Humor and Aging:
Resident Humor Profile—Lake Winona Manor
Introducing Humor into the Nursing Home
Sympathetic Pain the Big Winner
What types of humor do nursing home residents prefer? What will tickle their funny bone?
In 2007, at the invitation of Winona Health in Winona, Minnesota, ITCHS administered the Humor Quotient Test at Lake Winona Manor nursing home. Findings were presented at the 2009 Minnesota Aging Services Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The 2009 report featured an assessment of humor preferences for 36 nursing home residents and 24 staff.
The great difference between staff and residents was greater resident appreciation for Sympathetic Pain humor among the residents. In a Sympathetic Pain joke we laugh with an innocent victim. Often quite literally, as we laugh we are saying to ourselves, "That's okay, we know exactly how you feel!"
As a second choice, residents liked Word Play. Word Play includes puns and other language jokes. Word Play does not require much memory of concepts or events, just of the language we all share.
It should be noted that only 6 of our 36 resident respondents were men. And those 6 men were NOT strong in preference for Sympathetic Pain humor. That means among other things that senior women are EXCEEDINGLY trending toward more Sympathetic Pain! ITCHS staff are particularly anxious to extend our assessment of nursing home male residents to give us a better read on senior male humor preferences.
These results examining at the strong Sympathetic Pain humor preferences of nursing home residents, in contrast to the preferences of nursing home staff, have also been published in the December, 2008 issue of the Humor Quotient Newsletter.