Test Yourself: Psychologists Created a Quiz to Define Your Sense of Humor

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In 1979, a New York Post editor past the name of Norman Cousins published a memoir called Anatomy of an Illness. The book, which described how Cousins used laughter to assist him recover from an ill-defined disorder, was a smash striking, and did quite a bit to farther the idea of sense of humor equally a panacea. It's a notion that persists today, and not just in clichés ("laughter is the best medicine"); when you have a particularly awful 24-hour interval, it's natural to reach for a comedy or seek out an excuse for laughs as a pick-me-up.

But that's non quite right: Humor isn't an unqualified good, and a psychology researcher named Rod Martin, who recently retired from the University of Western Ontario, has defended his career to proving it. Martin was simply starting out in the field when Cousins published his book; Intrigued past its message, he decided to investigate its scientific merit — but before he could exercise that, he had to effigy out how to measure sense of humor, an amorphous, multifaceted concept, in a scientific fashion.

At the time, humour research was considered a fringe involvement in psychology. Attempts to study humor looked less like scientific measurements and more similar BuzzFeed quizzes: Researchers would present people with a series of jokes and cartoons and inquire them which ones they found funny, assuming that the answers would reveal something almost the respondent'due south personality. The problem was, these studies failed to discover a human relationship between personality and taste in jokes. Self-reports of humor, meanwhile, are notoriously unreliable (everyone thinks they have a adept sense of sense of humour, and at to the lowest degree some of them take to be wrong).

Martin took a unlike tactic: Modeling his approach later on recently developed tests to measure feet, he focused non on the jokes themselves, but on how respondents used humor in everyday life. The cease result would become his signature work: the Humor Styles Questionnaire, the commencement scientifically validated measure of sense of humor. In 2003, Martin and his colleagues published the HSQ in the Journal of Inquiry in Personality; today, it'southward in common use all over the world.

The HSQ divides sense of humour into iv main styles: Affiliative, Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, and Self-Defeating. Affiliative sense of humour ways slap-up jokes, engaging in banter, and otherwise using humor to brand others like us. Self-enhancing humor is an optimistic, coping humour, characterized past the power to laugh at yourself or at the absurdity of a situation and experience better as a outcome. Aggressive humour is characterized by sarcasm, teasing, criticism, and ridicule. Self-defeating sense of humour is attempting to go others to like us past putting ourselves down. Come across for yourself which category best describes your own sense of sense of humour (though it's of import to notation that the lines between humor styles aren't hard and fast, even so, nor are the categories mutually exclusive — everyone's individual sense of sense of humor is a unique combination of all iv styles).

What'due south Your Sense of humor?

"Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-existence: Development of the Sense of humour Styles Questionnaire," Journal of Research in Personality

Unlike his predecessors, Martin did find a link betwixt certain sense of humour styles and certain traits: Affiliative and cocky-enhancing humor are linked to extraversion and openness to new experiences, and cocky-defeating humor to neuroticism. Affiliative and self-enhancing humor are as well generally adaptive, both correlated with greater mental well-being, while aggressive and self-defeating humor are by and large maladaptive. There are plenty of exceptions, though: Aggressive and self-defeating jokes tin can be fine and even benign when used sparingly and in the correct context. Likewise, even affiliative and self-enhancing sense of humour tin go maladaptive when used in excess. "Some people are ever laughing and joking every bit a way of avoiding issues," Martin says.

"It'south really the style we utilize humor that is well-nigh important," he adds. "Not and then much how funny you are, simply how you utilise sense of humor in advancing relationships or in detrimental ways."

This may exist the cardinal to understanding sense of humour'south relationship to well-being: It'southward all in how yous wield it. Someone who goes overboard with aggressive humor, for case, may experience better almost themselves in the short term by putting other people down. Just sooner or after, they may discover people pulling away for fright of becoming a target; eventually, their relationships may deteriorate, along with their psychological well-being. In one 2014 study led by Sara Caird, a graduate student of Martin'southward, couples who reported using more aggressive sense of humor also had lower human relationship satisfaction; on the flip side, when people engaged in more affiliative and adaptive humor with their partners, they experienced a greater sense of intimacy and reported more than positive and less negative moods.

So if humor doesn't primarily serve to promote psychological well-being, what does it do? "I think it primarily has a social function." Martin says. "From an evolutionary perspective, we evolved every bit a social creature. We needed other people to survive. And so anything that can enhance the cohesiveness of groups of people was adaptive," even when that cohesion came at the expense of outsiders: "Sense of humour is a very aggressive thing," he adds. "You're laughing with your friends, at your enemies. There'due south aspects of that I think tin can be maladaptive in the here and now that might have been adaptive in one time." Humor was never a panacea, merely it is a powerful tool — one that can be used for positive purposes, simply simply if you lot so cull.

Psychologists Created a Quiz to Define Your Sense of humor