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

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In 1979, a New York Post editor by the name of Norman Cousins published a memoir called Anatomy of an Disease. The volume, which described how Cousins used laughter to help him recover from an ill-defined disorder, was a smash hit, and did quite a flake to further the idea of humor equally a panacea. It's a notion that persists today, and not just in clichés ("laughter is the best medicine"); when y'all have a peculiarly awful day, it's natural to accomplish for a comedy or seek out an alibi for laughs every bit a selection-me-up.

Just that's not quite right: Humor isn't an unqualified skillful, and a psychology researcher named Rod Martin, who recently retired from the University of Western Ontario, has dedicated his career to proving it. Martin was just starting out in the field when Cousins published his book; Intrigued by its message, he decided to investigate its scientific merit — but earlier he could do that, he had to figure out how to measure humor, an amorphous, multifaceted concept, in a scientific style.

At the time, humor inquiry was considered a fringe interest in psychology. Attempts to report sense of humour looked less like scientific measurements and more than like BuzzFeed quizzes: Researchers would nowadays people with a series of jokes and cartoons and inquire them which ones they establish funny, assuming that the answers would reveal something about the respondent's personality. The trouble was, these studies failed to find a relationship between personality and taste in jokes. Self-reports of humor, meanwhile, are notoriously unreliable (everyone thinks they accept a good sense of humor, and at least some of them have to exist incorrect).

Martin took a unlike tactic: Modeling his approach after recently developed tests to measure feet, he focused not on the jokes themselves, but on how respondents used sense of humor in everyday life. The finish result would become his signature work: the Sense of humour Styles Questionnaire, the first scientifically validated mensurate of humor. In 2003, Martin and his colleagues published the HSQ in the Journal of Research in Personality; today, it'southward in common employ all over the world.

The HSQ divides humor into four primary styles: Affiliative, Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, and Self-Defeating. Affiliative sense of humor means groovy jokes, engaging in banter, and otherwise using humor to make others similar u.s.a.. Self-enhancing humor is an optimistic, coping sense of humor, characterized by the power to express joy at yourself or at the absurdity of a situation and feel amend as a result. Aggressive humor is characterized by sarcasm, teasing, criticism, and ridicule. Cocky-defeating sense of humor is attempting to get others to like u.s. past putting ourselves down. Encounter for yourself which category best describes your own sense of sense of humour (though it'due south important to notation that the lines between humor styles aren't hard and fast, however, nor are the categories mutually exclusive — everyone's private sense of humor is a unique combination of all four styles).

What'southward Your Sense of Humor?

"Private differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Evolution of the Humor Styles Questionnaire," Journal of Research in Personality

Unlike his predecessors, Martin did find a link between certain humor styles and certain traits: Affiliative and self-enhancing humor are linked to extraversion and openness to new experiences, and self-defeating humor to neuroticism. Affiliative and self-enhancing humor are besides generally adaptive, both correlated with greater mental well-being, while aggressive and self-defeating humor are by and large maladaptive. At that place are enough of exceptions, though: Aggressive and self-defeating jokes can exist fine and even beneficial when used sparingly and in the right context. Likewise, fifty-fifty affiliative and self-enhancing sense of humor can become maladaptive when used in excess. "Some people are e'er laughing and joking as a way of avoiding issues," Martin says.

"Information technology's really the fashion we use humor that is most important," he adds. "Not then much how funny you are, only how you use sense of humor in advancing relationships or in detrimental ways."

This may be the key to understanding humor's relationship to well-beingness: It's all in how you wield it. Someone who goes overboard with aggressive humor, for example, may experience amend about themselves in the short term by putting other people down. Merely sooner or later, they may find people pulling away for fear of becoming a target; eventually, their relationships may deteriorate, along with their psychological well-being. In one 2014 report led by Sara Caird, a graduate student of Martin's, couples who reported using more aggressive humor as well had lower 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 positive and less negative moods.

So if humor doesn't primarily serve to promote psychological well-being, what does information technology do? "I think it primarily has a social function." Martin says. "From an evolutionary perspective, we evolved as a social animal. We needed other people to survive. So anything that tin can heighten the cohesiveness of groups of people was adaptive," even when that cohesion came at the expense of outsiders: "Sense of humor is a very aggressive affair," he adds. "You're laughing with your friends, at your enemies. There's aspects of that I think tin can be maladaptive in the here and at present that might accept been adaptive in one time." Humor was never a panacea, but it is a powerful tool — one that can be used for positive purposes, simply only if you so choose.

Psychologists Created a Quiz to Ascertain Your Sense of Humor