“Keep joking”: appreciation and production of humor in aging
Lucie Hevin, Yannick Gounden, Maéva Chignier, Aymeric Parant, Harmony Duclos · 2026
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Description
Lucie Hevin, Yannick Gounden, Maéva Chignier, Aymeric Parant, and Harmony Duclos ask how joking and joke-telling change as people age, in a 2026 study. Humor helps people handle stress and stay close to others, yet most past research studied the young. The team gave a self-rating survey to three age groups: young adults, the middle-aged, and adults over sixty.
The survey covered six humor forms, from puns and irony to dark jokes and slapstick. Older adults rated both their liking for jokes and their own joke-making lower than the young did. Still, the ranking of the six forms stayed the same at every age. Skill with words tracked humor scores across the whole sample, but not inside any one age group. The authors say humor fades in amount, not in taste, and stays a resource worth tending in old age.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Lucie Hevin, Yannick Gounden, Maéva Chignier, Aymeric Parant, Harmony Duclos |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 29 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |