Self-defeating humor is attempting to get others to like us by putting ourselves down. ![]() Aggressive humor is characterized by sarcasm, teasing, criticism, and ridicule. Self-enhancing humor is an optimistic, coping humor, characterized by the ability to laugh at yourself or at the absurdity of a situation and feel better as a result. ![]() Affiliative humor means cracking jokes, engaging in banter, and otherwise using humor to make others like us. The HSQ divides humor into four main styles: Affiliative, Self-Enhancing, Aggressive, and Self-Defeating. In 2003, Martin and his colleagues published the HSQ in the Journal of Research in Personality today, it’s in common use all over the world. The end result would become his signature work: the Humor Styles Questionnaire, the first scientifically validated measure of humor. Martin took a different tactic: Modeling his approach after recently developed tests to measure anxiety, he focused not on the jokes themselves, but on how respondents used humor in everyday life. Self-reports of humor, meanwhile, are notoriously unreliable (everyone thinks they have a good sense of humor, and at least some of them have to be wrong). The problem was, these studies failed to find a relationship between personality and taste in jokes. Attempts to study humor looked less like scientific measurements and more like BuzzFeed quizzes: Researchers would present people with a series of jokes and cartoons and ask them which ones they found funny, assuming that the answers would reveal something about the respondent’s personality. 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 before he could do that, he had to figure out how to measure humor, an amorphous, multifaceted concept, in a scientific way.Īt the time, humor research was considered a fringe interest in psychology. ![]() It’s a notion that persists today, and not just in clichés (“laughter is the best medicine”) when you have a particularly awful day, it’s natural to reach for a comedy or seek out an excuse for laughs as a pick-me-up.īut that’s not 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 dedicated his career to proving it. The book, which described how Cousins used laughter to help him recover from an ill-defined disorder, was a smash hit, and did quite a bit to further the idea of humor as a panacea. In 1979, a New York Post editor by the name of Norman Cousins published a memoir called Anatomy of an Illness.
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