![]() | This article may be unbalanced towards certain viewpoints.(September 2013) |
Humor styles are a subject of research in the field of personality psychology that focuses on the ways in which individuals differ in their use of humor. People of all ages and cultures respond to humor, but their use of it can vary greatly. There are multiple factors, such as culture, age, and political orientation, that play a role in determining what people find humorous. [1] Although humor styles can be somewhat variable depending on social context, they tend to be a relatively stable personality characteristic among individuals. [2] Humor can play an instrumental role in the formation of social bonds, enabling people to relate to peers or to attract a mate, and can help to release tension during periods of stress. [3] There is a lack of current, reliable research that explores the impact of humor usages on others because it is difficult to distinguish a healthy humor usage from one that is unhealthy. Justifications for harmful versus benign humor styles are subjective and lead to varying definitions of either usage. [4]
The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) has emerged as a different model for understanding the individual differences in humor styles. Humor can enhance individuals' self representation, and can also help to facilitate positive interactions with others. Humor can be both beneficial and detrimental to social relationships. [4] The combination of these factors creates four distinct humor styles: self-enhancing, affiliative, aggressive, and self-defeating. Some styles of humor promote health and well-being, while other styles have the potential to negatively impact both mental and physical health. [2] There are other humor scale surveys that are used to measure different aspects of humor, such as The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire, The Coping Humor Scale, The Sense of Humor Questionnaire, and The Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale. [5]
The Sense of Humor Questionnaire was proposed by Sven Svenbaks in 1974. [6] The original Sense of Humor Questionnaire was 22 items broken into three categories that could be answered on a scale of 1-4. The three categories are: M-items (reactive to humor and implicit messages), L-items (attitude towards humorous people and situations), E-items (openness to expression of amusement). An example of each type of item is: when I go to the movies I prefer to know ahead what type of story it is (M-item), fun is aimed at hurting another (L-item), do you ever laugh so hard it hurts? (E-item). M-items and L-items use the same scale prompts, 1 = total agreement, 4 = total disagreement, whereas E-items use 1 = very seldom, 4 = very often. However, some of the items could overlap and fit into another group of items. Despite the dimensionality problem, the scores correlated moderately positively to each other (r = .29 to .38). The Sense of Humor Questionnaire was revised and included items on each sub-scale that evaluate more in-depth of each group. The revised version of the Sense of Humor Questionnaire M and L-items have strong internal consistency (.60’s and .70’s) but E-items have poor internal consistency. Due to poor internal consistency, E-items were not used in further studies, but M-items were used for the Situation Humor Response and L-items were used for the Humor Coping Scale.
The Coping Humor Scale was created by Rod A. Martin, Fazal Mittu and Herbert M. Lefcourt in 1983. The Coping Humor Scale is a survey of 7 items that assesses how much participants use humor to cope with stress. [7] The responses on the survey are on a 1-4 scale, strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (4). The alphas range from .60 to .70 and the test-retest reliability of 12 weeks alpha is .80. While the Coping Humor Scale doesn't have as high of an internal consistency as the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire, it is unique in the "self-observer agreement." The way participants rate themselves is strongly correlated with how their friends rate them on similar content. [8]
The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire was created by Martin and Lefcourt in 1984. [9] It is based on Eysenck's definition of humor and is a survey composed of 18 different situations that are on a scale from everyday events to events that are anxiety inducing and 3 non-situational items. The three non-situational items are: how desirable it is to the participant to have friends that are easily amused, how much a participants' humor changes depending on the situation, and a self-rating question about how likely the participant is to laugh in different situations. In regard to the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire, humor is defined as how often and individual smiles, laughs, or shows amusement but ignores the type of humor used. The responses to the survey are on a 1-5 scale, I would not have been particularly amused (1) to I would have laughed heartily (5). The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire was tested on almost 500 participants in four groups and has alpha coefficients from .70 to .83. Of the participants, 33 were tested again a month later to examine the test-retest reliability which has an alpha of 0.70. The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire was compared to the Crowne-Marlowe (1960) Social Desirability Scale but had only .04 correlation meaning the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire is free from the bias of social desirability.
The Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale was created by James A. Thorson and F. C. Powell in 1991 and combines elements from the Situational Humor Response Questionnaire, the Coping Humor Scale, and the Sense of Humor Questionnaire. [10] It was created to assess the different elements of sense humor such as playfulness, humorous ability, recognition and appreciation of humor, and using humor to achieve social goals or as a coping mechanism. The Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale is composed of 124 statements with responses on a scale of 1-5. 1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree. The 124 statements were reduced to 29 with an alpha reliability of .92. The remaining statements are broken into four factors. Factor 1 combines humor production humor for social uses, Factor 2 combines coping humor and adaptive humor, Factor 3 evaluates humor appreciation, and Factor 4 evaluates the participant's attitude on humor. Some examples of statements on the Multidimensional Sense of Humor Scale respective to the factors are: I use humor to entertain my friends, uses of humor help me master difficult situations, I like a good joke, and people who tell jokes are a pain in the neck.
