20 .10 .05 .10 .14
Depression .09 .13 .10 .06 .07 .02
Effort .11 .03 .04 .09 .10 .09

Note: TOM Theory of Mind cartoons; SEM semantic cartoons; PUN visual puns. Sex is coded 1 for women and 2 for men. r . zero-order correlation; sr . semi-partial
correlation; *p < .05, **p < .01.
 A.C. Samson et al. / J. Behav. Ther. & Exp. Psychiat. 43 (2012) 625e631
significant (F4,55 ¼ 1.4, ns.). None of the predictors explained
a significant amount of variance of response latencies to PUN
cartoons (F4,55 ¼ .8, ns.; see Table 2). Perceived funniness and
response latencies of the funniness ratings were not correlated
(TOM r ¼ .20, ns.; SEM: r ¼ .09, ns.; PUN: r ¼ .18, ns.). The
analyses with response latencies to the comprehensibility ratings
as the dependent variable revealed no significant effects
(F4,55 ¼ .42, ns.; F4,55 ¼ .57, ns.; F4,55 ¼ .65, ns.; all zero-order and
semi-partial correlations ns.).
The correlation between social anxiety and depression was
r ¼ .43 (p < .005). Participants with high social anxiety scores rated
the task as more difficult (r ¼ .30, p < .05). Sex differences in social
anxiety scores were not statistically significant (t54 ¼ 1.6, ns.; men
M ¼ 13.6, women M ¼ 18.3).
3. Discussion
The present study discovered a clear drop in humor appreciation
when participants with high social anxiety scores were presented
with humorous material that required making inferences about
other people’s mental states for its comprehension. The decrease in
the funniness response was specific to TOM cartoons and was not
generalizable to the other types of cartoons. This result eliminates
the possibility that humor appreciation might be generally
impaired in social anxiety or that the findings might be related to
hedonic deficits or a general positive emotional dysfunction in
social anxiety (Watson & Naragon-Gainey, 2010). As the possible
impact of depression was statistically controlled, the findings
cannot be attributed to the association of social anxiety with
negative affect, which may be related to impaired affective flexi-
bility (Papousek et al., 2010). Both a cognitive component (more
negative appraisal of social situations in which other people’s
mental states have to be inferred) and an emotional component
(associated higher levels of evoked negative emotions) may be
involved in the impaired appreciation of TOM humor in social
anxiety.
Social anxiety was specifically related to perceived funniness of
TOM cartoons, but not of SEM cartoons, which also frequently
portray social situations. Therefore, the previously shown tendency
of socially anxious individuals to (mis)interpret social situations in
a negative or threatening fashion (Alden & Taylor, 2004; Rapee &
Heimberg, 1997) seems to be replicated in the humor domain, but
only if the humorous stimulus required interpretations of other
people’s thoughts and feelings. This is probably related to the
greater ambiguity of the scenarios in which others’ mental states
have to be inferred from the available information, whereas the
content of the situations is more explicit in SEM cartoons (cf. Amin
et al., 1998). The associated negative affect may hinder the pro-
cessing of discordant positive information and, consequently,
reduce the perceived funniness of jokes.
Moreover, participants with higher social anxiety scores not
only perceived TOM cartoons as less funny, but also took more time
to deliver the funniness ratings. Thus, the greater prevalence of
negative affect in highly socially anxious individuals may also make
it more difficult to rate their own level of amusement. Participants
with high social anxiety scores took more time to respond to the
ratings of TOM and SEM cartoons, but not of PUN cartoons. As both
TOM and SEM (but not PUN) cartoons involve social situations,
socially anxious participants may have needed more time to decide
whether it was potentially threatening or safe to be amused by the
joke, or they may have had to inhibit their nascent anxiety before
they could perceive and judge their amusement (cf. Kashdan,
2007).
The impaired appreciation of TOM humor in more socially
anxious participants seems to line up neatly with the cognitive
629
features of social anxiety. Socially anxious individuals tend to
transform vague or neutral social cues (e.g., facial expressions) into
interpersonal threats (Alden & Taylor, 2004; Rapee & Heimberg,
1997) and interpret mildly negative social events in a cata-
strophic fashion, leading to inaccurate interpretations not only of
others (e.g., as critical judges) but also of the mental representation
of the self (e.g., as socially incompetent; Alden & Taylor, 2004;
Hirsch & Clark, 2004; Hofmann, 2007). This may also be related
to a greater tendency of socially anxious individuals to project
negative aspects that occur in the cartoon scenarios to themselves.
For instance, being generally more worried about being criticized,
they may feel embarrassment for the character, who has a false
belief. This is in accordance with a study by Moran (1996) in which
the perceived funniness of cartoons was reduced when participants
identified themselves with the protagonist, particularly when the
protagonist was the target of the joke. However, it should be
mentioned that all cartoons in the present study were low in
aggressive, violent, and sexual content. They were carefully
selected according to this criterion, because the appreciation of
aggressive and sexual jokes strongly depends on personality traits
and gender (see Ruch, 2007). Nevertheless, many jokes involve
a victim, particularly those involving social situations.
In contrast to perceived funniness, social anxiety did not seem to
affect the detection of the cartoons’ punch lines. Thus, social
anxiety was only associated with impaired affective humor
appreciation and reduced positive emotional responsiveness,
whereas the subjective cognitive comprehension of the incongru-
ities and their resolution was not affected. This may distinguish
social anxious individuals from individuals with general deficits in
seeing things from another person’s perspective who showed
lower responsiveness to all kinds of humor (Samson & Hegenloh,
2010).
