People over 65 are less able to detect and understand sarcasm, according to an immensely valuable study just published in Developmental Psychology. You might think it is obvious when somebody is saying the opposite of what they mean for comic effect. Indeed, you probably find the device so funny that you never tire of it. However, quite a lot of research now suggests that ageing tends to make people less good at perceiving emotional cues and understanding the intentions of others, thereby excluding some in later life from sarcasm’s playfulness and charm.

For this study, led by Professor Louise Phillips of the University of Aberdeen, 116 participants were shown a series of videos and written stories, then asked to explain them. “For example,” the study says, “in one simple sarcasm video, a woman is busily doing a domestic task while a man reads a book and she says (sarcastically): ‘Are you busy? I know you’ve got a lot on.’” Participants were then required to answer yes or no to the questions: Is she is trying to pressure him into helping her? Is she trying to say it’s OK if he doesn’t help? Is she annoyed with him? and so on. When all the tests were marked, the 36 people who were older than 65 were just as good as the rest at understanding non-sarcastic conversations, but around seven percentage points worse on the sarcastic ones. “Older adults have problems in decoding different types of sarcasm,” the study concluded.

Obviously, it is sensible to draw conclusions about old people based on the behaviour of 36 of them. And clearly, when you’re being tested for sarcasm-awareness you respond to filmed examples of it in the same way that you would respond in real life (even if some of the videos, such as the example on the University of Aberdeen’s website, are unconvincingly acted by Australians). We can also safely dismiss the idea that gender differences within the groups, or age differences within the groups, or the different use of sarcasm by people in different eras, could have skewed the results. Even so, the study itself gives muted warning that it may not be perfect. “There is a stereotype that recent generations use irony and sarcasm more frequently than previous generations do,” it says. “However, there is not much empirical evidence to determine whether this reflects reality.”

Last spring, psychologists around the world were shocked when it was revealed that 61 out of 100 published psychology experiments delivered results that could not be reproduced by other researchers. To me, this study looks utterly robust, however, and given my extensive training in statistics and psychology, I am unlikely to be wrong.