The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) was developed by Rod Martin and Patricia Doris (2003) to measure individual differences in styles of humor. [4] Humor has been shown to be a personality characteristic that remains relatively stable over time. [2] Humor is sometimes viewed as a one-dimensional trait. However, individuals seem to differ in the ways in which they use humor in their everyday lives, and different styles of humor seem to have different outcomes. As a result, two variables are measured within the questionnaire to cover multiple dimensions that humor contain. The Humor Styles Questionnaire was developed to identify the ways in which individuals differ in humor styles and how these differences influence health, well-being, relationships, and other outcomes. [11]
The Humor Styles Questionnaire is a 32-item self-report inventory used to identify how individuals use humor in their lives. Participants respond to the degree to which they agree with each statement (e.g., "I enjoy making people laugh") on a scale from 1 (totally disagree) to 7 (totally agree). The questionnaire measures two main factors in humor. The first factor measures whether humor is used to enhance the self or enhance one's relationships with others. The second factor measures whether the humor is relatively benevolent or potentially detrimental and destructive. The combination of these factors creates four distinct humor styles: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating. [11]
The reliability of the Humor Style Questionnaire is questionable. The original questionnaire was written in German and due to inexact translations and cultural differences, when translated to another language it frequently generates test items that don’t produce anticipated results. [12] When the HSQ is given in the original language, the test for internal consistencies was an alpha over 0.77 for all items. However, when translated, the internal consistency alpha varied from .55 (aggressive) to .89 (self-enhancing) in one study, Taher et al. (2008), and from .67 (self-defeating) to .78 (self-enhancing) in another study, Bilge and Saltuk (2007). While most of the styles tested reasonably well, the aggressive humor scale produced the lowest internal consistency values. [13]
Affiliative humor is defined as the style of humor used to enhance one's relationships with others in a benevolent, positive manner. This style of humor is typically used in a benevolent, self-accepting way. Individuals high in this dimension often use humor as a way to charm and amuse others, ease tension among others, and improve relationships. They are often spontaneous in their joke telling, frequently participate in witty banter, and enjoy laughing with others. Affiliative humor is similar to self-defeating humor because both styles of humor enhance the relationships with others. However, unlike self-defeating humor, affiliative humor is not used at one's own expense. [4]
A number of outcomes are associated with the use of affiliative humor. Individuals who report high levels of affiliative humor are more likely to initiate friendships and less likely to become victims of bullying. [14] [15] In an organizational setting, affiliative humor has been shown to increase group cohesiveness and promote creativity in the workplace. [16] Affiliative humor is also associated with increased levels of (explicit) self-esteem, psychological well-being, emotional stability, and social intimacy. They are also more likely to exhibit higher levels of implicit self-esteem (independently of their level of explicit self-esteem). [17]
This style of humor is associated with decreased levels of depressive symptoms [18] and anxiety. Individuals who use affiliative humor tend to have higher levels of extraversion and openness to experience as personality characteristics. [4]
Examples of items targeting affiliative humor on the HSQ include:
Self-enhancing humor is a style of humor related to having a good-natured attitude toward life, having the ability to laugh at yourself, your circumstances and the idiosyncrasies of life in constructive, non-detrimental manner. It is used by individuals to enhance the self in a benevolent, positive manner. [4] This type of humor is best understood as a type of coping or emotion-regulating humor in which individuals use humor to look on the bright side of a bad situation, find the silver lining or maintain a positive attitude even in trying times. [19]
Self-enhancing humor is associated with a number of personality variables as well as psychological, physical and health-related outcomes. Individuals who engage more in the self-enhancing humor style are less likely to exhibit depressive symptoms. [18] In an organizational setting, self-enhancing humor has been shown to promote creativity and reduce stress in the workplace. [16] The self-enhancing style of humor has also been shown to be related to increased levels of self-esteem, optimism, and psychological well-being, as well as decreased levels of depression and anxiety. Individuals who use the self-enhancing humor style are more likely to exhibit extraversion and openness to experience as personality characteristics and less likely to exhibit neuroticism. [4]
Examples of self-enhancing humor on the HSQ include:
Aggressive humor is a style of humor that is potentially detrimental towards others. This type of humor is characterized by the use of sarcasm, put-downs, teasing, criticism, ridicule, and other types of humor used at the expense of others. Aggressive humor often disregards the impact it might have on others. Prejudices such as racism and sexism are considered to be the aggressive style of humor. This type of humor may at times seem like playful fun, but sometimes the underlying intent is to harm or belittle others. Aggressive humor is related to higher levels of neuroticism and lower levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness. [4]
