Adult Playfulness, Humor Styles, and Subjective Happiness

Abstract

Playfulness has been referred to as a disposition that involves reframing a situation to amuse others and to make the situation more stimulating and enjoyable. It may serve to shift one's perspective when dealing with environmental threats. Despite all the benefits of playfulness towards psychological well-being, it remains a largely understudied subject in psychology, particularly in Chinese societies. Hence, this study examined the association between adult playfulness, humor styles, and subjective happiness among a sample of 166 university students in Hong Kong and 159 students in Guangzhou, who completed a self-administered questionnaire, including the Short Measure for Adult Playfulness, the Chinese Humor Styles Questionnaire, and the Subjective Happiness Scale. Results showed that adult playfulness was positively correlated with affiliative humor, self-enhancing humor, and subjective happiness in both Hong Kong and Guangzhou samples. By its implication, highly playful Chinese students preferred using affiliative and self-enhancing humor to amuse themselves and others.

How Humor Styles Affect Self-Compassion and Life Satisfaction: A Study in Hong Kong

“…Similar pattern have been reported in previous studies, such that adaptive humor styles were mostly found to be related to measure of well-being as compared to maladaptive humor styles [19,23]. As mentioned earlier, these two humor styles occur solely within the social situations.…”

“…Previous studies show that use of affiliative and self-enhancing humor would lead to lower depression and anxiety, higher positive affect, and higher self-esteem; whereas use of selfdefeating humor would lead to increased depression and anxiety, greater negative affect, and lower self-esteem [19][20][21][22][23]. Besides, self-enhancing humor was found to be positively associated with the ability to manage emotions whereas the ability to perceive emotions accurately was negatively related to aggressive and self-defeating humor [24].…”

“…The Chinese considered humor and satire are inferior forms of aesthetic expressions which are strongly influenced by the philosophy of Confucianism [29]. Chinese culture has given emphasis on the importance of good conduct, proper social relations, humility, and self-improvement to maintain group harmony [23]. Such inclination may explain the present study findings that other-directed form of humor styles (affiliative humor and aggressive humor) are less functioning comparing with the self-directed humor styles (self-enhancing humor and self-defeating humor) in the current Chinese sample.…”

Humor Styles in Indian University Students

“…Moreover, valuation of humor was positively correlated with adaptive humor and self-esteem. This implies that the more students valued humor, the more adaptive humor styles they used, and the better they felt about themselves [25,26]. This also reflects an important factor in determining who we are and how we think of ourselves [11,27].…”

Conceptual models of the playfulness construct: Additive, balanced, or synergistic?

“…Further, research on adult playfulness is just beginning to be con-ducted in nonWestern societies (cf. Barnett, 2017;Pang & Proyer, 2018;Yue, Leung, & Hiranandani, 2016), an especially significant direction in that fundamental belief systems and negative attitudes towards play prevail in many cultures (cf. Bai, 2005;Holmes, 2001).…”