Aggressive Humor as a Negative Relational Maintenance Behavior during Times of Conflict

Abstract

This study explores how aggressive humor is used as a negative relational maintenance behavior during conflicts in romantic relationships. Negative relational maintenance behaviors are questionable interpersonal behaviors romantic partners use to relieve personal tensions about the state of the relationship while still keeping the relationship in existence. Twenty-six participants in committed romantic relationships participated in seven semi-structured group interviews, and transcripts from these group interviews were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. This analysis revealed participants were motivated to use aggressive humor in conflict situations to cover up topics of discussion, elicit a response from their partners, and ease tension. Aggressive humor was enacted through sarcasm, repetition, and mimicking. These findings extend existing research on negative relational maintenance behaviors and provide insight to the “dark side” of maintaining romantic relationships.

The Relationship Between Humor Style and Death Anxiety of Palliative Care Patients

“…In this study, it was seen that the most used humor style by the patients was the affiliative humor style, and the patients used compatible-positive (affiliative and self-enhancing) humor styles more than incompatible-negative (aggressive and selfdefeating) humor styles. Studies have shown that patients use affiliative humor more [8,22]. It is stated that individuals who have compatible-positive humor styles, which include affiliative humor and selfenhancing humor styles, use humor in an accepting way to contribute to themselves and others in order to contribute to their relations with others and improve their social relations in a tolerant and harmless way [9,12].…”

“…The scale, which consists of 25 items, is a five-point Likert type. While 17 items of the Death Anxiety Scale have a positive sentence structure (1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9,12,14,15,16,18,19,20,22, 24 th items) the other 8 items have a negative sentence structure (items 4, 10, 11, 13, 17, 21, 23, 25 th items). For the scale to determine the death anxiety level, the lowest 0 and the highest 100 points can be obtained, and a high score indicates a high level of anxiety.…”

“…This situation causes the person to experience anxiety and the person tends to some actions to get rid of this troublesome process. One of these actions is the use of humor [8,9]. The Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor (2004) defines humor as any attempt to promote health and wellbeing through playfully exploring, expressing, or affirming the strangeness or inappropriateness of life situations.…”

“…At the same time, it is stated that humor can be used as a complementary treatment of diseases to provide physical, emotional, cognitive, social, or spiritual healing or coping [10,11]. It is stated in the literature that humor is accepted by the health care team and has positive psychological and physiological results for patient care [8,12,13]. In addition, it is stated that humor in clinical settings is mostly patient-centered and occurs spontaneously [10,12].…”

“…There are four different styles of humor used in daily life, which are harmonious or incompatible and determined by the individual's in-person or interpersonal character. These styles also express the differences in the use of humor [8,13]. Two of these humor styles are positive-healthy humor in terms of psychological well-being (self-enhancing, affiliative humor) and the other two are negative-unhealthy humor (aggressive humor and self-defeating humor) [15,16].…”