Individuals who exhibit higher levels of aggressive humor tend to score higher on measures of hostility and general aggression. Males tend to use aggressive humor more often than women. [4]
Examples of aggressive humor on the HSQ might include:
Self-defeating humor is the style of humor characterized by the use of potentially detrimental humor towards the self in order to gain approval from others. Individuals high in this dimension engage in self-disparaging humor in which laughter is often at their own expense. Self-defeating humor often comes in the form of pleasing others by being the "butt" of the joke. This style of humor is sometimes seen as a form of denial in which humor is used as a defense mechanism for hiding negative feelings about the self. [4]
A variety of variables are associated with self-defeating humor. Individuals who more frequently use self-defeating humor show increased depressive symptoms. [18] Individuals who use this style of humor tend to have higher levels of neuroticism and lower levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness. Self-defeating humor is associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety and psychiatric symptoms. It is also associated with lower levels of self-esteem, psychological well-being and intimacy and higher levels of bullying victimization. [20]
Examples of self-defeating items on the Humor Styles Questionnaire might include:
Humour or humor is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement. The term derives from the humoral medicine of the ancient Greeks, which taught that the balance of fluids in the human body, known as humours, controlled human health and emotion.
Stress management consists of a wide spectrum of techniques and psychotherapies aimed at controlling a person's level of stress, especially chronic stress, usually for the purpose of improving everyday functioning. Stress produces numerous physical and mental symptoms which vary according to each individual's situational factors. These can include a decline in physical health, such as headaches, chest pain, fatigue, and sleep problems, as well as depression. The process of stress management is named as one of the keys to a happy and successful life in modern society. Life often delivers numerous demands that can be difficult to handle, but stress management provides a number of ways to manage anxiety and maintain overall well-being.
A personality test is a method of assessing human personality constructs. Most personality assessment instruments are in fact introspective self-report questionnaire measures or reports from life records (L-data) such as rating scales. Attempts to construct actual performance tests of personality have been very limited even though Raymond Cattell with his colleague Frank Warburton compiled a list of over 2000 separate objective tests that could be used in constructing objective personality tests. One exception however, was the Objective-Analytic Test Battery, a performance test designed to quantitatively measure 10 factor-analytically discerned personality trait dimensions. A major problem with both L-data and Q-data methods is that because of item transparency, rating scales and self-report questionnaires are highly susceptible to motivational and response distortion ranging all the way from lack of adequate self-insight to downright dissimulation depending on the reason/motivation for the assessment being undertaken.
Coping refers to conscious strategies used to reduce unpleasant emotions. Coping strategies can be cognitions or behaviors and can be individual or social. Coping is to deal with and overcome struggles and difficulties in life. It is a way for us to maintain our mental and emotional well-being. Everybody has a way of handling the hard events that occur in our life and that is what it means to cope. Coping can be healthy and productive, or destructive and unhealthy for you or others. It is recommended that an individual copes in ways that will be beneficial and healthy. "Managing your stress well can help you feel better physically and psychologically and it can impact your ability to perform your best."
Distressed personality type, or "type D" individuals, tend to suppress powerful negative emotions as a means of coping with stressful events or situations. These individuals suppress feelings of anger or sorrow even when they are in an environment that is supportive of emotional expression, such as suppressing anger when clearly justified, or refusing to cry at a funeral. The type D individual tends to be anxious, irritable, insecure, and uncomfortable with strangers. These types of people are constantly experiencing and anticipating negative emotions, which results in their being more tense and inhibited around others.
Psychological resilience is the ability to cope mentally and emotionally with a crisis, or to return to pre-crisis status quickly.
A self-report inventory is a type of psychological test in which a person fills out a survey or questionnaire with or without the help of an investigator. Self-report inventories often ask direct questions about personal interests, values, symptoms, behaviors, and traits or personality types. Inventories are different from tests in that there is no objectively correct answer; responses are based on opinions and subjective perceptions. Most self-report inventories are brief and can be taken or administered within five to 15 minutes, although some, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), can take several hours to fully complete. They are popular because they can be inexpensive to give and to score, and their scores can often show good reliability.
