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 In a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers
analyzed comedians from Australia, Britain and the United States
and found they scored significantly higher on four types of
psychotic characteristics compared to a control group of people
who had non-creative jobs.
The traits included a tendency towards impulsive or anti-social
behavior, and a tendency to avoid intimacy.
"The creative elements needed to produce humor are strikingly
similar to those characterizing the cognitive style of people
with psychosis — both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder," said
Gordon Claridge of the University of Oxford's department of
experimental psychology, who led the study.
Although the traits in question are known as "psychotic",
Claridge said, they can also represent healthy equivalents of
features such as moodiness, social introversion and the tendency
to lateral thinking.
"Although schizophrenic psychosis itself can be detrimental to
humor, in its lesser form it can increase people's ability to
associate odd or unusual things or to think 'outside the box',"
he said.
"Equally, manic thinking — which is common in people with
bipolar disorder — may help people combine ideas to form new,
original and humorous connections."
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 The researchers recruited 523 comedians — 404 men and 119 women — and asked them to complete an online questionnaire designed to
measure psychotic traits in healthy people.
The traits scored were "unusual experiences", such
as belief in telepathy and paranormal events, "cognitive
disorganization" such as difficulty in focusing thoughts, "introvertive
anhedonia" — reduced ability to feel social and physical pleasure,
and "impulsive non-conformity", or tendency towards impulsive,
antisocial behavior.
The same questionnaire was also completed by 364
actors — who are also used to performing in front of an audience — as a control group, and the comedians' and actors' results were
compared to each other as well as a general group of 831 people who
had non-creative jobs.
The researchers found that comedians scored significantly higher on
all four types of psychotic personality traits compared to the
general group. Most striking were their high scores for impulsive
non-conformity and introverted personality traits, the researchers
said.
The actors scored higher than the general group on three types — but
did not display high levels of introverted personality traits.
(Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)
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