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. Although humor styles can be somewhat variable depending on social context, they tend to be a relatively stable personality characteristic among individuals. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
The Sense of Humor Questionnaire The Sense of Humor Questionnaire was proposed by Sven Svenbaks in 1974. 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 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. 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.
The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire The Situational Humor Response Questionnaire was created by Martin and Lefcourt in 1984. 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.
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