Agreeableness is a personality trait that manifests as behavior that is perceived as kind, sympathetic, cooperative, warm, frank, and considerate. In contemporary personality psychology, agreeableness is one of the five major dimensions of personality structure, reflecting individual differences in cooperation and social harmony.
Humor research is a multifaceted field which enters the domains of linguistics, history, and literature. Research in humor has been done to understand the psychological and physiological effects, both positive and negative, on a person or groups of people. Research in humor has revealed many different theories of humor and many different kinds of humor including their functions and effects personally, in relationships, and in society.
The Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) is a self-report personality test developed over several decades of empirical research by Raymond B. Cattell, Maurice Tatsuoka and Herbert Eber. The 16PF provides a measure of personality and can also be used by psychologists, and other mental health professionals, as a clinical instrument to help diagnose psychiatric disorders, and help with prognosis and therapy planning. The 16PF can also provide information relevant to the clinical and counseling process, such as an individual's capacity for insight, self-esteem, cognitive style, internalization of standards, openness to change, capacity for empathy, level of interpersonal trust, quality of attachments, interpersonal needs, attitude toward authority, reaction toward dynamics of power, frustration tolerance, and coping style. Thus, the 16PF instrument provides clinicians with a normal-range measurement of anxiety, adjustment, emotional stability and behavioral problems. Clinicians can use 16PF results to identify effective strategies for establishing a working alliance, to develop a therapeutic plan, and to select effective therapeutic interventions or modes of treatment. It can also be used within other areas of psychology, such as career and occupational selection.
Sexuality can be inscribed in a multidimensional model comprising different aspects of human life: biology, reproduction, culture, entertainment, relationships and love.
Positive affectivity (PA) is a human characteristic that describes how much people experience positive affects ; and as a consequence how they interact with others and with their surroundings.
The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) was developed in 1979 by Raskin and Hall, and since then, has become one of the most widely utilized personality measures for non-clinical levels of the trait narcissism. Since its initial development, the NPI has evolved from 220 items to the more commonly employed NPI-40 (1984) and NPI-16 (2006), as well as the novel NPI-1 inventory (2014). Derived from the DSM-III criteria for Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), the NPI has been employed heavily by personality and social psychology researchers.
Gelotophobia is a fear of being laughed at, a type of social phobia. While most people do not like being laughed at, in his clinical observations, German psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Michael Titze (1996) discovered that some of his patients seemed to be primarily worried about being laughed at. They tended to scan their environment for signs of laughter and ridicule. Furthermore, they reported that they had the impression of being ridiculous themselves. Additionally, Titze observed a specific movement pattern among them when they thought they were being laughed at—awkward, wooden movements that resembled those of wooden puppets. He described this state as "Pinocchio-syndrome".
In psychology, manipulation is defined as subterfuge designed to influence or control another, usually in a manner which facilitates one's personal aims. The methods used distort or orient the interlocutor's perception of reality, in particular through seduction, suggestion, persuasion and non-voluntary or consensual submission. Definitions for the term vary in which behavior is specifically included, influenced by both culture and whether referring to the general population or used in clinical contexts. Manipulation is generally considered a dishonest form of social influence as it is used at the expense of others.
The Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy scale (LSRP) is a 26-item, 4-point Likert scale, self-report inventory to measure primary and secondary psychopathy in non-institutionalised populations. It was developed in 1995 by Michael R. Levenson, Kent A. Kiehl and Cory M. Fitzpatrick. The scale was created for the purpose of conducting a psychological study examining antisocial disposition among a sample of 487 undergraduate students attending psychology classes at the University of California, Davis.
Interpersonal emotion regulation is the process of changing the emotional experience of one's self or another person through social interaction. It encompasses both intrinsic emotion regulation, in which one attempts to alter their own feelings by recruiting social resources, as well as extrinsic emotion regulation, in which one deliberately attempts to alter the trajectory of other people's feelings.
Structure of Temperament Questionnaire (STQ) is a test to measure 12 biologically and neurochemically based individual differences.
Sad clown paradox is the contradictory association between comedy and mental disorders such as depression and anxiety. These comedic performers are characterised by feelings of deprivation and isolation in their early lives, where comedy evolves as a release for tension, removing feelings of suppressed physical rage through a verbal outlet.
The Cook-Medley Hostility Scale (Ho) is a standard in psychology designed to measure an individual's personality and temperament, specifically degrees of hostility. Initially developed as a scale for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), scores from the hostility scale represent the individual's disposition towards cynicism and chronic hate. Scores from the scale have been used by studies as a predictor of the measured individual's risk of developing certain health problems as well as the success of their interpersonal relationships.