Humor appreciation of captionless cartoons in obsessive-compulsive disorder

We examined 25 patients with OCD and 25 healthy controls, matched by age, education, and gender. We administered Penn's Humor Appreciation Test (PHAT), a computerized test comprising captionless cartoons by Mordillo. Each set of stimuli consisted of two almost identical drawings, one of which was funny due to the alteration of a detail in the cartoon, whereas the other was not funny. Severity of psychopathology was evaluated with the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS).No significant effect for group, gender or group × gender interaction was found on the PHAT scores. In OCD patients, humor appreciation was not significantly associated with age of onset, duration of illness, and obsessions, but correlated significantly with compulsions.Humor appreciation, based on captionless cartoons in OCD, does not seem to be deficient compared to healthy subjects but may be related to illness characteristics.Data from structural and functional imaging studies in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have suggested abnormalities in the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, caudate, and thalamus, structures linked by well described neuroanatomic circuits [1,2]. Findings of previous studies addressing neuropsychological functioning in patients with OCD, however, have not presented a clear and specific neuropsychological profile for these patients. There is some evidence for visuospatial and verbal memory dysfunction in OCD, owing to an underlying executive deficit in the ability to organize necessary strategies to encode the presented information [3,4]. Mean effect sizes on fluency, set shifting, planning, and problem solving abilities point to large overall differences between OCD patients and healthy controls, indicating poorer performance in patients [3,4]. With regard to attention, some aspects such as attention span, sustained attention, and selective attention seem to be unaffected, whereas speed of information processing was impaired in about half of the studies.