Investigating the Influence of Multilingual Humour on Stress Reduction after Inducing with TSST: An EGG Study

Abstract

One of the major health issues is mental stress which often begins at a minor level and gradually builds up pressure, ultimately leading to stress. Electroencephalogram is a non-invasive method that evaluates the workings of the human brain and can be used for calculating stress. EEG detects the electrical activity in the brain by placing small electrodes on the brain’s scalp. The study aims to use the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) to induce stress in participants, followed by exposure to either native or non-native comedy videos as a potential stress-reduction intervention. In this study, the sample size of EEG signals was collected using one channel from 40 subjects aged 18-25 years with a gender split of 50% male and 50% female. This data only included students from the university. They were all healthy individuals without any known mental health conditions. All the subjects were shown one native comedy video clip and one non-native comedy video clip as their audio-visual stimuli that helped reduce different stress levels after taking the stress test. The brain's electrical activity was recorded while the participants performed TSST and watched comedy clips. This data was pre-processed using filters to remove environmental, biological, or technical artifacts. Specifically, the study used Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Power Spectral Density (PSD) analysis to determine changes in brainwave patterns mainly on the Delta, Theta, and Alpha waves. Increased delta and theta power after exposure to humor is found to represent the reduction of stress and cognitive relaxation. In the comedy video shown in the native language, there was a greater increase in Delta and Theta power, which induced a greater stress-reducing effect compared with non-native humor. Therefore, cultural familiarity plays an important role in stress management, and native-language humour may be more effective for reducing stress