Humour styles, personality and psychological well-being: What’s humour got to do with it?

Abstract

The Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) by Martin et al. (2003) measures four humour styles, namely affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive and self-defeating. In contrast to former humour instruments, the HSQ has strong relations to various measures of psychological wellbeing. However, its incremental validity in relation to basic personality traits has not been sufficiently studied. Two studies analysed how much unique variance the HSQ contributed to predicting psychological well-being over and above personality. While the affiliative, selfenhancing and self-defeating humour style were potent predictors of well-being in Study 1, the results also indicated that these humour styles had small effects when personality was controlled for. Study 2 tested a possible explanation for these findings, namely that the context (i.e., non-humorous components) of the HSQ items dominates their humour-specific content. Two questionnaires were utilised to separate context and humour components in the HSQ. Results showed that (a) the HSQ contributed little in predicting personality and psychological well-being once context was controlled for, and that (b) the humour component of each HSQ scale correlated highly with other humour instruments and neither of them were detrimental or maladaptive in terms of psychological well-being. Thus, these two studies showed a low incremental validity of humour styles in predicting psychological well-being beyond personality and hint to a limited role that humour plays in the these relationships. Overall, the humour components of the HSQ rather resemble those of other self-report measures and mainly comprise humour appreciation and humour production in everyday life.

An examination of the convergence between the conceptualization and the measurement of humor styles: A study of the construct validity of the Humor Styles Questionnaire

“…Thus, the humor styles seem to have shifted away from their initial functions and now assess mainly adaptive vs. maladaptive uses of humor. This could, for example, explain why the aggressive humor style, which was initially conceptualized to aim at enhancing oneself, has been found to be either uncorrelated (e.g., Martin et al 2003;Ruch and Heintz 2013) or negatively correlated with self-esteem (e.g., Edwards and Martin 2010;Galloway 2010).…”

“…Only a few studies so far have investigated the construct validity of the HSQ beyond its well-studied factorial validity (i.e., a replicable four-factor structure) and nomological network (i.e., correlations with other variables such as personality and well-being; but see Ruch and Heintz 2013). Martin et al (2003) reported in their construction article the relationships of the HSQ scales with four peer-reported HSQ items, which showed small to medium convergent validities and satisfying discriminant validities (except between the affiliative and selfenhancing humor styles).…”

“…The higher the discriminant validity, the better distinguishable the four humor styles are within and across every indicator. Investigating discriminant validity is important because the definitions were developed as being "mutually exclusive and specific" (Martin et al 2003: 55) and because there are usually medium-sized positive correlations between the HSQ affiliative and self-enhancing scales (e.g., Cann and Matson 2014;Galloway 2010;Martin et al 2003;Ruch and Heintz 2013).…”

“…Assessing humor behaviors or their functions directly would allow for an inherently valid assessment of humor styles. If using the HSQ, the warranted interpretations and conclusions of the findings should be carefully discussed (see also Ruch and Heintz 2013).…”

Humor-based online positive psychology interventions: A randomized placebo-controlled long-term trial

“…Although it has been shown that the study of the relationship between humor and (facets of subjective) well-being has several pitfalls (Heintz & Ruch, 2015;Ruch & Heintz, 2014), humor seems to have a potential to contribute to people's well-being. For example, correlational studies using (self-and peer-ratings of) character strengths consistently show robust positive relations in the upper range of the VIA strengths (e.g., Park, Peterson, & Seligman, 2004;Proyer, Ruch, and Buschor, 2013;Proyer, Gander, Wellenzohn, & Ruch, 2013).…”