Humor Recognition in Psychiatric Patients and Artificial Intelligence

摘要

Patients with schizophrenia are characterized by humor recognition defiicit which is connected with their cognitive disorder such as inability to filter out irrelevant stimuli. As soon as patients with schizotypal and affective disorders easily recognize humor, this may be used as a strong diagnostic criterion in clinical practice. On the other hand humor recognition by artifiicial intellect became a hot question in computer science in a flow of attempts to bring human-computer communication closer to social. It is argued that schizophrenic and computer thinking have common features. Both have lack of social and emotional context understanding. To compare failures in humor recognition made by patients with schizophrenia vs computer may move forward theory and practice of both clinical psychology and computer science. Many clinicians suggest sense of humor disorder to be an important diagnostic criterion in clinical practice (for ex. Arieti 1950; Forabosco 2007; Haig 1988; Ivanova, Enikolopov, Mitina 2008ab; Kuhlman 1984; Kuiper et al. 1998; Levin 1957; Moody 1978; Senf et al. 1956; Werth, Perkins, Boucher 2001). Sense of humor is such a unique psychic phenomenon that reveals the unit of intellect and affect. Luk (1977) argues that in some cases sense of humor disorder may be even the earliest sign of intellectual and emotional psychopathology (Luk 1977). If to confiirm this, the possibility of early diagnostics appears. Patients' jokes preferences and style of joking may reflect different mental disorders and are useful for clinical practice (Forabosco 2007). Observing a patient's sense of humor and witticism may be helpful in regard with maintaining therapeutic relations and deep personality diagnostics, but this qualitative work is mostly subjective and demands a lot of time to obtain representative sample of patient's jokes and reactions. On the other hand humor recognition disorder may give more simple, short and,formalized method for differential diagnostics (Polimeni, Reiss 2006; Ivanova 2005; 2006). No matter if one likes a joke or not, usually he is possible to recognize what is supposed to be humor and what is not (at least in case of intentional canned jokes). It is clear though that inability to recognize humor is connected mostly with severe disorders like schizophrenia or organic brain syndrome.