Our finding of unimpaired cognitive TOM capacities in socially
anxious individuals corresponds to a recent study by Lysaker et al.
(2010) who found that better TOM performance was associated
with higher levels of social anxiety and paranoid features in
schizophrenic patients. Perhaps social anxiety requires a certain
level of cognitive TOM capacity allowing one to draw paranoid
inferences about the mental states of others. There is emerging
evidence of a close association between paranoid thoughts and
social anxiety (Freeman, Garety, Bebbington, Slater, 2005; Freeman,
Garety, Bebbington, Smith, 2005; Freeman et al., 2008). Thus,
a more functional cognitive TOM capacity allows more socially
anxious individuals to catch the punch lines and report an under-
standing the joke. But the more negative appraisal of the social
situations in which the mental states of other have to be inferred
(i.e., interpretation of the scenarios in a more negative or “para-
noid” way, and projecting negative aspects that occur in the cartoon
scenarios more to themselves) makes the more socially anxious
people rate the jokes as less funny.
An alternative interpretation of the prolonged response laten-
cies may be related to hypotheses that socially anxious individuals
have deficits in properly accessing their own emotions (Gentili
et al., 2009). The present study design does not allow us to make
direct inferences about the ability of highly social anxious people to
evaluate their own emotional state. Therefore, these considerations
remain speculative. The hypothesis may be supported by the
finding that participants with high social anxiety scores retro-
spectively rated the task as more difficult. As they obviously had no
difficulties detecting the punch lines, this presumably refers to the
judgments of their amusement. Recently, findings with a self-
report measure suggested that individuals high in gelotophobia
(i.e., the fear of being laughed at; Ruch, 2009; Ruch & Proyer, 2009),
which is conceptually very close to social anxiety (Carretero-Dios,
Ruch, Agudelo, Platt, & Proyer, 2010; Edwards, Martin, & Dozois,
630 A.C. Samson et al. / J. Behav. Ther. & Exp. Psychiat. 43 (2012) 625e631
2010; Ruch, 2009) had general difficulties in perceiving and inter-
preting their own emotions (Papousek et al., 2009). Moreover,
a neuroscientific study, in which participants were asked to infer
the mental state of the individual in a picture and to evaluate their
own emotional response to the picture, demonstrated that brain
regions supporting judgments of one’s own mental state and
inferences about another individual’s mental state considerably
overlap (Ochsner et al., 2004). This was also shown on the behav-
ioral level. Even if reading cognitive and emotional states might be
different processes, there is evidence that the ability to read mental
states correlates with reading one’s own emotions (Lombardo,
Barnes, Wheelwright, & Baron-Cohen, 2007; Spreng & Grady,
2010; Subic-Wrana, Beutel, Knebel, & Lane, 2010). Thus, there is
some indication that there may be a common basis underlying the
reduced perceived funniness of the TOM cartoons and the pro-
longed response latencies to the ratings. However, perceived
funniness and response latencies were not correlated.
The present findings also indicate that not all people are able to
benefit from humor to the same extent. Humor is said to have many
positive functions, for instance, to help cope with a difficult social
situation (e.g., Martin, 2007). However, in socially anxious indi-
viduals, the use of humor may backfire, particularly if the joke is
based on other people’s false mental states. Instead of having
a relaxing and positive effect, the jokes might raise negative
emotions and the suspicion that the joke is meant to put them
down and encourages others to laugh at them instead of fostering
camaraderie with them (see also Yoon & Zinbarg, 2007).
A well-controlled study design that ruled out the influence of
any systematic bias or deliberate faking (especially as far the
latencies are concerned) could allow for more valid conclusions. A
possible limitation is that the present study was conducted in
individuals with social anxiety in a non-clinical range. Although
there is evidence that social anxiety disorder is a dimensional
condition varying quantitatively rather than qualitatively from
subclinical manifestations of social anxiety (Kollman, Brown,
Liverant, & Hofmann, 2006), it will be necessary to replicate the
findings in individuals diagnosed with social anxiety disorder.
However, as associations tend to be more pronounced in clinical
samples, it seems likely that the present results represent
a conservative estimate of the strength of the relationship between
social anxiety and humor appreciation.
Taken together, the present study showed that specific differ-
ences in the processing of humor may provide some insights into
the inner-workings of social anxiety. Our findings support indica-
tions that social anxiety may be related to aberrant social cognition
and perhaps also difficulties in the perception of one’s own mental
state. Negative affect evoked by humor that requires other people’s
mental states to be understood may hinder the experience of
funniness and may make it even more difficult to rate one’s own
amusement. If social anxiety is a dimensional condition, research
like the present one can provide insight into factors of the etiology
and maintenance of social anxiety disorder, thereby facilitating the
development of effective treatments. If social anxiety disorder can
be qualitatively distinguished from subclinical manifestations of
social anxiety, it allows similar conclusions about social anxiety in
the non-clinical range that can also be a source of considerable
burden.
Conflict of interest
There is no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Theresa Wallner for her valu-
able help in data collection and Ursula Beermann, William Brady
and Rebecca Podell for comments on a previous version of the
manuscript and proof reading. H. K. Lackner was supported by the
Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG project 817086 ‘Ortho-
cap’). A. C. Samson was supported by the Swiss National Science
Foundation.
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