Huumori mõistmine nooremas koolieas epilepsiaga lastel

Abstract

The present research aimed to compare humor comprehension in primary-school-aged healthy children and children suffering from epilepsy, and to examine whether the peculiarities in humor perception of preschool children with epilepsy that were found in Suits’s (2007) research (e.g. dichotomous response style and the tendency to regard aggressive and verbal jokes as less funny), remain unchanged as the child grows older. Participants were 131 Estonian children aged 7–10 (M = 8,40, SD = 0,93), of whom 100 made up the control and 31 the test group. A previously developed test (Suits, 2004) for evaluating preschool children’s humor comprehension was used. Results show that children with epilepsy assessed jokes as funnier and used different explanations than healthy children (especially in verbal humor), indicating a possibility that children with epilepsy reached the same developmental stage in humor perception in primary school that healthy children reached already before starting to attend school. Keywords: verbal and visual humor, epilepsy, primary-school-aged children