See if you spot the possible flaw in the study reported on in this ScienceDaily news release: A Sense of Humor Helps Keep You Healthy Until Retirement Age
(I say “possible” because I only read the article once and may have missed something. I’m going to read it again, and will mention the results further down.)
As the title and the first sentence assert — “A sense of humor helps to keep people healthy and increases their chances of reaching retirement age” — the research focused on two variables: a sense of humor and life expectancy. And they’ve found an inverse relation between them.
Life expectancy — that’s pretty straightforward to define and measure. What about sense of humor?
Svebak and his colleagues evaluated people’s sense of humor with three questions from a test designed to measure only friendly humor. The test is not sensitive to humor that creates conflicts, is insulting or that is a variation of bullying, explains Svebak.
The questions revealed a person’s ability to understand humor and to think in a humorous way, Svebak says….
Did you spot the possible flaw to this study (at least the one that immediately came to my mind)?
Need a hint? Think beyond the highlighted variables.
I immediately wondered if they had controlled for types of intelligence. And perhaps personality variables. These could certainly be hidden influences, doing the real work behind the scenes, so to speak.
After a re-read it still seems these variables weren’t controlled for. But I can’t be sure, for I only read the news release — though it was fairly in-depth, for a news release — and I am unable to read the original paper, for it is written in Norwegian.
In particular, I wonder if verbal intelligence was controlled for. And if that variable is somehow related to health. Maybe via education and life style?
I do know that research into risk factors for crime have identified “low verbal intelligence” as one of them….
Oh-oh, just had a thought. Did those studies control for poverty? Man, doing social/psychological science isn’t easy!
And I guess I’ll stop there. Because that’s the point. The social and psychological sciences, and the medical as well, aren’t easy because there are so many darn variables involved. So when evaluating the findings from these fields, we need to be extra careful.
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Tags: health, humor, intelligence
June 13th, 2010 at 10:42 am
Okay, no cheating. I read the description and have not yet scrolled down to read your comments: The title makes me crazy because 1)Sunny humor? My usual brand of sardonic wit? What? 2)Healthy defined as cancer/diabetes/heart disease free? No chronic ailments that negatively impact sense of well-being? What? 3) Humor will just get us to retirement age? Not beyond? I already don’t like this study.
Reading down: With you, I was running demographic variables in the background, too. Did this only apply to fish-eating Norwegians or could we generalize it to Big Mac-eating Americans. Exercise? BMI? History of trauma events? The list of potential powerful variables that were not controlled for could get huge, of course. Didn’t like the 3-question survey…can they really delineate my sense of humor with that? Self-reported humor: Have you ever met anyone who thinks they do NOT have a sense of humor?
They reference an historic study that measured the sense of humor of ten year olds. How old are we when it can be said that our senses of humor have matured into their ultimate form?
I never take these studies seriously anymore…typically just laugh them off.
June 14th, 2010 at 8:17 am
Good points, Nance. I also didn’t like the 3-question measure. Seemed very “let’s throw stuff against the wall and see what sorta sticks.”
Your, “I already don’t like this study,” made me chuckle in recognition of a like mind. Reminds me, too, that cognition and emotion are certainly bedfellows, if not conjoined twins.
Personally, I consider studies like this to be pieces of a puzzle (of questionable quality) rather than solutions to puzzles, as they are far too frequently touted as (almost wrote “tooted as.” Freudian slip?)